Quotes

Fine, You Loved Your Maniac Son. Now Shut The Hell Up, Mom!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

There is a point where loyalty, unconditional love and bias-born blindness can no longer be tolerated nor excused, and Adriana Reyes, the mother of mass murderer Salvador Ramos, reached that point and passed it.

Her various efforts to defend her now fortunately dead son or to mitigate his incomprehensible crimes do nothing but harm. They contribute just this to understanding of the tragedy: Ramos was raised by a stupid, distracted mother with the ethical instincts of a sea sponge. Thanks, Adriana, but we kind of figured that out. We don’t need the reminders.

Reyes has now said…

Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Heat-Up, 5/18/2022: More Judicial Review And Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Because I was otherwise obsessed, I missed noting yesterday a true landmark in law and ethics. It was that date in 1954 when a unanimous the  Supreme Court handed down the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Linda Brown, a young African American girl had been denied admission to her local elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because of the color of her skin.

Written in 1896 as the KKK roamed the South, the SCOTUS ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson held that “separate but equal” accommodations in railroad cars conformed to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. Plessy was interpreted as justifying segregation in everything from buses to water fountains to elementary schools. The white school Brown attempted to attend was far superior to her the segregation-mandated alternative and miles closer to her home, so The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  took up Linda’s cause. Thurgood Marshall led Brown’s legal team, and on May 17, 1954, Plessy was overturned after 58 years as “the law of the land” despite the siren call of stare decisus. The opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that “separate but equal” was an unconstitutional doctrine in ringing terms: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”  A year later, the Supreme Court published guidelines requiring public school systems to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”

1. Prudent and responsible, if not courageous. Speaking of SCOTUS, newly confirmed Justice-in-Waiting Ketanji Brown Jackson sat for an interview by the Washington Post and was asked about the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs abortion case. Conservative media was triggered by this section:

Q: What was your response when you when you saw the draft leak [of a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade]?

A: Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.

Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?

A: I can’t answer that.

Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?

A: I don’t have any comment.

Charles Cooke at the National Review writes, “This ranges from somewhere between cowardly and sinister, much like the failure of the justices to issue a joint statement that echoes the chief justice’s condemnation of the leak and statement of determination to identify the leaker, and that condemns the protests, which violate federal law.”

Wrong. SCOTUS justices should not issue opinions on such matters. Her statement that the leak was a breach of the normal order was factual, and breaches of normal order in any institution are unethical. She was right to go no further. As for the demonstrators, some of them may be arrested at some point, and a statement by a Supreme Court Justice regarding their conduct could interfere with a fair trial.

Her responses give me more reason to trust Jackson’s judgment, not less.

Continue reading →

Nancy Pelosi’s Unethical Quote Of Her Career Proves What An Ethics Villain She Is…But We Knew That Already

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Who would ever [have] suspected that a creature like Donald Trump would become president of the United States, waving a list of judges that he would appoint, therefore getting the support of the far right and appointing those anti-freedom justices to the court?”

—Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on CNN yesterday

Almost exactly four years ago, progressives, Democrats and the news media accused Donald Trump, then President, of racism because he referred to border-jumping MS-13 gang members as “animals.” At that time, Pelosi delivered this pious rebuke:

We believe some of us who are attracted to the political arena and to government and public service that we’re all God’s children. There’s a spark of divinity in every person on Earth and that we all have to recognize that as we respect the dignity and worth of every person. … And so when the president of the United States says about undocumented immigrants, ‘these aren’t people, these are animals,’ you have to wonder, does he not believe in the spark of divinity? The dignity and worth of every person? ‘These are not people, these are animals,’ the president of the United States. … Calling people ‘animals’ is not a good thing.

Of course it was a cheap shot by Pelosi, but she specialized in cheap shots during the Trump years. If one is going to call anyone an animal, the brutal, lawless MS-13 gang members are a good choice. Now, however, Pelosi calls a President of the United States a “creature,” which is even lower than “animal,” evoking slimy insects, reptiles, and this guy…

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SCOTUS Leak Freakout Update: The Times’ Unethical Editorial Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

It’s rare that one sees blunt incivility in an old and revered political publication like the National Review, but here was the headline of Charles Cook’s column there yesterday:

The New York Times’ Editorial Board Is Apparently Extremely Stupid

I had read the editorial and my reaction had been the same, except that I would have been tempted to leave out “apparently.” I’d also categorize this as old news, at least to readers of Ethics Alarms. Then, for a nonce, I regretted the absence of self-exiled commenter “A Friend,” since his predictable efforts to defend the indefensible in the Times would have been particularly entertaining in this case.

