Race

Ha! And You Thought The Left In New York, Chicago And Portland Had Gone Completely Bonkers…The City Across The Bay Says “Hold My Beer”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The official proposal from San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, the existence of which itself is evidence of psychosis, is finally out, and The Great Stupid has reached a new benchmark.

In December, Ethics Alarms reported that California’s Task Force to Study and Recommend Reparations Proposals for African Americans was about to submit a recommendation that the state hand over $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California as a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers will be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget. I concluded that “it was just one more indicator of how the entire state had lost its collective mind, that The Great Stupid knows no bounds.” Well, I was right about that, and San Francisco’s panel apparently decided to show the USA that its home state was relatively reasonable.

The committee, after much thought, study and debate, has proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to each black resident of the city deemed eligible as recompense for the “decades of harm they have experienced.” And that’s not all! The committee also proposes cancelling all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households, and supplementing lower-income recipients’ income for the next 250 years. After all, the report points out, “Reparation​ ​must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.​”​

They do not, apparently, have to be feasible, responsible, reasonable or constitutional, but then, the city has been working up to clinical insanity for quite some time. We shouldn’t be too surprised.

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Ethics Villains: Fairfax Virginia High Schools, And Why Isn’t The News Media Treating This As The Major Scandal It Is? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Let’s start with a memorable quote from that eloquent villain, Auric Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

This is enemy action against motivated and talented students, responsible and trusting parents, and core American values. It should be reported as such and responded to with the vigor and relentlessness the attack warrants, but the news media is burying the story, because they are enemies as well.

Happenstance: My fault. I reported this story as the last item in the Ethics Alarms Christmas Eve ethics outrage collection, here, pretty much guaranteeing that even fewer people would see it than usual. It should have been a full post. I wrote,

City-Journal reports that at Thomas Jefferson High in Fairfax, Virginia, two administrators have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s students awarded them, most of them Asian. This denied those students the chance to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. The author believes that this was intentional, a part of “the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.”The school’s leadership is acting as if it was just an oversight—for at least three years. Read the article. [Pointer: Mark Metcalf]

Well, hey, that’s just one DEI-obsessed principal, and she’s apologized and maybe will get fired, so all is well, right? Wrong:

Coincidence? The Fairfax Times reports that while Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid claimed the principal at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology withheld National Merit awards from students in a “one-time human error,” Langley High School Principal Kim Greer sent an email to parents apologizing for doing the same thing:

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Gilbert & Sullivan, The Great Stupid, And Me

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

OK, That’s IT! Now The Great Stupid is messing with me personally.

This is war!

Among my many useless and unprofitable areas of expertise are the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, which I performed in, directed, produced, adapted and lectured on for most of my life. Maybe there is someone who has as much experience in the genre as I have, but I doubt it, frankly.

Recently I was engaged to prepare a program on my exploits with the great Victorian musical comedy team for a private club in Washington, D.C. I assembled a capable cast of experienced Savoyards to assist me, including in the planned program numbers from 12 of the 14 performable operettas. I will be emphasizing how many of the songs make still valid satirical observations on current societal foolishness; that number above is included in the program and is from “Princess Ida,” in which Gilbert pokes fun at early feminism. The song is sung at a women’s college where the faculty and students have forsworn male contact and regard the opposite sex as inferior in all respects. Here are Gilbert’s lyrics:

A Lady fair, of lineage high,
Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by.
The Maid was radiant as the sun,
The Ape was a most unsightly one,
The Ape was a most unsightly one
So it would not do
His scheme fell through,
For the Maid, when his love took formal shape,
Express’d such terror
At his monstrous error,
That he stammer’d an apology and made his ‘scape,
The picture of a disconcerted Ape!


With a view to rise in the social scale,
He shaved his bristles and he docked his tail,
He grew mustachios, and he took his tub,
And he paid a guinea to a toilet club,
He paid a guinea to a toilet club
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through
For the Maid was Beauty’s fairest Queen,
With golden tresses,
Like a real princess’s,
While the Ape, despite his razor keen,
Was the apiest Ape that ever was seen!

He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,
He crammed his feet into bright tight boots
And to start in life on a brand new plan,
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man!
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man! 

But it would not do,
The scheme fell through!

But it would not do,
The scheme fell through!
For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey crav’d, 
Was a radiant Being, With a brain farseeing
While Darwinian Man, though well-behav’d,
At best is only a monkey shav’d!

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On The Freedom Of Speech Front…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Strangely, many of the same people who are claiming that democracy is hanging by a thread or two are also trying to fray a rather obvious thread, the right to free expression and free speech. Since that First Amendment thingy is a bear, they have to find ways around it that will stifle ideas, opinions and arguments that interfere with the “greater good”.”” (as they see it, natch). Or pretend the First Amendment “isn’t what it is” (#64).

Recent developments:

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Worst of Ethics Award 2022: Most Unethical Parent Of The Year…And More!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Kendra Licari was arrested this month and faces up to ten years in prison. In December of 2021, Licari informed police that her daughter and her boyfriend were being harassed, bullied and stalked online. Her daughter, she told them, was frightened and traumatized. Kendra and the boyfriend’s mother, she said, were working together to find the person responsible for the cyberbullying.

