Government & Politics

Boeing, the 737 Max, and the FAA: What a Team!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

One benefit the Department of Transportation has going for it is that with all the incompetence being displayed at the Defense Department, the Education Department, and Homeland Security, the fact that the Transportation Department’s DEI Secretary Buttigieg is habitually asleep at the switch doesn’t get as much attention as it might otherwise.

One would think that if there was any plane on earth that passengers should feel absolutely safe flying on, it would be Boeing’s 737 Max. Both the company and the FAA were found negligent, liable and villainous following investigations of a pair of fatal crashes of the aircraft shortly after the model’s introduction. A Lion Air MAX plane crashed in Indonesia in October 2018, killing all 189 people aboard, followed by the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines MAX killing all 157 people on that flight. Once the fleets of the Max were permitted to fly again, it was natural to assume that these planes would be scrutinized, double-checked, checked again and then checked again, because another incident would cause Boeing to lose investors’ trust and the FAA to look like irredeemable fools.

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So Apparently It Isn’t Just Slaveholding: Being A White Male Is Sufficient Offense To Justify Tearing Down Your Statue…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The insanely woke National Park Service wants to renovate Philadelphia’s Welcome Park by removing its statue of William Penn as well as Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House. The proposed redesign will highlight Native American history at the expense of the memorial to Penn, who founded the colony, now state, of Pennsylvania.

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Ethics Quiz: Trump’s “Dome”

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Here is part of what Donald Trump said in Iowa:

“I didn’t like it when Ronald Reagan suggested it because we didn’t have the technology. We do have the technology now, and we’re going to build a giant dome over our country to protect us from a hostile source. And I think it’s a great thing, and it’s going to all be made in the United States, and that’s something that I consider productive. You know, when I watch, uh, our guys operate those things, it’s unbelievable. Missile coming in, missile coming in. These geniuses sit down. Most of them are, you know, they’re from MIT. But they sit down, bing! bing! bing! bing! boom! ph-sheee! It’s gone, it’s amazing! I think we could use…do you like that? I mean, isn’t that better than giving other countries billions of dollars? Billions! We’re going to get billions of dollars out of the country and so they can build a dome, but we don’t have a dome ourselves! We’re going to have the greatest dome ever!”

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay…

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day goes like this…

Is it responsible to vote for someone who talks like this the power of the American Presidency?

…because, to be brutally frank, I’d have hesitated to vote for a student candidate for president of the 8th grade in junior high who gave a speech like that. Wouldn’t you? It bothers me that Trump would say all that, it bothers me that he thinks it’s going to win votes by saying it, it bothers me that he obviously doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, and it bothers me that he has such a low opinion of the American public.

Observations on Media Research Center’s 2023 Political Joke Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Media Research Center, a conservative “media watchdog” roughly the Right’s equivalent of Media Matters but with a much bigger job, analyzed six of the daily late night comedy shows: Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Late Late Show with James Corden” until its April exit, from January 3, 2023 through December 22, 2023. The results are here. The researchers counted 9,518 jokes they judged political in nature, and broke them down into categories. 1,601 targeted progressive, Democrats and figures on the left of the political spectrum. 186 aimed at people, groups, or institutions not associated with either side. 7,729 or 81% of the jokes were considered barbs at were directed at individual, organization or positions considered to be conservative. 493 targets were the objects of a single joke, with 285 of these on the right, 167 on the left, and the remaining 41 on non-partisan topics.

The unbalanced percentages are only a surprise in that they are less lopsided than I would have guessed, but still obviously showan absurdly unfair partisan bias. If, as was once the norm in all political comedy, all sides and parties were mocked relatively equally with the President in the White House taking most of the fire, political humor can be fairly categorized as entertainment with the primary objective being to make as many people laugh as possible. Distorted to this extent, however, late night comedy becomes a self-evident propaganda weapon that plays a significant part in the mainstream media mission to sway elections and manipulate public opinion.

Some telling findings:

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Incompetent? Irresponsible? Dishonest? Whatever This Was, It’s Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Look! Another example of IIPTDXTTNMIAFB (“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”)!

From the New York Times:

It took the Pentagon three and a half days to inform the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized on New Year’s Day following complications from an elective procedure, two U.S. officials said Saturday.

