Leadership

Ethics Dunce: Jared Schmeck [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That’s nice…embarrassing the President of the United States while he’s engaged in a non-partisan Christmas-related appearance. How clever. How brave.

What an asshole.

As you can see above, President Biden and the First Lady were set up by (allegedly) a father participating in the annual White House NORAD Santa-tracking call, who ended his conversation with POTUS with the “Let’s Go Brandon,” the code for “Fuck Joe Biden.”  After the caller, identified as “Jared from Oregon,” but later revealed to be Jared Schmeck, wished the President and Jill Biden a merry Christmas and added, “…and let’s go Brandon!” Poor clueless Joe responded “Let’s go Brandon, I agree!”

Hilarity and ridicule quickly followed in conservative media- and social medialand.

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Ethics Resuscitation,12/23/21: Lift, Spirits, LIFT!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Boy, has today ever been a rotten prelude to Christmas! There’s nothing like feeling like Bob Cratchit and Scrooge at the same time….Hit it, Judy!

Yeah, easy for YOU to say…

1. Admittedly, it’s hard to be unusually unethical on a phony show like “Paranormal Experiences,” but I was fascinated to see how actual news footage of a dog rescue would be tied into the show’s theme. A dog was viewed by a crowd at New York’s East River as it desperately dog-paddled for land, then panicked and began swimming in circles. A police officer dived into the freezing (and filthy) water and grabbed the dog by the collar, getting bitten in the face and hand in the process, to tow the canine to safety as the crowd cheered him on. How was this “paranormal”?

As one onlooker explained it, the officer was a water rescue specialist, and the crowd had gathered for a ceremony honoring him. It couldn’t be a mere coincidence that a drowning dog just happened to turn up during that ceremony for that officer, could it? No, something supernatural was afoot! Such a coincidence can’t happen by itself!

Yes, it can, and does, every day, many, many times, you moron. A TV episode like this makes the public stupid and superstitious, which makes them easy to manipulate and con. Given enough time and random events, anything that can happen will happen, and the proclivity to see portents and miracles in standard chaos-driven events undermines life competence.

Where do you think the term “lucky dog” came from?

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So Fox News Hosts Wanted President Trump To “Stop The Jan. 6 Riot”…So What?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

text messages

Why is this news? Why is this being used as evidence of anything by the partisan kangaroo court posing as a House select committee investigating the events of January 6? Text messages by Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade and Sean Hannity were read aloud by Rep. Liz Cheney during last night’s hearing. Who cares?

“According to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately,” Cheney said. “They texted Mark Meadows, and he has turned over those texts.” Fox News propagandists Ingraham, Hannity and Brian Kilmeade all wanted Meadows to make some kind of exhortation to the rioters. Kilmeade, who co-hosts the nauseating “Fox & Friends,” called upon Meadows e to “please get him [that is, Trump] on TV” because the riot was “destroying everything you have accomplished.” Hannity wanted Trump to “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.” “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” host Laura Ingraham texted Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

Well…

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Ethics Quiz: Fat-Shaming Or Legitimate Criticism?

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Belgian health

That’s Maggie De Block, the Belgian Minister of Health from October 2014 to October 2020. She is currently serving as a member of the World Health Organization’s Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development.

For some reason her photograph came to the attention of social media over the weekend, and she is being made the target of considerable mockery (though she is being incorrectly labeled as Belgium’s current Minister of Health). At 59, she is estimated to weigh between 350 and 400 pounds.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz to begin a busy week is…

Is it fair to criticize her for her weight when she is in a position involved with health promotion and policy?

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“Moby-Dick” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Moby

Today marks the 170th anniversary of the publication of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” or “The Whale”(never forget that hyphen!). What does the 19th century novel with the most famous opening line in American literature have to do with ethics? Oh, only everything…and not just ethics, but leadership, values, perspective, chaos, hubris, and the ethics-related fact that you never know how things will work out, so all you can do is the best you can.

“Moby-Dick” was Jack Marshall, Sr.’s favorite novel by far, and he had read almost every classic of his era and going back 200 years before he was in high school. I read the book in a tattered hard-cover edition full of my dad’s notes in the margins. (If only I could have read his handwriting!) “Moby-Dick” is tough sailing; public schools did Melville no favors by making high-schoolers read it, even in the redacted versions. Hollywood did even more damage: the book cannot be filmed. The best and most profound parts of novel are the narrator, Melville/Ishmael’s philosophical musings, like when he asks what a dead whale might be thinking when a harpooner nearly downs in its brains.

Eventually, I was able to honor both Dad, Melville and Orson Welles by mounting a production of Welles’ brilliant (but flop) theatrical version, “Moby-Dick Rehearsed,” which I repaired thanks to my father’s comments and inspiration. It was, by far, the most successful production of the American Century Theater’s two decades, the most successful professional production Orson’s invention has ever had, and my most satisfying experience as a director.

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Why Do We Let People Like This Idiot Into Congress?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Anime video

Somehow, this story seems related to the previous post.

Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted out an altered anime video that attacks illegal immigrants (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and shows someone with two swords attacking a giant Joe Bden head. The video in his tweet used clips from popular Japanese anime “Attack on Titan,” and opens with Gosar’s name under Japanese text, which reads “attack of immigrants” (if you can read Japanese) before it continues to show real clips of Gosar and Border Patrol agents spliced alongside scenes from the anime show’s opening credits.

Several news outlets say the video shows Gosar killing killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If it does, I missed it, but then I could barely stand watching the thing. If that’s really in the video, I’d say it’s unprofessional, uncivil and unethical. All of it is inexcusable, though.

