History

If It Exists, Heaven Isn’t a Game Show. I Hope.

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

When ” Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, in his last days before dying, announced that he had converted to Christianity, my immediate thought was that it was either a final joke by the “cancelled” wit and iconoclast or a classic deathbed conversion that lowered my opinion of him. It may have been both based on his final tweet, which said in part,

“Many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation… for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go. I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and look forward to spending an eternity with Him. The part about me not being a believer should be quite quickly resolved; if I wake up in heaven, I won’t need any more convincing than that. I hope I’m still qualified for entry.”

Ann Althouse, for some strange reason (but she was always a big Scott Adams fan) finds this announcement astute and charming, rating it “an impressive mix of intelligence, respect, humor, and honesty. I have read many Christians cheering for Adams as well.

This is demeaning to God and Christianity, and I say this as a life-time agnostic. What kind of silly religion holds that you will reach paradise for eternity as long as you say the magic words, whether they are true or not, just before shuffling off these mortal coils?

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Confronting My Biases #27: Middle-Aged Men Wearing Basball Caps Backwards

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I started really being annoyed at this when “The Gilmore Girls,” an annoying chick TV series to begin with, began featuring the single mom’s boyfriend who wore his cap like the guy in the photo. The graphic is a screen shot from a Tik-Tok video in which the guy is railing against wearing caps like that because you look like an idiot when you do. Verdict: True. In fact, I assume anyone who wears a baseball cap that way IS an idiot. It looks stupid, it defeats the purpose of the brim—there is no excuse for it whatsoever, except, in the opinion of the guy in the video, it is an attempt to look “like a ‘bad boy.'”

Oh. Well that’s all right then!

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Just Because She Can’t Be Sued For It Doesn’t Make Hillary’s Latest Shameless Lie Less Damning

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

My sympathy for Hillary Clinton has finally run out.

For a long time, I have wanted to give Clinton every bit of leeway imaginable since her fluky, statistical anomaly Electoral College loss to Donald Trump in 2016. It’s an ethicist thing; the Golden Rule is strong here. What must it feel like to be that close to achieving your dream and to have it yanked from your grasp at the last moment? Oh-oh…I’m making Hillary sound like Moonlight Graham.

Still, I can understand why she has been so bitter and angry ever since. On the other hand, to go from “Field of Dreams” to “The Godfather”: this is the life she has chosen. “Politics ain’t beanbag.” It’s been 10 years. Time to grow the hell up.

Hillary’s latest outburst of Trump Hate—always wrongly placed because her own ineptitude, corruption and foolishness lost her that 2016 election—-came on the anniversary of Teddy Roosevelt’s death—wait, no, that was the worst thing that ever happened on a January 6th, but Hillary was using the date to misrepresent the stupid January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Clinton posted a comment on X, declaring, “Five years ago today, Donald Trump urged his supporters to attack Congress and the Capitol over a proven lie.”

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Ethics Quote of the Week (On That Fanciful “International Law” Thingy): Konstantin Klein

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“All the bleating about “international law” shows just how completely deluded some of our elites have become. International law was a pleasant fiction that lasted for a few decades…It was never real. Laws are based on submission to an overarching authority backed by force. There is no such international authority and even if you view the UN as one, it does not have the ability to use force against those who violate “international law”…

—Someone named Konstantin Klein on Twitter/”X.” I have no idea who the hell he is, and I could have just as easily said that myself, but I’ve been waiting for someone else to point exactly this out, because it is true..

As a general rule, those criticizing the U.S. action in Venezuela based on “international law” don’t know what international law is, and those who criticize the seizing of Maduro and his wife who do know what international law is are deliberately misleading those who don’t. Why hasn’t the new media clarified the issue? Well, 1) it would undermine the Axis’s anti-Trump narrative and 2) most journalists are lazy and not too bright.

On The View yesterday, Sunny Hostin, who appeals to her own authority frequently because she is a lawyer and was once a prosecutor, again proved she was an affirmative action botch by her law school (Notre Dame) by showing beyond a reasonable doubt that she’s an idiot. According to her, the Trump administration arresting Maduro and extraditing him the United States was a “kidnapping,” “100 percent Illegal,” and akin to “piracy.” Piracy? Then she played the frayed international law card, babbling “And international law doesn’t allow it unless there is — unless Congress declares war, and Congress did not do at. So, this country was founded on the premise of the balance of power. Right? So, you have a checks and balances. So, you have co-equal powers — co-equal branches of power. So, you have the Judicial Branch and then you have the Executive Branch, which the president is a part of, and then you have, of course, the Legislative Branch and that’s Congress. And they are supposed to check each other!”

Psst, Sunny! International law doesn’t “allow” or disallow anything. The United States was actually founded on the premise that the people who lived here wanted to decide on and enforce their own laws and not be subject to foreign rule.

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Amazingly, This Tennis “Battle of the Sexes” Had Even Less Integrity Than The Last One

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ugh. I missed writing about the latest “Battle of the Sexes” tennis fiasco last month. I meant to. I think my brain must have registered a veto after threatening to leave if I did.