Police investigated, and discovered who was making Licari’s daughter’s life miserable. It was her own mother.

The investigators found that Kendra Licari had begun harassing her daughter online in early 2021, sending anonymous threats and insulting messages while pretending to be another high school girl. Though Mom tried to conceal her real identity, but FBI cyber-experts traced the messages to Licari’s IP address.

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More Evidence That The Public Is In Need Of Basic Education Regarding The Constitution And The Bill Of Rights…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The online petition can demand until it is blue in the face, if petitions could be blue in the face, or had a face, for that matter.

The comments of the citizen in the video clip are 100% First Amendment protected speech. There is no valid argument to the contrary. Signatories of such a petition have announced that a) they don’t believe in free speech; b) they want the government to censor individual opinions they disagree with and c) they are unfit to participate or benefit from a democratic republic, preferring a totalitarian government provided its agendas aligns with those of the petition-signers.

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From England, A Great Stupid Christmas

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Looking on the bright side, it’s heartening to know that after all these years, the United States is still less censorious than our cousins across the pond.

Two British radio stations ( Heart FM and Magic Radio; the BBC is said to be considering following their lead) have censored a line of Johnny Mathis’s song “When a Child Is Born” because of listener complaints that it is “racist.” On the recording of Mathis’s Christmas song that he introduced in the Seventies, the African-American singer speaks about the significance of Jesus’s birth:

And all this happens because the world is waiting–waiting for one child…black, white, yellow, no one knows. But a child that would grow up and turn tears to laughter, hate to love, war to peace, and everyone to everyone’s neighbor. And misery and suffering will be words to be forgotten forever.

What’s the racist part, you well may ask? It’s “yellow!”

“Black”‘s OK for blacks, thought they aren’t really black, and “white”‘s fine for whites, but “yellow” is racist. What is the vernacular for Asian skin-tone, then? Wait, is calling Donald Trump “orange” also racist? Who can keep up with these rules. much less the floating, ever flexible definition of “racist.” What an amazing word: it’s there anything it can’t do? It’s like duct tape or Silly Putty! A black singer speaking about how skin-color is irrelevant can be racist!

Amazing.

Incompetent Headline Of The Week: “Report: Joe Biden Realized His Mistake With Kamala Harris Very Early On” (Red State)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m sorry, but I can’t resist.

What’s “early” is a case like this? Anyone who watched and listened to and watched Harris during the Democratic Presidential debates could tell in an instant that she was a dolt, and obviously unqualified to run for President or be one, which means she has no business running for or being Vice-President either. The headline is the equivalent of “Early on as he attempted to shave using his power mower, he realized his mistake.”

What are we supposed to conclude from that statement? Admiration for Joe that he was so quick to pick up on what was wrong with his entirely race and gender-based pick for a running mate? That’s not quick. Someone who is competent, has good judgment and knows which end of the trumpet to blow on doesn’t make an epic mistake like picking Harris to be a heartbeat from the Oval Office.

I saw this story and couldn’t restrain myself.

Carry on…

Tales Of The Great Stupid: The Tweet Speaks For Itself

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Woods bills herself as a film and TV critic, and she is complaining about “cultural appropriation” by whites regarding a nonexistent, science fiction culture. Are the Avatar people (whatever they’re called: I don’t care) considered “of color” on their planet? Has “The Great Stupid” spread that far?

Woods made this head-exploding, antiwhite statement, was fabulously mocked for it, and because she didn’t have the wit or rhetorical skills to debate her critics on the merits of her assertion (there are none), she shut down comments on her tweet.

And I thought “The Simpsons” insisting that Dr. Hibbard, a black cartoon character, had to be voiced by an “actor of color” was bonkers. This is the equivalent of insisting that Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer needs to be voiced by a BIPOC actor in the old Rankin-Bass cartoon because deer are brown.

People like Kathia Woods—you know, morons—in sufficient volume and given a critical level of exposure, will eventually render the human race too dumb to survive, like the dodo.

Institutional Ethics Dunce: The U.S. Congress

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The House of Representatives passed legislation last week ordering the Capitol’s bust of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court Chief Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, to Hell, or someplace. It will be replaced by a new bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first black judge to serve on Court.

Of course it will. This naked political grandstanding wouldn’t be complete without installing a black judge’s image as a rebuke to the evil white judge. The legislation now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed, probably followed by a victory jig.

The pandering legislation says that Taney’s bust is “unsuitable for the honor of display to the many visitors to the Capitol.” It currently sits at the entrance of the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860. Taney led the court from 1836 to 1864.

“While the removal of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s bust from the Capitol does not relieve the Congress of the historical wrongs it committed to protect the institution of slavery, it expresses Congress’s recognition of one of the most notorious wrongs to have ever taken place in one of its rooms, that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision,” the legislation says. I wonder how many of the members who voted for the legislation know anything about Taney or have ever engaged in an objective reading of his opinion. My guess: not many. Maybe none.

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