History

Proposition: A Basic Knowledge Of US History Should Be Prerequisite For Running For Congress, Because It Is Incompetent And Irresponsible For Any Rep. To Be As Ignorant As Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

A straight “Unethical Quote of the Week” or “Incompetent Elected Official” EA honor still doesn’t do Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) justice. She is special. Well, I hope she is.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was crossing rhetorical sword points with Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) during the House hearing over U.S. military action in Iran. When Rep. Chu accused the administration of not caring about Americans’ financial struggles—which is, after all, completely irrelevant to the decision to defang a hostile nation seeking nuclear weapons that has been at war with the U.S. since 1979— Bessent asked her who was President of the U.S. during World War I. After a pause, apparently to check all the blank files in her memory banks, Chu answered “I don’t know.”

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Remembering the Remarkable Sheb Wooley [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

My favorite ubiquitous unknown character actor of all time is probably amazing Whit Bissell, this guy….

…who appeared in many classic films and tons of TV series despite having the dramatic range of a mannequin. But Sheb Wooley is the focus of this “Duty to Remember” post. I love performers who excel in multiple realms, and while Sheb isn’t quite in Hedy Lamar’s league (but who is?), he was versatile, and has one distinction that nobody is likely to equal, ever.

Sheb was best known for his role in Westerns. He was a regular cast member in the famous TV series “Rawhide,” renowned as the show that made Clint Eastwood a star and for the memorable theme song sung by Frankie Lane (“Move em out!”). He also played the brother of the dreaded villain in “High Noon” who had vowed to kill Sheriff Gary Cooper, and was one of the three Miller accomplices gunned down by Cooper (and Grace Kelly) in the climax of one of the greatest Westerns ever made. Decades later, Sheb had a key role in another classic: he was the high school principal who hires disgraced college basketball coach Gene Hackman to take over a tiny Indiana school’s basketball team in “Hoosiers.”

That’s just the normal stuff, though. Sheb Wooley was also a successful Country music star and songwriter (often under the name “Ben Colder”) and in 1958, penned and performed one of the most memorable novelty songs in a decade filled with them. That’s Sheb singing “The Purple People Eater” in the video above. His most impressive distinction, however, was as the voice actor for the Wilhelm scream, the stock recording of a man in the process of a experiencing a violent death. Because it has been used in in nearly 750 films including the first three “Star Wars” movies and the original “Indiana Jones” films, Sheb Wooley has “appeared” in more movies than any American actor. And his scream, which you can enjoy here, is still being used in new productions (it’s a film school in-joke), so Wooley’s voice keeps acquiring new roles. The most current list is here.

I must mention that the actor who is probably Sheb’s runner up for the title of “Most Film Credits Ever” is James Hong, the actor best known, perhaps, as the annoying maitre’d at the Chinese restaurant Jerry, George, and Elaine futilely wait to dine at in a famous episode of “Seinfeld.” [Notice of Correction: I originally included Kramer as one of the group. He was omitted from the episode, and apparently that cause a bit of tension behind the scenes.] Hong, who is 97, has inflated his own list of credits with his work as a voice actor, and has over 600 credits.

No hit songs, though, and no immortal scream.

Jill Biden’s Elder (And Former President) Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
What an awful human being...

This story is too awful to contemplate. If you have a soul, maybe you don’t want to read it.

Former President Joe Biden was planted in the audience this week at a New York City stop on his wife’s tour promoting “Dr.” Jill’s memoir, “View from the East Wing.” Whoopi Goldberg was moderating the Q and A segment (How’s that career going, Whoop?) when President Biden wandered up to the edge of the stage and said “I have a question.”

“Joe has a question? Like you couldn’t ask it later?” the distinguished author said. Oh, nice! If you didn’t want Joe to embarrass you or himself, why did you place a mentally declining old man in a position where he might do so? Or was he having another “stroke”?

Joe, as he has been for years now, was oblivious. “Who do you love most in the whole world?” what is left of Joe Biden asked. “I love you most, Joe. Was that it? Was that the answer he wanted?,” Jill said to the group, talking about him in the third person as if he were a toddler. The 46th President of the United States stood and blankly faced his wife.

The shell of Joe Biden then said, “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?,” whatever that means. At least he didn’t say “We beat Medicare.”

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Ethics Villain: Jill Biden [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt), but the contest for the Worst First Lady Ever is settled. It’s Jill Biden, easy. Edith Wilson hid her husband’s stroke from the nation but at least she wasn’t complicit in letting an unfit and mentally declining man run in the first place. Woodrow was a terrible human being, but until his stroke he wasn’t an incompetent one. Michelle Obama was and is loathsome, but she didn’t do much substantive damage while she was in the White House. She left that to her husband.

