U.S. Society

On “The Crown,” National Anthems, Tradition, And That Guy Making A Sex Video In The Capitol

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Perhaps I am the only one who immediately thought of Aidan Maese-Czeropki when I read this Brit’s complaints about “God Save the King,” but that’s the way my mind works.

Apparently the University of Bristol has dropped the UK national anthem from its graduation ceremony, and that decision has roiled the traditionalists in Britain. “University bosses have been accused of hating British culture and pandering to wokes,” one paper reported. The deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, posted on X: “If Bristol University are too ashamed of their British heritage, presumably they no longer want to be subsidised by [the] British taxpayer?” Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said that “universities should stand up for our British values and stop giving in to woke ideology.” But Guardian lifestyle columnist Tim Dowling took the predictable progressive line: all that traditional stuff is behind the times, stuffy and boring. “God Save the King is not a good song. It plods. It goes nowhere,” he writes. “The first three lines end with the same word, as if no one could be bothered to come up with a rhyme for king. Obviously this made things easy the first time they had to change it to queen, but there’s no historical evidence that anyone was thinking that far ahead.”

Wouldn’t it be great if the British national anthem were something flashy and fun like “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen? (That’s my suggestion, not Tim’s.) No, it wouldn’t be great; Dowling doesn’t get it, just as so many people don’t get it, just as Aiden the Sex Machine doesn’t get it, just as those who complain about our national anthem don’t get it.

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Great, Something Else To Worry About…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On CNN Business, we learn…

Intercity bus lines like Greyhound, Trailways and Megabus, an overlooked but essential part of America’s transportation system, carry twice the number of people who take Amtrak every year. But the whole network faces a growing crisis: Greyhound and other private companies’ bus terminals are rapidly closing around the country.

Houston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Tampa, Louisville, Charlottesville, Portland, Oregon, and other downtown bus depots have shuttered in recent years. Bus terminals in major hubs like Chicago and Dallas are also set to close. Greyhound and other companies have relocated their stops far away from city centers, which are often inaccessible by public transit, switched to curbside service or eliminated routes altogether.

These stations built decades ago are shuttering because of high operating costs, government underfunding and, surprisingly, the entrance of an investment firm buying up Greyhound’s real estate for lucrative resale.

Wait, what was that last part?

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Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Geena is right.

A survey conducted this week by Harvard-Harris polling found that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe the answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” The stark contrast between our rising generation and the rest of the American population is truly disturbing. As you can see..

…outside of the demographic that has been indoctrinated into an anti-American, victim-obsessed, extreme progressive ideology by exposure to our education system and social media, the U.S. public is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and understands that Hamas represents terrorism and genocide. “These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said, reacting to the poll. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”

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2023 Asshole Of The Year Runner-Up: Aidan Maese-Czeropki, And 2023 “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Headline Of The Year: NBC News

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Yes, it’s that time of year when Ethics Alarms will be announcing as many Best of… and Worst of…ethics awards as I get around to posting. A bit of background, in case you rely on the New York Times for your Washington. D.C. news (the Times up to now has ignored the embarrassing—to Democrats–saga completely):

The American Spectator was the first to reveal that a staffer for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md) regularly posted images and videos on Twitter (“X”) of himself having sex with a male partner. One such video was particularly provocative: the sex show was captured in a conference room in the Hart Senate Office Building, where his boss the Senator’s office is located. The star is shown naked except for a jock strap, on on all fours, facing away from the camera, with a cartoon of the Capitol Dome covering his posterior. The Daily Caller then posted the video, leading the Capitol police to investigate (Prof. Turley explains that the video may be evidence of a crime).

It wasn’t exactly a case requiring Columbo, since the staffer had made the video publicly available. He was identified as Cardin aide Aidan Maese-Czeropski, 24, and was quickly fired in a terse, “we don’t want to talk about it” statement from Cardin’s office.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This supercut of Democrats and their mainstream media minions (well, and Liz Cheney, of course) flogging Big Lie #3 ( “Trump Is A Fascist/Hitler/Dictator/Monster”) is a really funny, or, if you are a member of the Democratic Party, sad. If someone you know thinks it’s genuinely scary, however, try to get them some help.

Behold…

Interesting! FireFox, my browser, is blocking this video from posting, though embed codes just like it have always worked. I’m sorry, you’ll just have to go here to see what this post is about:

https://news.grabien.com/story-media-warn-if-trump-s-re-elected-every-bad-thing-they-can-possibly-ima

Incidentally, that once responsible, respected Presidential historian who keeps showing up is Michael Beschloss, whose EA dossier is here.

Ethics List Update, 12/15/23

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is stressful and irritating to have so many ethics stories dancing in my head like sugarplums, so I’m going to indulge myself in a quick exercise to get them out there and make room for the incoming stampede….

1. Yes, Michelle Goldberg really is this clueless. The scary part is that there are so many like her. The most irritating Times opinion writer—-not the worst, now, there are worse than her, like Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman and the inimitable Charles Blow, but she’s the one who irritates me the most—put her name under an op-ed titled, “What’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?” Gee, what a mystery! What could it be? “Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future,” she decides. What are those “excellent policy ideas”? Goldberg points to dismantling “capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy [and] the nuclear family” and concludes that doing these marvelous things are just too darn hard for the faint-hearted.

It’s easier to be conservative, see: “The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times.”

Yeah, that must be it, Michelle.

It couldn’t possibly be that after assessing the state of the nation since 2008 and watching the collapse of the education system, rot in the cities, a rise in racial preferences, rampant inflation and an out-of-control national debt, chaos at the border, riots across the country launched by a Marxist scam group, the explosion of state-driven censorship efforts in the name of fighting “misinformation,” the transformation of journalism into a Leftist propaganda network, the return of anti-Semitism, the gradual destruction of women’s sports by trans-madness, and—there is a lot more—cutting to the chase, this…

…that some progressives have done what rational adults do when they find that something they really wanted to work doesn’t: they try something else.

