U.S. Society

Pre-Halloween Ethics Tricks And Treats, 10/29/23

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Things are piling up again on the metaphorical Ethics Alarms runway, so let’s get into it, shall we?

1. Speaking of runways, will you feel better about your family dying in an airplane crash if you know a DEI hire in the control tower was at fault? Sure you will! The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is placing a more diverse diverse workforce over the most qualified workforce even as the air traffic control system has been showing alarming holes, problems and failures including staffing shortages, mistakes, technological challenges and close call incidents. The Mountain States Legal Foundation sued on behalf of plaintiff Andrew Brigida and over 2,000 other air traffic controller applicants who had test scores invalidated as part of President Barack Obama’s 2015 FAA diversity policy—what matters is how many minorities an agency has, you see, not how well it does its job. The lawsuit became class-action certified in 2022, and is headed to litigation. “Obviously we are talking about a line of work where merit and the need for skill are a matter of life and death,” Mountain States Legal Foundation General Counsel William Trachman. “No one cares about the race of the air traffic controller guiding in their flight.”

Wanna bet?

2. The ethics foul buried in the misleadingly-titled essay, “Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night”: the news media, politicians and educators are trying to terrify children and gullible adults into accepting extreme progressive and Marxist policies. Causing clinical anxiety is just collateral damage to the activists. We’ve seen this before in the ’50s through the 80’s, when the “ban the bomb,” unilateral disarmament, “Better Red than Dead” and “Imagine” crowd was convincing children that they were going to die in order to advance the cause of pacifism.

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Serious Question: Has Vice-President Harris Not Read The Bill of Rights, Or Does She Just Want The Government To Ignore It?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This would be an “Incompetent Elected Official” post, except a) we already know Kamala Harris is incompetent, and b) her penchant for talking nonsense, gibberish or idiocy long ago reached Julie Principle proportions. But other Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, have appealed to ignorance, emotion and hysteria by doing what Harris did yesterday as part of the wholly predictable Democratic Party/progressive/mainstream media attack on gun rights after a mass shooting tragedy. This one, as you probably know already, was in Maine, and unusually deadly, so the gun-grabbing fanatics and the “Do something!” crazies were really licking their chops.

On stage with Australia’s Prime Minister at an event yesterday, Harris blathered, “Gun violence has terrorized and traumatized so many of our communities in this country. And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way, as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.”

As usual, Harris required a translator. It doesn’t have to be “this way” in Australia? Have our communities been terrified there? How has Australia demonstrated what is possible or desirable in the United States? It hasn’t, of course: it hasn’t even demonstrated that it is possible to eliminate mass shootings in Australia, where the National Firearms Agreement of 1996 made semiautomatic weapons and shotguns illegal and mandated the confiscation of close to 650,000 firearms.  The NFA requires Australians to wait 28 days before they purchase a gun to allow extensive background checks. Applicants must obtain a license and a permit, be over 18 years old, provide documentation that the weapon will be stored securely and complete firearms safety training. They must also provide a “justifiable reason” for owning the gun, and self-defense doesn’t qualify. A requirement less stringent than this was just struck down as unconstitutional in New York.

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So: When Does The Supreme Court Get Its Apology From The Dobbs Hysterics?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Statistics based on research by the Guttmacher Institute seem to indicate that legal abortions increased slightly in the United States in the first six months of 2023 compared with 2020. The assumption is that states with more permissive abortion laws absorbed patients traveling from states with more restrictive laws, and access to abortion pills increased.

Thus the feminist and progressive narrative that Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year created a “Handmaiden’s Tale” hellscape where women were compelled to give birth to children they did not want was, as those inclined to be rational realized, inflammatory propaganda designed to support unhinged attacks on the six Justices in the Dobbs majority. The lie also proved to be a useful Democratic Party election weapon.

As Justice Alito stated clearly in his opinion, the ruling over-turning Roe v. Wade was not a pro- or anti-abortion ruling, but a necessary decision to uphold core Constitutional principles while striking down a badly reasoned precedent. The Constitution does not include a right to abortion, and the Founders would have been horrified at the very thought. Nor is abortion a proper matter for a national law, other than a Constitutional amendment.

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Friday Open Forum! Find Me Some Good News, Please…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

My sister traditionally ends our phone conversation by suddenly blurting out—lately the impetus has been the prospect of a Presidential contest between Biden and Trump—“Everything’s going to Hell!” and hanging up. I am constitutionally disinclined to be that pessimistic (unlike some who comment here of late), but boy, I sure could use some good news beyond the ACLU deigning to protest a judge muzzling a major political candidate that her pals disapprove of.

Here’s my latest Ethics Alarms worry: increasingly, my story sources are demanding paywall fees. Most of the formerly free bloggers have moved to substack and subscription newsletters. The New York Post, CBS, NBC and others hit me with a block asking for ad-blockers to be disabled, then don’t remove the block until I’ve disabled the ad-blocker and refreshed three times or more. CNN has joined the group that make it difficult to copy text. Now The Blaze is going full subscription. I pay for the digital versions of the Washington Post and New York Times, but as we all know by now (I hope), they can’t be trusted.