I’m going to give you a gift link to the New York Times’s notably uncritical report on Jill’s new spin on her husband’s crack-up during that fateful debate with Donald Trump, when the mentally declining President descended into authentic frontier gibberish. The Times:

“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing ‘View From the East Wing,’ a memoir of her time as first lady.”

I call bullshit, and so should everyone else. There is so much wrong with that fake narrative if boggles the mind:

1. She’s lying. Everyone had seen Biden freeze, become disoriented, mumble and get confused repeatedly for nearly four years. Months before, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material. In opting not to bring charges, Hur said that Biden would appear to the jury too befuddled to find guilty of the requisite intent. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Sure sounds like a man every American should feel secure having his finger on the nuclear button! Yet the Axis chorus of partisan hacks continued to tell the public that Joe was “as sharp as a tack.”

2. After Biden’s embarrassment in the debate, Jill went into full cover-up mode. “You answered every question!” she exclaimed, treating the President of the United States like a second-grader. His gibberish was bad enough that she thought he had a stroke, she says now, but not bad enough to have him checked out. Biden had refused to have a cognition test: after this episode, wouldn’t a caring wife be obligated to insist on a medical examination? Of course she would, except that the reality was that Biden’s debate performance was not out of character at that point. His staff and family were thinking, “Oh no. I was afraid this would happen.” Their response after the debate, joining in the agreed upon narrative that “he had a cold…he was tired….he just had a bad night…it could have happened to anyone…he’s always had a stammer…Trump rambled too!” proves that there was no new concern for Biden’s well-being, only concern that the jig was up.

3. In February of 2020, I wrote in part…

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No, John Brown Is NOT a Role Model For “Social Justice Reformers,” and Anyone Who Says So —Like Hakeem Jeffries’s Brother—Is Both Unethical and Dangerous

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I co-wrote a book about Clarence Darrow (you can buy it here: it’s cheap), and one of the points I made in the Introduction was that the U.S.’s most famous trial lawyer also believed in terrorism. Well, Darrow had his quirks, and he frequently argued that one of his murderer clients should be acquitted because the murder was justified (it worked, too!). He was ethically and morally wrong about Brown, as I asserted here in a post that republished a shortened version of Darrow’s famous eulogy for the anti-slavery vigilante. It was written long after Brown’s death, of course; Darrow used to deliver the speech on anniversaries of Brown’s birthday on May 8. The most famous section of Darrow’s passionate speech:

“The radical of today is the conservative of tomorrow, and other martyrs take up the work through other nights, and the dumb and stupid world plants its weary feet upon the slippery sand, soaked by their blood, and the world moves on.”

Darrow was an early progressive when the movement began, on the extreme end. In his “ends justifies the means” glorification of violence as a means of social change, we can see the seeds of where modern progressives have gone off the metaphorical rails and become a genuine threat to the rule of law and democracy. In Darrow’s time (he was active from 1890 to 1932) there were few progressives who would go as far as Darrow, though the anarchists did. They were the terrorists of the day, but Darrow defended labor leaders who also believed that murdering the exploitive capitalist here and there as well as their political enablers was the right thing to do.

Thus Darrow defended “Big Bill” Haywood (February 4, 1869 – May 18, 1928), an American labor organizer, a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America. “Big Bill” was indicted for engineering the booby-trap murder of Frank Steunenberg, a former governor of Idaho. Darrow got “Big Bill” off (Just look at this guy! You just know he did it.)…

….but by arguing that even if he was guilty, its shouldn’t matter because he was on the right side. Fortunately, Darrow’s arguments in favor of just murder were confined to the courtroom and his John Brown eulogy once a year.

This week, Hasan Kwame Jeffries , an Ohio State University history professor and the brother of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, declared in a social media post that “John Brown understood that the only way to free Americans from the scourge of white supremacy was to get rid of white supremacists by any means necessary. He was right then. He is right now.” Gee, do you think Prof. Jeffries is at odds with his brother in this appeal to violence? I doubt it.

Prof. Turley has called out the Democratic House minority leader for encouraging violence on the Left, and lionizing John Brown is literally a justification of violence. If Republicans and the news media don’t confront Democrats and the party’s leaders with Prof. Jeffries’s words, they are being negligent and irresponsible.

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Sure Such “Polls” Are Rigged, But Nevertheless…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The gimmick of walking through college campuses or other denizens of the young, woke and stupid and exposing the stunning ignorance on parade is an old one. Jay Leno developed it into an art form with his “Jay Walking” segment on the “Tonight” show. Jesse Waters has displayed versions of the bit on Fox News for quite a few Memorial Days now, asking young beach-goers about basic U.S. military history.