Here’s the the paragraph Cooke was reacting to:

Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.

This is the newspaper that is regarded as the flagship of the news media. This is the newspaper that holds itself up as a paragon of objective news analysis. This is a newspaper that claims that its perspective isn’t skewed by a progressive bias.

This is the newspaper I have been paying almost 90 bucks a month to have delivered every day for four years. Yes, I’m stupid too.

Here, in part, is what Cooke writes in his understandable disgust: Continue reading →

The Immediate Benefit Of Musk’s Twitter Takeover: The Left Is Revealing Its Fear Of Free Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

That depressing exhortation above was released by the president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson. It is signature significance for a man, and presumably the organization he has led and spoken for since 2017, who favors censorship, content-based control of communications media, and a manipulated political system. It also reveals a leader of an influential organization who sees no danger that his members and his organization’s supporters will react negatively to his open embrace of totalitarian principles.

“Hate speech” is free speech, and groups like the NAACP (and the Democratic Party, and too frequently the mainstream media) define as hate speech any speech that they hate, because it is critical of their positions, agendas or members. “Disinformation and misinformation” have always been welcome on Twitter as long as it advanced progressive goals. “Do not allow 45 to return to the platform”? What is that but a demand that a prominent political figure who was recently President be handicapped in his efforts to seek political office? How would the NAACP have responded to a call from white supremacy group to keep Barack Obama from a communication platform in 2008?

The organization is only about power. It has no integrity or principles.

Or self-awareness. Or comprehension of the words it uses and the concepts it claims to revere. Censoring speech and political opinions along with a recent President and current political leader protects democracy.

War is Peace

Ignorance is Strength

Slavery is Freedom

Silly me, I did not expect the NAACP to reveal itself as such a fan of Big Brother; I somehow thought that last motto would be a deal-breaker.

Well, now we know. It’s sad, and scary, but that’s what’s so great about letting people say what they think.

Among other benefits, we learn who can’t be trusted.

From The Ethics Alarms “How Stupid Do Democrats Think The Public is?” Files: Inflation Denial Games

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This will be an interesting test of the gullibility and brain mass of the American public. Faced with epic inflation greatly worsened by the Democrat’s wild spending sprees, incompetent handling of supply chain disruptions, and virtue-signaling suppression of oil production that cannot possibly have any ameliorating effects on global climate change whatsoever, the Donkey High Command has apparently decided on a carpet-bombing “Jumbo” strategy: “Inflation? What inflation?”

We have discussed already the “Putin price hike” mantra Jen Psaki keeps repeating. Last week, I saw a White House release admitting the inflation explosion but noting that if you took out food and gas prices, the rate of inflation increase had declined thanks to deft Biden policies. This, of course, brought back memories of former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry’s immortal statement that if you didn’t include all the murders, D.C. crime rate was actually pretty good! Nancy Pelosi, Psaki and Biden have all distorted the meaning of a letter from a group of acclaimed economists endorsing the trillion dollar infrastructure bill to falsely claim that they said spending all that money would reduce inflation, so, SEE? It’s can’t be Biden’s fault! (The letter actually said, correctly, that repairing and upgrading the infrastructure would make commerce more efficient and less costly in the long-term. As the Washington Post confirmed, they were not making any statement about current inflation.)

Last week we learned that the Biden new military budget assumes only 2% inflation, meaning that its numbers are fictional.

Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: It’s Unethical For ABC To Allow Anyone As Ignorant, Reckless And Stupid As Joy Behar To Be A Host On “The View”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I hate having to devote a whole post to someone as trivial as Joy Behar, and I wish I didn’t have to start Easter morning by highlighting her idiocy, but as Linda Loman would say, “Attention must be paid.”