I can only be Scarlet O’Hara for so long, but I guess I’ll worry about that tomorrow…

Enough bitching from me: Over to you, Clarence…

The Rest Of The Story, Or At Least Some Of It: Rep. Bowman Pleads Guilty

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In the midst of more pressing matters like the House not being able to elect a Speaker, the Hamas attack and so many Democrats revealing their dark anti-Semitic side, it is understandable that “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman’s law-breaking to disrupt a House vote on the budget and his subsequent ridiculous lies to minimize his responsibility might have been pushed to the back of our brains. (You can review this clown show here, in the first seven posts listed). But justice has, sort of, prevailed.

Bowman was booked, fingerprinted, photographed and processed by the U.S. Capitol Police today, after D.C. prosecutors charged the Democrat with setting off a false fire alarm in the Cannon Office Building adjacent to the Capitol, a misdemeanor.

Bowman has agreed to plead guilty to the single false fire alarm charge. He will pay the maximum fine of $1,000, and all charges will be dropped in three months provided that Bowman provides a formal apology to the Capitol Police along with the fine. The New York Times says this is the standard policy with such charges.

“I’m thankful for the quick resolution from the District of Columbia attorney general’s office on this issue,” Bowman said in a statement yesterday responding to the charge. “I am responsible for activating a fire alarm, I will be paying the fine issued and look forward to these charges being ultimately dropped.” His statement did not address the fact that by pleading guilty, he is admitting that his act was intentional, despite saying repeatedly at the time that he thought the obvious fire alarm apparatus would open the doors of the building, which are always locked on weekends, and that included signs clearly explaining the situation. But Bowman is still lying: in his statement he said that he was “grateful” that the Capitol Police general counsel’s office “agreed I did not obstruct nor intend to obstruct any House vote or proceedings.” There was no such statement by authorities indicating that. Obstructing House business is a felony, and no determination has been made public about whether charges will be brought for that. Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, a spokesman for the D.C. attorney general’s office which announced the charges, said, “Congressman Bowman was treated like anyone else who violates the law in the District of Columbia,” Mr. Shoglow-Rubenstein said in a statement. “Based on the evidence presented by Capitol Police, we charged the only crime that we have jurisdiction to prosecute.”

The D.C. attorney general’s office—Full disclosure: I have done a yearly ethics training for the office for more than a decade—does not handle obstruction charges.

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Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: The Left’s Mask Falls Away…Part 2: Ugly Faces [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It serves me right: in planning a second part on this topic, I never suspected that the Left’s embrace of anti-Semitism, fact-free excuses for Hamas, and rationalizations against Israel defending itself would metastasize the way it has. I can’t possibly cover all the significant examples now; there are too many. But I’ll do the best I can with some recent low-lights…

  • This is what indoctrination in woke victim mentality has wrought: a Harvard Harris Poll shows that a slight majority of 18-24-year-olds, just under half 25-34-year-olds, believe that Hamas’s terror attack is justified. 51% of the rising generation told the pollsters that the the October 7 attacks on civilians, children, babies and hostages “can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.”
  • Say what you will about Trump (or Nikki Haley), we can be confident of how he would have reacted to this: United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres,  said that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” as he referenced “56 years of suffocating occupation” for the Palestinian people. Israel has demanded his removal. New York Sun got it right, saying,

    “The speech today by the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, blaming Israel for the attack on it by Hamas is one of the most shocking moments in the history of the world body. It absolutely infuriated Israel, its diplomats, and the Jewish community world wide. It is hard to imagine that the UN, already a deeply corrupted institution obsessed with Israel, can continue with business as usual. We grasp that there was a certain diplomatic subtlety to the way Mr. Guterres couched his libel — a blood libel, at that.  There is no justification for the October 7 attack by Hamas, he said, and then justified it by claiming it “did not happen in a vacuum.” As our Benny Avni reports, he enumerated hardships inflicted on Palestinian Arabs. His remarks smacked of attempts by enemies of the Jews to suggest that the Jews deserved the Holocaust.”

The US should withhold any payments or funding for the United Nations until he resigns or is replaced. Continue reading →

Case Study:”When Ethics Fail, The Law Steps In”— The 2023 Major League Baseball Season

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

After the Arizona Diamondbacks win tonight, everything but the World Series will has been settled in the 2023 MLB season. (The Texas Rangers had already defeated the cheatin’ Houston Astros for the American League pennant, thus proving that the Baseball Gods read Ethics Alarms.) The season will be most noted in history notable for the fact that several game-changing new rules were introduced, all designed to cut down on dead time and speed up the games, which had gradually stretched out to an average of more than three hours.