Nah. It couldn’t be that...

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun: An Insider Confirms The Ethics Rot At The New York Times And In American Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The bad news is that the platform for this powerful exposé is The Economist, which most Americans don’t read. Another problem is that the essay by former Times opinion editor James Bennet is prohibitively long: over 17,000 words. Nonetheless, everyone should read it, especially those who still hold on to the myth that “advocacy journalism” is journalism, that’s it’s healthy for our democracy, or that the New York Times can be trusted to convey facts rather than propaganda.

The piece is titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” and the author begins by focusing on the Senator Tom Cotton op-ed piece that he was forced to take down and that cost him his job. It is understandable that Bennet feels that way, but the fact that he would point to that episode and not many others that occurred before it shows his own blindness and bias. Apparently the Times announcing in late 2016 that it would henceforth frame the news to ensure that Hillary Clinton, or pushing the Hillary-seeded Russian collusion myth for two years didn’t qualify as signature significance of a corrupted paper, but pulling a conservative U.S. Senator’s op-ed because the Times staff disagreed with it does. Well, that one cost Benett his job, after all.

Ironically, Bennet’s biases enhance his credibility: in many ways he’s a classic Democratic, Trump-hating progressive, and yet he’s still blowing a very loud whistle on his colleagues. Is he a “disgruntled ex-employee”? Sure he is; Bennet is bitter and disillusioned, and maybe that’s why he felt it necessary to write such an exhaustive piece. Nonetheless, his argument is persuasive. If the Times was the newspaper it claims to be (and that Bennet shows it is not), it would have published his essay itself.

The article is here, and to encourage you to read it, I’ll point out some representative passages:

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Worst-Timed Fundraising Appeal Of The Decade…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations.

Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.

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Some semi-alert Harvard fundraiser decided to tweak this letter to emphasize supporting students rather than the institution itself. I rule that deceitful, but it’s such an obvious and pathetic ploy that the chances of it fooling anyone with an IQ above 80—most, though not all, Harvard alums probably can top 100— are slim.

This year-end fundraising appeal arrives in my mailbox the same week that the school’s leadership unanimously supported a president who embarrassed herself, the school and its alumni in a public forum. It comes after Harvard gave tacit approval to students threatening the welfare and educational opportunities of Jewish students by refusing to take any action against other students extolling terrorism targeting Jews, and espousing intafada and genocide. While a lesser Ivy League institution, UPenn, correctly dismissed its president who made almost exactly the same tone-deaf and cowardly statements before Congress that Harvard’s Claudine Gay did, saying that whether calls for the death of Jews constitutes harassment and a violation of the school’s conduct code depends on their “context,” Harvard’s governing body submitted an absurd-on-its-face endorsement of Gay, stating “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

Yes, the most prestigious university in the U.S., among all its scholars and graduates, can’t find a better leader than one unable to explain the limits of free speech on campus, or do better under questioning than to repeat verbatim the canned answers provided by lawyers as if she were reciting “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”

Who believes that? What informed graduate not yet in the throes of senility doesn’t comprehend that the vote of confidence means, “We chose this woman because she was black and a DEI hun, and not having black alums and woke faculty rebel is more important to us than showing that we reject anti-Semitism and care sufficiently about maintaining Harvard’s reputation. “

If there was doubt that President Gay could do anything short of running naked with a bloody machete through Harvard Square and keep her job, she was also permitted to pilot “Back to the Future’s” Delorean and remove plagiarized sections of her nearly 30 year-old PhD dissertation, though it was in its illicit form when the document won her the doctorate. Although the Harvard Crimson has supported Gay (on the theory that Harvard should never do anything demanded by evil, racist Republicans) it also concluded in an investigation…

The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations.

Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.

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‘Fund Raising Appeals I Stopped Reading After Two Paragraphs’ Dept.: No, ProPublica, I’m Not Giving Money To Your Brand Of “Independent Journalism”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I subscribe to ProPublica because the group often does valuable investigative reporting, just as I subscribed to Glenn Greenwald this year even after he took my substack subscription money and then produced nothing for months because he was sick or something. (Not again, Glenn, Sorry.) However, I will not give money to organizations who lie to me. This is how the year-end appeal I just received from ProPublica begins:

It’s no secret that American democracy is in peril. The 2020 elections were unlike anything our country has seen before — election deniers, an insurrection and bad actors sowing disinformation shed a harsh light on the fragile state of our democracy. As a ProPublica reader, I know you’ve been aware of these growing threats for some time now.

ProPublica is no bystander when it comes to ensuring a transparent government, regardless of who is in power. As a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom, we believe that investigative journalism is one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure a healthy democracy…

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See, This Is GOOD Discrimination. Got It?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Honestly, how do these people look at themselves in the mirror without retching? Isn’t there some level of toxic hypocrisy that is physically disabling, or does one build up resistance over time?

An aide to Boston’s Asian-American mayor Michelle Wu was supposed to send that invitation for the Mayor’s “Electeds of Color Holiday Party” (Catchy name!) to, you know, only elected officials who aren’t white because, after all, who wants them at a party? Oopsie! Poor Denise DosSantos, soon to be ringing a bell by a red pot on a corner, accidentally sent the invitations for the secret racist and exclusive event to everyone. This prompted criticism, and this resulting “apology” from the aide: “I wanted to apologize for my previous email regarding a Holiday Party for tomorrow. I did send that to everyone by accident, and I apologize if my email may have offended or came across as so. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.”

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