History

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 / 67 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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Brilliant! Democrats Kill The National Womens’ Museum Because It Wouldn’t Include Non-Women! [Revised and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wow.

A veteran EA commenter today who excels in the contrived “gotcha!” accused me of “name-calling” because I consistently describe today’s Democratic Party as aspiring totalitarians, Machiavellian, and cheaters, and say Democrats want to gut the Constitution. It reminded me of the objection in the Continental Congress (as portrayed in “1776”) over Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word “tyrant” to describe England’s King George. Jefferson’s justification of his choice of words: “He is a tyrant.” I bet my critic really be incensed as I write—now—that today’s vote in Congress indicates that the party is also silly, doctrinaire and…wait for it….moronic.

Because it does, and it is.

Democrats, along with a few Republicans who should go the way of Thomas Massey, voted to cancel the Smithsonian’s planned Women’s History Museum because Republicans added language to its astablishment bill defining women in a manner that leaves out Renee Richards, Caitin Jenner, and the fully, ah, “intact” male “transitioners” who have been slaughtering female competitors in amateur swimming, wrestling, volleyball, and track and field. You know, like this person known as “Lia Thomas.”

The measure to establish the museum was defeated 216 to 204. Not a single Democrat voted for it, so chained is the party to radical LGBTQ propaganda.

Amazing. Amazing. The fact that most women still support a party that is so hypocritical regarding women’s welfare and rights—this is the party, remember, who made serial sexual predator Bill Clinton the keynote speaker at its national convention proclaiming the “Year of the Woman”!— is as incomprehensible as the fact that so many American Jews still vote for the party that increasing supports Hamas.

In fact, irony and hypocrisy are everywhere in this vote. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the news media) like to say that Congressional Republicans refuse to swerve from the MAGA script, but the GOP virtually never gets 100% agreement. Every House Democrat, however, wants to see a Women’s History Museum that has a special exhibit honoring this recent Democratic administration official:

How “inclusive.”

Because the proposed museum wouldn’t be pandering to anomalies like Admiral Rachel Levine and the former cute-as-a-bunny actress playing Achilles in the new Odyssey film…

…Democrats decided en masse that American women who were crucial to the founding and development of this nation despite being marginalized, abused and discriminated against shouldn’t have their fascinating and inspiring stories told at all. Their museum wouldn’t sufficiently validate the social pathogen causing parents to allow their children to be mutilated and sports to undermine the cause of female athletes after they fought so hard to compete, you see.

An earlier version of the bill was co-sponsored by 127 Democrats. Republicans on the House Administration Committee added new language to the bill last month to dedicate the museum to “preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women.”

As opposed to, you know, men who decided they were women, wanted to be regarded as women, or pretended to be women.

Republican New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis resigned as vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus today in response to the Democrats’ ridiculous tantrum, being appropriately disgusted by the vote even though 20 Democrats on the caucus co-sponsored the bill. In a letter to the committee’s co-chairs, Malliotakis pointed to Democrats on the committee refusing to cross party lines on pieces of legislation.

“If not one Problem Solvers Democrat would vote for a straightforward measure to transfer federal land for a women’s history museum simply because it was amended through regular order, during the committee process, to ensure that only biological women are exhibited, then what can we actually rely on the Caucus’ Democrats to join us on? I therefore submit my resignation as vice chair and member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, effective immediately,” Malliotakis wrote.

Good for her.

[Incidentally, I am not unalterably opposed to a National LGBTQ Museum that includesaccomplished and significant trans individuals, if they ever stop killing people…]

Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

According to J. Joseph Edgette from Widener University, there were twelve dogs that have been confirmed as passengers on the iconic doomed ship, which sank in April of 1912. Three of the dogs survived; they were all small breeds that their owners could wrap up in blankets and hide in their coats. The crew told passengers (only the First Class passengers brought their dogs) that the limited number of life boats meant that dogs would have to be left behind. 