MLB had tinkered around the edges of the rules in recent years in an effort to fix the dragging games problem. It (finally) banned one-batter mid-inning pitching changes, a curse visited on baseball by a combination of statistics-obsessed managers and the rise of left-handed pitching specialists, by requiring relief pitchers to face a minimum of three batters. It also made intentional walks automatic, with batters being sent to first with pitchers actually having to throw four balls outside the strike zone (that one shaved about 3 seconds off the average game time, maybe).

These new rules had little measurable effect, however, so for 2023, baseball dropped The Big One by instituting a pitch clock that limited the time pitchers had to throw a pitch to 15 seconds with the bases empty and 20 seconds with runners on base. Rules were attached limiting the number of time-outs a batter could call during his at-bats to one and requiring batters to step up to the plate when a pitcher was ready to throw the ball, thus ending psychological stalling tactics. Baseball had always taken pride in the fact that it was the one major sport without time limits, but that virtue had become a liability as players increasingly abused the privilege. Another rule stopped more tactical abuse: pitchers had begun throwing alleged pick-off throws to first base sometimes for no apparent reason, again, stalling to compose themselves are to unsettle the batter. Starting in 2023, a pitcher got three shots at trying to pick-off a baserunner, and if the third failed, the runner advanced to the next base anyway.

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Housekeeping Note…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Yikes. I just rescued seven comments from spam, a few of which were first-time commenters. That shouldn’t happen, and I’ll pursue it with WordPress. A few were a couple of weeks old. Please, if your comment doesn’t post, email me. I hate to see comments lost. This was a record.

I apologize to all.

Ethics Dunces, Incompetent Elected Officials, And Aspiring Totalitarians: Anti-Free Speech And Free Thought Congressional Republicans; Ethics Hero: Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. The Fox News headline reads, “Democrat blocks Hawley’s resolution to condemn antisemitism on college campuses.” That’s not exactly fair and balanced. The gist of the headline, of course, is to make it sound like Democrats enable anti-Semitism. BAD Fox! BAD. That Democrat is Maryland Senator Chris Van Holland, and he wasn’t blocking a generic Senate resolution condemning anti-Semitism, which like a resolution condemning police brutality, would be virtue-signaling with little significance. This was something else.

Conservative Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri called upon all of his colleagues to give unanimous consent on his resolution condemning Hamas, pledging support of Israel, confirming that nation’s “right to exits” and condemning the pro-Palestinian statements and demonstrations by student groups on college campuses. It is clear, however, that what the resolution was really targeting are students. Hawley’s resolution begins with the usual list of “Whereas’s,” with nine of the thirteen referring directly to student reaction to the October 7 Hamas attack.

“Almost as disturbing as the facts of these terrible attacks themselves is the response of some people in this country. On our college campuses in this country who promptly took to the streets, to the courtyards of these campuses, the airwaves, to broadcast their support for this genocide against the people of Israel,”said Hawley on the floor introducing his resolution. “Students at Ohio State praised the heroic resistance in Gaza. Heroic — it’s now heroic to massacre Jews in cold blood. It’s now heroic to try and carry out a genocide against Jewish people. Calling for the death of Jewish people is not just another opinion. Calling for the genocide, celebrating the genocide of Jewish babies is not just another opinion. Celebrating the assaults on Jewish people in this country is not just another opinion, and the Senate should be clear and stand with moral clarity and say ‘this is wrong.'”

Ringing words, except that the same kind of argument could be raised against students opposing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision or in support of affirmative action. Hawley’s resolution should give pause to anyone under the delusion that only Democrats are hostile to free speech and expression when it doesn’t please them.

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An Ethics Obituary For Mitt Romney

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Guest Post by Steve-O-in NJ.

[This is a comment posted by Steve-O in response to the post, “KABOOM! I Have To Take Back Every Positive Thing I Ever Said About Mitt Romney.” Properly it would be a Comment of the Day, but I decided that in both theme and length it deserved to be a free-standing guest post. I know comments are usually written with less precision than the authors might apply if they knew they were going to be highlighted—I know my comments are—so I did edit Steve’s work a bit, not substantively, and I hope he approves. JM]

I don’t know if this is even worth talking about very much, since Romney is headed toward the door and will exit as an also-ran. In his day, he amassed quite an impressive resume, certainly much more impressive than Barack Obama’s. He did a reasonably good job as governor of Massachusetts. That’s why it strikes me as odd that he did not run an effective presidential campaign, nor did he seem to grasp that campaigning on the national stage in 2012 was very different than campaigning 20, 10, or even 5 years before that.

The other side had one goal, and they stuck relentlessly to it: destroy Mitt Romney, by all means fair or foul. Positive campaigning has been pretty much dead since the days of Bush the Elder. It’s negative campaigning that moves the numbers, and Romney didn’t seem to grasp that. He tried to run a gentlemanly campaign when the other side and the media were prepared to fight as dirty as possible. This country didn’t give a damn about his resume or his plan for fixing the economy, at least not enough. They wanted things to be better, but Mitt just couldn’t make his case.

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