I know, I know. We have no idea how many people had to be interviewed to collect the staggeringly wrong answers. The dumbest participants are featured multiple times. Maybe these were the only embarrassing responses, though, frankly, I doubt that. I have mentioned before a lawyer I worked with who had been an associate at Skadden Arps, and was a graduate of Cornell. She had no clue when the Civil War was, guessing its dates to be “somewhere in the 1930s???” “Well, I was an economics major,” she explained.

These videos have the same perverse appeal as reality shows: they give audiences a chance to feel superior. It’s the same appeal that carnival freak shows had in past generations. Nevertheless, I believe that Watters’ Memorial Day debacles have value, because they provoke some clarity as well as foreboding.

First, the fact that there is a single adult American without a brain tumor, dementia or a closed head injury who doesn’t know who we fought in the Revolutionary War or who guesses that Albania was the world threat in World War II is a serious indictment of our culture, parenting, and the educational system from pre-school through college. One such idiot is too many. That more than one can be located on the same California beach on the same day portends of a decaying society being undernourished by atrophied minds. Democracy, more than any other form of government, depends on an engaged and informed populace. If people can reach adulthood that ignorant, we don’t have one, or at least we don’t have enough of one.

Second, it is arguably even more alarming that these dolts all laugh and giggle when their pet rock-level ignorance is exposed. They shouldn’t find it funny; they should be humiliated. They should dash into the surf to drown themselves. At very least they should tearfully apologize to, well, everyone.

These people vote. They are the audience that the Axis news media aim at, and the low information citizens that politicians like AOC, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Mamdani and James Talerico pander to. They, and people like them everywhere, are the reason the world doesn’t work.

I write comedy; I perform comedy, I have directed award winning comedies. I like satire, parody, slapstick and sophomoric humor. Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, W.S. Gilbert, Oscar Levant, Jerry Seinfeld, P.G. Wodehouse, Lewis Black and Chris Rock all amuse me, as will a good knock-knock joke. Those answers on the beach, however do not elicit a smile from me. They elicit despair.

The Duty To Remember and Walter Hunt (1796-1859)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I mentioned one of my favorite American oddballs, inventor Walter Hunt, last week in passing, and subsequently realized that while his name had turned up in several EA posts over the years, I have never devoted a whole essay to him. Shame on me. Readers here know my obsession with cultural memory and my devotion to the mission of trying to ensure that important and remarkable people, events and things don’t become discarded by American society’s short attention spam and poor education. In my other life, I co-founded a professional theater in Northern Virginia dedicated to producing great, influential and important American stage works that the rest of the theater community forgot, neglected, or was too shallow to appreciate.

Hunt, however, was among my first forays into extolling the unfairly obscure. My fifth grade teacher, Miss Barrett, assigned the class to write a paper on an American inventor. Leaving Edison, Bell and Franklin to the mob, I spent a Saturday in the library and tracked down a dusty tome called “The Encyclopedia of American Invention,” published before World War II. It had a huge and detailed chapter on Hunt, and I was hooked.

As the excellent video above explains, Walter was one of these amazing people who could see a problem, think for a while, and come up with an original solution. Part of his problem was that he was so confident in his ability to invent new things that he didn’t hesitate to sell the rights to his latest invention to pay current bills and debts, never committing to the laborious project of building a business with his ideas, Hunt made many entrepreneurs wealth with his inventions, but never became wealthy himself. He was, in short, a hopeless businessman.

As a creative problem solver, however, few could match Walter Hunt. He belongs in the same elite company with Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin, but unlike them, he’s almost completely unknown, not just today, but during his lifetime as well. And yet…these were among Hunt’s most important inventions:

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Memorial Day Ethics Reflections…

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

Nice.

The Democratic National Committee decided to use Memorial Day to attack the President of the United States. Of course it did. Despite all of the party’s rhetoric about saving democracy (while it was undermining it to a degree never before seen in U.S. history—go ahead, challenge that!), this is a party that literally doesn’t like the United States (maybe hate is too strong).

That tweet was so offensive, even Democrats objected. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-Ill.) tweeted, “It is incredibly distasteful to use our heroic dead for a political attack on Memorial Day. I’m a Democrat and I condemn this post by the DNC.”

And the DNC pulled it, replacing it with this…

…without comment, apology, anything. Tweet? What tweet? But it was the fact it could be tweeted at all that is signature significance. The party is blaming the “kids” that it had in charge of social media during the holiday, but this just means the Gen Z radicals the party has indoctrinated in our schools and with its media don’t yet understand that the mask has to stay on a bit longer or else…

Can’t have that.