In an orgy of ignorant anti-gun hysteria on “The View” following last week’s subway shooter in New York City, Joy Behar predictably took the prize for Most Outrageous Statement, and there was tough competition. Are you ready? I don’t want brains and skull fragments to mess up your Easter baskets.

She actually said, and I wouldn’t kid you about this,

The Supreme Court is poised to pass a bill contradicting the New York City State laws. We have very strict gun laws here, and they would like it to be apparently somebody has put it on their desk that New York should be an open carry state, and an open carry city with all of the density in this city. They want people running around with guns. People – middle-class people will be leaving in droves if that happens.

Yes, Joy Behar thinks that the Supreme Court passes bills that “somebody has put on their desk.” She’s 79 years old, with a college degree and a Masters (so much for the benefits of higher education) , and still lacks the civic literacy of a 6th grader. She also said that New York City is a state, but that’s within her usual range of sloppiness. Later, Behar claimed that there had been “more than 130” mass shootings in the U.S. this year. Continue reading →

Rueful Observations On The Grand Rapids, Mich. Police Shooting

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

…and reactions to it so far.

So occupied was the  news media with crowding out all other news events with the Ukraine war that you may have missed the latest justification for a Black Lives Matter protest, and the latest reason we may have to use robots to police the streets soon, since no sane human being would want the job.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Patrick Lyoya, black and 26, was pulled over on April 4 after a police officer saw that the license plate on his car did not match the automobile he was driving. Lyoya tried to run away after the officer questioned him and asked for his driver’s license.

The officer quickly caught up to him, and there was a struggle. The Grand Rapids police department said that the officer’s body camera was deactivated during physical contact. Video from a bystander’s cellphone shows the officer trying to control Loyoya and kneeing him in the back while shouting at him to let go of the stun gun. (The officer appeared to have tried to use the stungun on Loyoya, without success. Finally the officer reaches for his gun and shoots once, killing the motorist. As day follows night, Black Lives Matter and other activists organized a protest, and the usual parties issued the predictable statements.

Rueful Observations: Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.); Ethics Dunces: GOP House Members Who Listened To Him

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I know the maxim is that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, but how do you explain this? It appears to be an example of a total fool leading the slightly less foolish.

What’s going on here? Continue reading →

PM Ethics Shadows, 4/12/2022: Civil War Memories, Crazy Climate Change Terrorists, Someone Figures Out That BLM Is A Scam, And More [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Civil War started on this date in 1861, as Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. That’s about all that needs to be said. All wars are ethics nightmares, but none has had more ethics ramifications for this country, from the lives sacrificed to end slavery, to the war crimes of Andersonville, and the total war tactics of Sherman, to the myriad instances of astounding courage, cruelty and incompetence on the battlefields and the ongoing debate about how best to glean the right ethics lessons from them. (Tearing down statues is not it, though.) The Civil War took away our greatest POTUS, Lincoln, and gave us Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and McKinley, Civil War veterans all. The one non-veteran in the sequence, Grover Cleveland, is an ethics controversy himself because of it: Grover paid someone else to take his place in the draft. And yet….try asking the nearest college grad to give you the dates of the Civil War. I asked a Cornell law grad and former associate of one of the most prestigious law firm in the nation once.
She guessed “Somewhere in the 1930s, right?”

1. I’ll take “Unethical environmental fanatic nutballs, Alex!” Adbusters, a self-described “international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts” posted instructions on how to deflate the tires of “rich people’s” gas-powered vehicles. [Pointer: JutGory] “Wedge gravel in the tire valves, leaflet the SUV to let them know the tires are flat and why it was done, and walk away. It’s that simple,” the group said in a tweet. The group cautioned “to avoid targeting vehicles with disabled stickers or hangers.” That’s considerate of them…

This is what climate change hysteria does to people who lack ethics alarms. Here’s what they want you to leave on the windshield when you disable a car:

2. Good. Now what took you so long? On the Huffington Post, progressive opinionater Stephen Crockett authored a rueful essay bemoaning the fact that Black Lives Matter is apparently a racket. (Please note that this space figured that out years ago, and it wasn’t hard.)

He writes, Continue reading →