The extraordinary breach of protocol — Mr. Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million active-duty military at a time when the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have dominated the American national security landscape — has baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.

Senior defense officials say Mr. Austin did not inform them until Thursday that he had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Pentagon then informed the White House.

The Pentagon’s belated notification, first reported by Politico, confounded White House officials, one Biden administration official said.

Meanwhile, conservatives “pounced”: “What possible motive could there be for doing this? Who knows? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but the Biden administration has an extensive record of covering up scandals, so it wasn’t exactly out of character for the Biden administration to cover something up,” wrote PJ media’s Matt Margolis. Other wags noted that hiding such health-related information about important government officials is the kind of thing China does.

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Curmie’s Conjectures: The Belfry Theatre’s Crisis of Nerve

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

by Curmie

[ JM here: I want to let Curmie’s Conjectures stand on their own, so I apologize at the outset by intruding with a brief introduction. Lest anyone be dissuaded from reading the whole post because the author’s scholarly tone and apparent focus at the start suggests that this will be a narrow discourse on topics rather more relished by Curmie and me than by the majority of EA readers—theater and the performing arts—fear not. The tags on the article will be “Canada, censorship, the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck, and political theater.” The post also involves some of the same considerations as one of mine two days ago. ]

There is a theory, one to which I subscribe, which suggests that the Dionysian Festival of classical Athens began not really as a religious observance in honor of a demi-god but rather as a means of consolidating the political power of the tyrant Peisistratus.  Whether or not this is true, there is no doubt that by 458 BCE Aeschylus’ Oresteia, widely acclaimed as “the world’s first dramatic masterpiece,” offers commentary on the reforms of the Areopagus enacted by the strategos Ephialtes some three years earlier.

There is no question that since that time the theatre has often—not always, but often—been political.  The 20th century offered more than a few examples of playwrights and production companies who, often at personal risk, critiqued the power structures around them: Jean-Paul Sartre took on the Nazis; Lorraine Hansberry, racism in the US; Athol Fugard, apartheid; Václav Havel, communism in Eastern Europe.

Not all such efforts were for causes most of us would endorse, of course.  Socialist Realism was a Stalinist policy under which all art had to support The Revolution: not just avoid criticism of the regime, but actively and explicitly endorse it.  More recently, the Freedom Theatre of Jenin (on the occupied West Bank) has been in the news.  A few weeks ago, one of the student organizations at my university posted an encomium to the company, which they described as “an example of creating liberating theatre and serving communities through theatrical pedagogy and profound performance.”  I remembered having written about that theatre a dozen or so years ago.  If I might quote myself for a moment: “Turns out that the Freedom Theatre was pretty damned proud of having turned out alumni who engaged in armed insurrection, and at least one of whom, a suicide bomber, richly merited description as a terrorist.” 

So no, propagandistic theatre isn’t always a good thing… but engaging with the world is.  Even subtle messages matter.  Under normal circumstances, Aunt Eller’s wish that “the farmer and the cowman can be friends” doesn’t amount to much.  But Oklahoma! hit Broadway after the declaration of war against the Axis powers and before D-Day.  “Territory folks” need to put aside their petty grievances when there’s a guy with a funny mustache who’s far worse than any of your neighbors will ever be.

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Is the Biden/Special Prosecutor/Biased MSM Hand-off To Terrify Voters Deliberate?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I don’t think so, because I don’t think they are that smart. But if it is deliberate, I have to admit that it’s pretty slick. Unethical, despicable and dangerous, but slick.

Let’s start with Biden’s speech yesterday, described as his first campaign speech of 2024. The Democrats are really going to do it; they really are going to base their whole campaign on Big Lies (and smaller lies) and fearmongering. Biden’s speech was basically “Soul of the Nation” (aka. “The Reichstag Speech”)II. The first time around, it was already the most irresponsible, unfair, and dangerous speech a President of the U.S. has ever delivered. I wrote that the speech signaled the “complete corruption of the Democratic Party for anyone to see who isn’t in an ethics coma.” That was a correct analysis. Nevertheless, Biden, his party and progressives think it “worked,” so now we’ll be hearing it over and over again.