You remember the first one, don’t you? That was when senior pro tennis huckster Bobby Riggs, who was never a top ranked pro player even in his prime, had challenged #1 ranked female tennis champ Margaret Court to a match using sexist wisecracks and shamed her into playing him in 1973. On national TV, the 55-year old lobbed and cheap-shotted poor Margaret, who was having a bad case of jitters as she was supposedly defending her sex, to distraction and won handily. Billy Jean King then picked up the metaphorical flag, challenged Bobby, and won in a match that looked exactly like what it was: a female tennis pro at the top of her game beating an old man who was a last a decent pro player 25 years earlier. This proved exactly nothing, but it was enough to make King a feminist icon. The match was effectively used to argue for women getting equal pay in pro tennis, and helped get the women’s professional tour started.

The whole thing was an over-hyped joke, lousy tennis combined with lousy politics, that presaged the worst of reality TV decades later. Still, no real was harm was done except extending obnoxious Bobby Riggs’ 15 minutes of past-his-pulldate fame. But for some reason it was felt necessary to revive the stupid stunt in 2025.

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FFF! First Friday Forum of 2026…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The New York Times started the New Year with a column by one of its more recently-hired progressive-biased columnist. His name is Carlos Lozada: the Times’s DEI office finally noticed in 2022 that it didn’t have a Hispanic pundit, I guess—and his self-written description is hilarious when compared to his column kicking off 2026. “I strive for fairness, honesty and depth,” he writes. “I believe that there is something called truth, and I do my best to approximate it. My overriding value is skepticism. Along with all Times journalists, I am committed to upholding the standards of integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook.”

Right. None of the journalists at the Times strive to uphold the standards of integrity outlined in the Ethical Journalism Handbook, and Lozada proves that he’s no different from the rest of the Times pundit stable. He begins with a deliberately disingenuous premise in today’s effort titled “How Did We Get to Such a Bad Question?” (Gift link). The “bad question” is “How did we get here?” which, of course, is exactly what Lozada’s column is about. How clever. This is like the guy who says, “I’m the last person to to say X” and then says it. At this paragraph, I stopped reading:

How did we get to the so-called Trump era, for example? If your answer is about economic inequality and the forgotten man, then maybe start with the World Trade Organization or NAFTA or the decline of organized labor. If your answer is about race, then point to the backlash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction. If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh; if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party, then quote at length from Patrick Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. And so on, ad infinitum.

Yeah, I’m pretty used to that brand of bias by now. The amazing thing is that the Times is so accustomed to it as the norm that no editor saw how disqualifying Lozada’s rhetoric is. One of the major reasons for Trump’s rise was that Obama made the discriminatory philosophy behind affirmative action central to his approach to his Presidency, increasing racial division and making “Racist!” the fall-back response of the media and Democrats to any criticism of his leadership. Lozada follows suit by framing the reasonable response to Obama’s destructive eight years as…racism. “[B]acklash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction”…yeah, Carlos, white Americans who didn’t appreciate living in a culture where they were constantly vilified were expressing their hostility to the civil rights movement.

Then: “If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.” Funny, this truth-seeker immediately fingers two conservatives who correctly called out the one-way partisan bias in the mainstream media, not the complete partisan takeovers of CNN, NPR PBS and the network news. Not Obama’s arrogant “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” comment, not  Hillary’s “deplorables” speech, or…

But the final smoking gun in the column is Lozada’s “if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party…” Dingdingdingdingding!  The Republicans rejecting the Obama-Biden-Democrat embrace of open borders and “the good illegal immigrants” are nativists….you know, bigots. Like Bill the Butcher in “The Gangs of New York.” That assessment is Lozada’s idea of “fairness, honesty and depth.”

Well, bye, asshole. Now we know what your agenda is.

But I digress! You write about whatever ethics issues interest you as the new year dawns…

…

Unethical Quote of the Year (2026): New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

—New New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his speech yesterday to too many ignorant voters who have no idea what he’s talking about and what they are in for.

Choosing that “Bananas” clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive was too easy; not only is it one of my favorites, but other pundits and social media wags has already made the connection to Woody’s Allen’s fictional South American country of San Marcos. And Mamdani’s open embrace of communism in that sentence was, indeed, bananas. I am sorely tempted to just leave the post at that: it’s res ipsa loguitur. It speaks for itself.

Yet it doesn’t speak for itself: that’s the scary part. That is what our education system’s collapse into incompetence and indoctrination has brought us. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana in his 1905 book, “The Life of Reason.” The average American not nearing retirement age is likely to say, upon hearing Mamdani’s seductive threat, “Collectivism! Sounds good to me!” as well as “Who’s Santayana?”

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Observations on an Anti-Trump Meme That Will Be Posted By One Of My Trump-Deranged Facebook Friends Any Second Now…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Typical, desperate, ignorant and stupid.