When the ship struck the iceberg and it became clear that it was going down, the dog-loving steward in charge of the ship’s kennel released all of its canine occupants, which then ran all over the ship, surely confused, while the chaos intensified. (How did James Cameron not use that in his movie?) The three survivors were all kept in their owners’ staterooms. Lady, a Pomeranian belonging to passenger Margaret Hays, was one; Sun Yat Sen, a Pekingese belonging to Myra Harper and Henry Harper, was another, and a second Pomeranian owned by Martin and Elizabeth Rothschild was the third lucky dog.

The larger dogs that died included a King Charles Spaniel, a Poodle, a Borzoi, an Airedale, another large terrier, a Chow-Chow, a Fox Terrier, a French Bulldog and a Great Dane.

According to Titanic lore, Ann Elizabeth Isham owned the Great Dane pictured above. Rather than leave him to die alone, she chose to stay behind and comfort her beloved dog as the sea rushed in. Isham was one of the four first-class female passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic, but the only one who allegedly decided to die rather than leave her pet.

In fact, there is no evidence that she really died that way, or that she ever owned a dog, much less died with one. Nonetheless, Isham has acquired a saintly reputation among dog lovers, so let’s assume she did die rather than abandon her dog.

Your Ethics Alarms Change-of-Pace Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was that decision rational and ethical or emotional and irresponsible?

Would you do that under similar circumstances?

I’m pretty sure my late wife Grace would have.

Incidentally, there is another famous dog story about Titanic that has also been debunked. Supposedly a Newfoundland named Rigel belonging to Titanic’s First Officer William Murdoch was able to withstand the freezing waters after the ship sank. As the rescue ship Carpathia approached, nobel Rigel barked so loudly that the ship could locate the lifeboats. 

The tale is fiction. Murdoch had no dog on board. No survivor mentioned “Rigel.” The story apparently first popped up in 1912, in “The New York Herald.” See? The news media was making stuff up even back then. The news reporter also claimed that Donald Trump was to blame for the sinking. 

Kidding!

Making Americans Dumber and More Ignorant Every Day: MSNow!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Jonathan Turley quoted a gobsmacking statement from MSNow’s consistently ridiculous Katy Tur that is, I kid you not, too stupid to qualify for Unethical Quote of the Month.

Commenting on Speaker Mike Johnson’s evocation of natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC., she said, “What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from “you, our creator and heavenly father.” Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?”

No, you moron, it is him correctly interpreting what Thomas Jefferson wrote about natural rights, the core of the American philosophy of liberty and individual determinism over government domination. The Declaration states without equivocation, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Who or what “The Creator” is was consistently left up to individual faith and judgment by the Founders, who often used neutral terms like “Providence” to describe the origins of life, humanity and the universe. Jefferson’s point, which of course statists like the Axis of Unethical Conduct and its mouthpieces like Tur want to ignore, is that certain rights accrue in a just society to an individual automatically, and government cannot ethically or morally take those rights away. To maintain that such rights have to be granted by the government is to declare humanity unacceptably dependent on the power and will of others. The Declaration, Constitution and the Bill of Rights explain what the government can’t do.

How can someone who doesn’t understand this—because they never learned it, presumably—get to be a network news host? It’s horrifying. Similarly horrified by Tur’s ignorance, Jonathan Turley wrote today,

“The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away. The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution.”

No wonder so many Americans are gulled by the Democrats’ cynical claim to be “protecting democracy.” They don’t know what American democracy is.

OK, Maybe Bill Maher Is Sincere In His Criticism Of Democrats and Progressives…MAYBE, Part II: Why Bill’s “New Rule” Is Not As Ethical As He Thinks It Is

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In Part I, I published Bill Maher’s surprising slap at Democrats and progressives for their unethical drift into anti-Semitism. It’s pretty good—for Bill. The 18 paragraphs are numbered so I don’t have to repeat them here, especially since WordPress nearly sent me to the woodchipper when I was trying to compose the first post. I’m sorry that you’ll have to jump back and forth, but so do I, to write this.

And away we go…

1. Everyone has a right to be anti-Semitic, just as everyone has a right to lie, or commit adultery. Advocating anti-Semitism, promoting it, and acting on it is still unethical. These ethical nuances, rights vs. law vs. ethics, are beyond Maher’s comprehension.