What’s the matter with this guy? Is he 12? This isn’t the kind of video a member of Congress should be having made, or put on social media. It’s an embarrassment to Congress, his party, his state, and his country. By what bizarre concept of public service and the House ethics rules could anyone conclude that such an assaultive, offensive, infantile piece of agitprop belongs in the public square?

If the rumored 2022 “red wave” doesn’t accomplish anything better than to put more jerks like Gosar in the House, it’s not worth the effort.

Yet Another “A Nation Of Assholes” Update, On Ice…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

foxes-goalie-2

I wish that I was as prescient all the time as I was in 2015, when I warned of the cultural rot relating to basic societal civility that would surely come if the United States elected a leader as habitually vulgar and nasty in his rhetoric as Donald Trump. True, I mistakenly predicted that the effects would be concentrated in the young, when in fact Mr. Trump’s lack of restraint and taste was quickly adopted by his political foes as well as entertainers and pundits.

The most recent evidence of my prognostication powers, however, comes from the group I originally signaled were most vulnerable: high school students. During a hockey game last week between the Armstrong River Hawks and the Mars Fighting Planets in Pennsylvania, a number of Armstrong Junior-Senior High School students began chanting “she’s a whore” and “suck our dicks” at the Mars goalie. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League announced last week that Armstrong students would be prohibited from attending games for the remainder of the season, including during the playoffs.

What possessed these students? I grew up in hockey-crazy Greater Boston, and my high school was state hockey power. I never heard chants like that. What changed?

The President of the United States changed, that’s what. Trump is no racist and he wasn’t Hitler, but his disrespect for woman and his verbal misogyny cannot be denied, nor can his vulgar rhetoric, though much of the worst of that was leaked by staffers who betrayed his trust in ways no previous President had to endure. Moreover, the despicable chants at the hockey game come while half the media is rationalizing and excusing a coded “Fuck Joe Biden” chant, and at recent sporting events, not even coded. That chant too flows directly from Trump’s un-Presidential boorishness.

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More On The Obama-Springsteen Exchange, Since Apparently Its Significance Isn’t Sinking In…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Obama Boss

I don’t understand why the recent televised comments by Barack Obama about white citizens haven’t been a major news story. I don’t understand why it isn’t the topic of dozens of columns and commentary pieces in newspapers, on broadcast news outlets, and on the web. There have been few comments about the episode here, and most of those have consisted of virtual shrugs: ‘Oh, as usual, the Obama worshipers and the news media will just look the other way, because he can do no wrong in their eyes.’ End of issue, apparently.

On the site that first publicized the exchange during CBS Sunday Morning, RealClearPolitics,there are no comments at all as I write this. None. A post called “Pét-Nats Are Champagne’s Funkier Cousin. Are They Here to Stay?.” also posted yesterday, has 29, and I have no idea what the hell its about. I know what the Ethics Alarms post is about, though. The former President of the United States looked upon as the most respected leader of the Democratic Party and who received about 98% of the black vote when he ran for President revealed himself as an anti-white bigot.

What he said on CBS to his new pal, Bruce Springsteen, was signature significance: nobody who isn’t an anti-while bigot says it or thinks it. Let me refresh your memory: Obama said to “The Boss,” speaking about a black E Street Band musician that Springsteen admired, “But most of your audiences were primarily white. And they can love Clarence when he’s onstage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly…the n-word comes out.”

Do you know what Obama’s statement reminded me of? It recalled a line from “12 Angry Men,” when Juror 10 says, asserting that it only stands to reason the the young defendant, who is a member of an unstated minority group, killed his father, the victim in the murder trial,

“Look, these people are lushing it up and fighting all the time, and if somebody gets killed, so somebody
gets killed…they don’t care. Oh, there are some good things about ’em too. Look, I’m the first
one to say that!”

Juror 10 is the repulsive, stereotypical bigot on the jury.

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Unethical Quote Of The Year: Barack Obama, And I Still Am Amazed He Would Say This Out Loud

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Obama and Springstein

“But most of your audiences were primarily white. And they can love Clarence when he’s onstage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly…the n-word comes out.”

—-Former President Barack Obama, talking with Bruce Springsteen on CBS Sunday Morning about the rock star’s partnership with the  E Street Band’s late black saxophonist Clarence Clemons.

And there it is. That’s how Barack Obama, just like his racist wife, thinks of white people like me. When “they” see a black man at a bar, even a famous musician like Clemons, they just can’t restrain themselves. The “n-word”—that’s nigger, you know—“comes out.”

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Ethics Observations On President Biden’s Crashing Poll Numbers [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

todd-poll

The mainstream news media and progressive gaslighting aficionados were shocked–-shocked!—when habitually left-biased and incompetent NBC talking head Chuck Todd went on Democratic propaganda organ MSNBC and revealed that the most recent NBC poll showed public trust and regard for President Biden and Democrats plummeting like Icarus.

What was shocking wasn’t that Biden was polling horribly, but that he was polling so horribly that MSNBC would report it. Not only are polls unrelaible at best, they are manipulated to confuse and mislead the public by left-biased media contractors (only the Fox News polling is showing Terry McAuliffe trailing Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, for example, which he is, and badly). Moreover, the news media routinely buries or misrepresents polls that carry bad portents for Democrats.

The poll found that 42% of U.S. adults surveyed approved of Biden’s job performance and 54% disapproved, despite a 49%-48% split as recently as August. The survey was conducted jointly by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies.

Observations:

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