Right now I’m placing bets on which of my Stage 5 Trump-Deranged friends or relatives will bite first. Let’s see..

1. This logic is like that of the man who kills his parents and wants sympathy from the judge because he’s a orphan. Trump was impeached twice by Democrats in the House, in both cases without thorough hearings and with contrived accusations and dubious evidence. He was also acquitted in the Senate, and correctly so.

2. The “34 felony convictions” have been effectively vacated. Though the convictions have not been overturned yet, no conviction is final until appeals have been exhausted. The fraud case in question was always pure lawfare, designed by New York Democrats and a partisan AG to “get Trump,” as that Attorney General campaigned on: she promised to “get Trump.” After all, he was threatening to win the White House. Those convictions were also for a single act that all authorities agree harmed no one, was standard business practice, and would never have prompted legal action had not Donald Trump been involved.

3. My favorite fallacy here, however, is that academic credentials have any relevance to leadership ability or successful Presidencies at all. For that matter, presumed intellectual ability hasn’t correlated with Presidential success either. To take the obvious example, Abraham Lincoln had no academic credentials. Harry Truman, an average intellect at best, proved to be a far better President than many with advanced degrees (or Harvard educations), such as John Adams, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.

4. Best of all comparisons with Trump is this one, authored by social media wit David Burge in response to that meme above:

He’s referring, of course, to the Second Worst President Ever, Woodrow Wilson.

Ethics Observations On The Dionne Quintuplets’ Resentment

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The last of the famous Dionne Quintuplets died last week. Annette Dionne, who seems to have been the strongest of the five identical sisters from the very beginning, was 91. The New York Times has an obituary that is also an excellent feature on their unusual lives (Gift link!)—this is the kind of thing the Times still does well. There isn’t a single slap at President Trump anywhere, at least that I noticed.

The article begins by noting that Annette, like all of her sisters, “resented being exploited as part of a global sensation.” I get it: the five girls were celebrities from the second they were born, and their fame was such that they never really escaped it: thus the last surviving quint being deemed worthy of a Times obituary more than 60 years after her birth. But resenting something that any objective analysis would find unavoidable is not just pointless, it’s unfair. In this case, the resentment was unfair to the quints’ parents and the public.

In 1934, the birth of surviving quintuplets in Ontario, Canada was considered, justifiably, a medical miracle. All five of them together weighed only 13 pounds, 6 ounces. Yes, in a way they were freaks and treated as such, extraordinarily cute little freaks. Medical miracles give people hope; they suggest that the world is getting smarter, safer, more beneficent. This miracle happened in the pit of the Great Depression, when celebrities like Babe Ruth and Shirley Temple became icons because they made Americans forget their troubles.

To the girls’ parents, Oliva and Elzire Dionne, the arrival of five babies to a family living in poverty was a looming catastrophe. The parents and five children already lived in a run-down farmhouse lit by kerosene and serviced by an outhouse. The new babies were nursed on water and corn syrup until the family started receiving breast milk donations. The fact that the public was so interested in the quintuplets was a blessing that saved the family from disaster.

They were indeed exploited. The parents for a time surrendered custody of the girls and they were cared for by a government-appointed guardian, the doctor who had delivered them. The were housed and cared for by the doctor and a staff at “Quintland,” where they were displayed several times a day on a balcony as 6,000 spectators watched them through one-way glass.

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Celebrating the 111th Anniversary of the Strange But Ethical “Christmas Truce”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

[Good morning! Was Santa good to you? I might as well repost this essay about the Christmas truce; since I only have published it on Christmas Day, some readers might have missed it, and EA, believe it or not, sometimes gets new followers from time to time…]

One of the weirdest events in world history took place on Christmas 1914, at the very beginning of the five year, pointless and stunningly destructive carnage of The Great War, what President Woodrow Wilson, right as usual, called “The War to End All Wars.”

World War I, as it was later called after the world war it caused succeeded it,  led to the deaths of more than 25 million people, and if anything was accomplished by this carnage, I have yet to read about it.

The much sentimentalized event was a spontaneous Christmas truce, as soldiers on opposing sides on the Western Front, defying orders from superiors, pretended the war didn’t exist and left their trenches, put their weapons and animus aside, sang carols,  shared food, buried their dead, and even played soccer against each other, as “The Christmas Truce” statue memorializes above.

The brass on both sides—this was a British and German phenomenon only—took steps to ensure that this would never happen again, and it never did.

It all began on Christmas Eve, when at 8:30 p.m. an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles reported to headquarters that “The Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” The two sides progressed to serenading each other with Christmas carols, with the German combatants crooning  “Silent Night,” and the British adversaries responding with “The First Noel.“ The war diary of the Scots Guards reported that a private  “met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them, they would not fire at us.”

The same deal was struck spontaneously at other locales across the battlefield. Another British soldier reported that as Christmas Eve wound down into Christmas morning,  “all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: ‘English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!’” He wrote in a letter home that he heard,

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