2. See? Bill immediately defaults to a Rationalization #22 defense of Israel. It isn’t the worst country! Wow. Talk about a back-handed compliment!

3. Not quite as bad as China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, and North Korea, eh? Way to make anti-Semites feel ashamed, Bill….

4. Ezra Klein is nothing to be proud of. He has been a leader of Axis bias for a decade.

5. A “They’re just as bad” (Rationalization #2) cheat by Maher, and he’s cherry-picking. Carlson has been excoriated by conservatives for his anti-Israel stance. He is not representative of the Right at all, and I, for one, never thought he was.

6. Bill managed not to mention the Times’ “dog rape” libel.

9. Maher likes the #22 rationalization so much he comes back to it. This is because Bill doesn’t get ethics. He also evokes “Everybody does it!” here, the hoariest rationalization of all. Jeez Bill…read a book.

10. The “new rule” is about Democratic Party anti-Semitism, but the candidate he writes the most about is an obscure anti-Semitic Republican. Huh.

11. Israel overwhelmingly has the “right-wingers” on its side, and it has the President of the United States on its side in particular. Maher never mentions President Trump at all. He’s only willing to infuriate his audience so much, apparently.

12. Trying to continue his false equivalence argument regarding anti-Semitism on”both sides,” Maher pairs two typical leftist academics with…Candace Owens? She is persona non grata among conservatives, a true embarrassment, and she is the opposite of an academic, as she is illiterate.

13. Again with the rogue Republican joke in a statement about Leftist anti-Semitism, and again, Bill is cherry-picking. There is a reason that Margery Taylor Greene isn’t in Congress any more. Representing her idiocy as mainstream Republicanism is despicable. Rep. Fine’s sharp quip after one of Mayor Mamdani’s Muslim minions derided dogs was, in my opinion, undiplomatic but defensible. No dogs in the U.S. have engaged in any mass shootings or terrorism.

14-18. Bill finishes very strong, almost making up for his rationalizations and weasel words on the way to his conclusion

You Know That Ridiculous “100 Best Vocalists” List? The Guardian says “Hold My Beer….”

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Well yes, John, I’d say that’s a fair and accurate assessment.

Read the Guardian’s explanation of how they got this list. It’s even worse than the list itself, but it does explain the bias creating this mess with this single phrase: “Atwood’s horribly prescient The Handmaid’s Tale.” Prescient? I guess I missed the U.S. turning women into involuntary full-time baby machines.

This is a DEI list, and not a very smart or informed one. No Mark Twain, because “Huckleberry Finn” has been cancelled. Jack London was too much of a toxic masculine writer for these weenies, I guess. “Treasure Island” is too full of men and boys too. “The Three Musketeers” is nowhere to be found; nor is “The Count of Monte Cristo.” The women in “Ivanhoe” are too girly. But knee jerk political correctness kicked three of the very best novels, all written by women, off the list: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Gone With The Wind,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” almost certainly the most influential and important American novel ever written. Humor is pretty much verboten, unless it’s anti-war humor (“Catch 22”). P.G. Wodehouse wrote the funniest novels of all time: the problem with including him would be picking which were the best. Yes, ancient odd-ball novel “Tristram Shandy” is on the list: I challenge anyone to claim it has even half the outright belly laughs of Wodehouse at his best.

Not including Tolkien is inexplicable (and I don’t even like his writing); similarly, the greatest novels that engage children while reaching adults as well were cut: “Wind in the Willows,” Watership Down,” and especially the two Lewis Carroll classics, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” both among the cleverest, most original, most quoted and influential novels in the English Language.

Meanwhile, one entry on the list, “The Turn of the Screw,” isn’t even a novel. I thought the vocalist list was absurd because it was lazy and ignorant, but “The Hundred Best Novels of All Time” is even worse, because it is overtly political. “Never has such a list been more needed,” The Guardian says. Why would incompetent, biased, misleading lists ever be “needed?” Amusingly, the explanation of this thing starts with the correct assessment in its very first sentence: “[C]ompiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task.”

Here is the stupid list. Go crazy…

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