The DNC was just one example. I wrote yesterday about Democrats declaring the holiday “Celebrate a Dead Arrest-Resisting Street Thug Day,” including Minneapolis’s woke mayor, who had to be reminded it was also a holiday to honor patriots and heroes. I note that Fark, the often funny, left-biased satirical news aggregator, posted this yesterday…

If challenged, I’m sure Fark would say that it was satirizing the Trump Deranged progs who still think the Epstein files hold damning evidence against the President. You know the old saying though…”Fool me once..”? I’ve checked Fark for years. It’s about as non-partisan as Stephen Colbert. As for Fark’s favorite party—well, do you remember the Memorial Day message posted by Kamala Harris—you know, that whizbang, smart-as-a-whip candidate for President who only lost because American are racists and sexist? Here , let me refresh your memory…

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Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The summary of the Pope Leo’s open letter to “all people of good will” is at Part I, along with a link to the whole 42,000 word opus. News reports on the document can be read here, here and here.

1. The document appears to begin, as we would expect, from the basic socialist/Communist/progressive bias the Catholic Church has always displayed, which includes suspicion and contempt for capitalism. In the text, Pope Leo says that while “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he added that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The encyclical doesn’t resolve the obvious conflict that has always existed in that perspective: technology ideally improves the quality of life for humanity, saves resources and redistributes them elsewhere, and often reduces the costs of goods and services making them more affordable to all. One of my favorite inventors, Walter Hunt (inventor of the safety pin), invented the first practical sewing machine but didn’t patent or market it because he was certain that it would put seamstresses out of work. So Elias Howe patented the sewing machine instead. Were more jobs lost or created by the invention? I have no idea. This has been the inevitable sequence with new technology throughout human history: its ultimate impact is usually impossible to predict.

Ethics Lesson: Trying to develop rules and laws limiting the uses of emerging technology is stifling as well as futile, and foolish to boot.

2. A Pope using the Biblical fable of the Tower of Babel as his primary analogy to justify limiting the use of artificial intelligence is signature significance that makes me, for one, tend to roll my eyes at the entire document. That’s a story about the Old Testament God finding sinful the aspirations of mankind and sabotaging an effort by humans to cooperate in creating something ambitious and unprecedented. The encyclical demands acceptance of human limits, while science, capitalism and American individualism set no limits on human advancement. The Pope seems to be saying the equivalent of “If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

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Comment of the Day: Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Recently esteemed veteran Ethics Alarms commenter Michael West has been active in commenting again. For as long as it lasts this time, I am grateful. Under his initial handle texagg04, or “tex” for short, Michael elevated the level of discourse here, and notably vanquished Ethics Alarms’ most aggressive progressive/libertarian warrior among the commentariate, the legendary tgt. (Don’t get me wrong: I like and miss tgt, who was sharp, articulate and civil, but he fled the battlefield.)

One of Michael’s most interesting recent contribution is the one below, which examines exactly the issues I was hoping to have discussed when I composed the ethics quiz about the dogs on the Titanic. Before I turn the floor over to Michael, I want to emphasize a few points that have been obscured in the discussion:

  • One reason I offered this quiz was because I am so sure that my late wife Grace would have wanted to stay with the sinking ship rather than let a beloved pet die alone. I would have had to put her in restraints and drag her into the lifeboat, and she would have divorced (or murdered) me for doing it if I somehow survived. I’m not kidding. And I would have been the one comforting the dog…
  • Several commenters said that they would never take a dog on a ship because of the implied danger. Remember that there were no planes in 1912. For anyone leaving the US to stay overseas or vice-versa, the choice was to bring their non-human companions, not to go, or leave them behind.
  • Passengers did and do take dogs on cruise-ships, and while Michael in other posts reminds us that the Titanic was never exactly marketed as unsinkable, it was marketed as the safest ship there was, which was translated in the minds of travelers as “virtually unsinkable.”
  • I don’t want to contribute to false history. As I stated in the post, there is no evidence that Ann Elizabeth Isham chose to die with her dog, or even that she had a dog with her. She was one of the four First Class women who didn’t get into a lifeboat when the rule was “women and children first.” The others stayed with their husbands, so the story about her Great Dane was posited as an explanation. She could have saved herself and didn’t. Nobody knows why.
  • The sinking of the Titanic is one of those historical events that is so studied and written about that new evidence and theories still keep, ah, surfacing. We may not have heard the last of Ann and her ghostly Great Dane.

Now here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic”:

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