The speech cites “the soul of the nation” almost immediately. It is riddled with lies, familiar ones, like calling the January 6 rioting an “insurrection” (thus telling the legally ignorant that the Supreme Court should obviously allow Democrats to block Trump from running) and saying “Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day.” The Bidens attended exactly one such funeral, and it has been reported over and over again that officer Brian Sicknick died of a stroke days after the riot, and that there was no indication that his death was related to the events of the 6th. The New York Times issued a false story that they had to retract, and Biden has been citing the misinformation for almost four years.

The whole speech is an attack on Donald Trump and his supporters, massaging and distorting Trumps words repeatedly. Of course we got the spin that Trump said “he’d be a dictator on day one.” That’s pure deceit, as we’ve discussed. Biden said: ”He called and I quote, the terminate, quote, this is a quote, the termination of all the rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the U.S. Constitution should be terminated if it fits his will. Even found in the Constitution, he could terminate.” (That’s a “quote,” mind you!) Here’s the actual quote, from one of Trump’s typical rants on Truth Social a year ago:

“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

It was an especially stupid outburst even for Trump, and it begged to be weaponized by the Democrats, but the post was not an assertion that Trump as President could or would “terminate” the Constitution.

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: District 7 Boston City Council Member Tania Fernandes Anderson

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ohhh, yeah, Boston must have high expectations for THIS City Council member…

Back in the Home of the Bean and the Cod, where of-color Mayor Michelle Wu held an apartheid Christmas Party to which no white officials were invited, (in case you’re curious, yes indeed, Mayor Wu has attributed Claudine Gay’s demise at Harvard to “racial bias”), newly elected city councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson has to retake her oath of office after a video was circulated on social media showing that she neither said the words nor raised her right hand during this week’s swearing-in ceremony.

Fernandes Anderson was instructed by both City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune and the city’s law department to retake the oath, both verbally and in writing. The do-over was supposed to take place at 9 a.m. today, but though City Clerk Alex Geourntas arrived to swear in, she wasn’t there. The District 7 councilor’s staff told Geourntas at around 11 a.m., and again shortly before 1 p.m. that she was on her way, but Fernandes Anderson eventually called in at 3:15 p.m. to say she wouldn’t make it.

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Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part I: Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Introduction

The worst part of writing a daily ethics commentary blog arrives when a juggernaut ethics train wreck starts causing carnage in all directions. Following the story is critical to the mission here, but doing it thoroughly makes Ethics Alarms less interesting, more predictable, and boring both for me and the readers. Examples of this phenomenon are, unfortunately, numerous. I’m sick of writing about Donald Trump’s miserable habits and rhetoric. I’m sick of writing about the Left dividing the nation, wrecking democracy, and crushing institutions to try to avoid having to defeat him fairly. I got thoroughly sick of writing about a dumb, corrupt, arrogant Democratic Representative who pulled a fire alarm like a 13-year-old to disrupt a House vote, and who should have been harshly punished for it…but was allowed to get away with an obvious lie. Etcetera: the mainstream media bias that so many progressives refuse to admit…the George Floyd Freakout…the DEI scam….the January 6 narrative….you can list them as easily as I can.

And I am really sick of writing about Harvard’s unethical culture, but having to watch and write about the Claudine Gay scandal is the worst yet. This story should have been quickly resolved, allowing Ethics Alarms to concentrate on more legitimately contentious matters. The facts aren’t in dispute, or shouldn’t be, embarrassing though they may be: [Added: I’ll get around to placing links to the corresponding EA posts, I hope, when I have time. You can also find them by searching for “Claudine Gay,” Harvard,” or by clicking on the “Claudine Gay” tag after the post.]

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Ethics Observations on Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Rant”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Quixotic GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is an entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking feature of the primary season because, whatever you may think of his positions, he’s unusually articulate and adept at spontaneous responses. His outburst in Scott County, Iowa, when a Washington Post reporter asked him to “condemn white supremacy and white nationalism” is a classic.

He was asked the “gotcha!” question following the endorsement of his candidacy by former Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King, who was punished by the party after repeatedly appearing to embrace white supremacists and their rhetoric. Ramaswamy took off like Harold Hill telling the crowd about the dangers of a pool table in River City:

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