U.S. Society

Has-Been Director Panders to the Trump-Deranged, Trump Responds Like The Silly Jerk He Is, and the Media Pretends This Is Newsworthy: Make It Stop!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I shouldn’t even be writing about this completely silly and worthless story. It exemplifies, however, the cesspool that we are going to be dunked in for all of the next year. Here’s how it goes:

ACT I

The mainstream news media decided to exploit the Christmas season as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump, since that is considered the patriotic duty of anyone who has ever had contact with him, and because he is a threat to democracy. So, as Columbus’s twin “Home Alone” movies were au courrant once again, Rolling Stone and some other enterprising Trump-bashers dredged up a three-year old Business Insider interview in which has-been movie director Chris Columbus, apparently looking to curry favor with the monolithic woke Hollywood community, revealed that Trump had “bullied” his way into the cameo he performed during “Home Alone 2.”

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The Campus Race-Baiters’ Favorite Things

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

College Fix, which has been the source of several EA posts this year, has provided an amusing (or depressing) compendium of 71 people, places and things that “were declared racist or in need of ‘anti-racist’ action” by academics or on college campuses. The list is, shall we say, provocative and revealing. Here are 25 of my favorites and their links; Ethics Alarms covered some of them:

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 5: The Speed Hump Weenies

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

For this continuing series examining the biases that make me stupid (or not), on the one month anniversary of the last installment, I want to take up the matter of drivers who slow to a crawl or even stop their vehicles entirely when they encounter a “speed hump” in the road.

This past week two such drivers almost caused my car to run into them. In recent years Northern Virginia has gone speed hump mad, putting the things virtually everywhere that isn’t a highway or a main thoroughfare. I don’t mind them, however, nearly as much as I mind the way some drivers seem to regard them as explosive devices. You can safely drive over a speed hump at a moderate velocity; your transmission or axles aren’t going to fall off if your car doesn’t slow down into single digits.

I confess: I regard drivers who freak out at speed humps as emblematic of creeping weenie-ism in the nation. I imagine such drivers as still wearing masks alone in their cars, spending nights shivering in terror over the certain doom that the world faces if we don’t start living like prehistoric cave dwellers, fearing to allow their kids to walk unaccompanied a few blocks home from school, and who want the U.S. to minimize the deployment of its military to tasks involving expanding LGBTQ rights and advancing the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion. I envision them applauding when some anti-gun fanatic shouts that it would be worth eliminating the Second Amendment “if it saved one life” and crippling the First so no feelings are ever hurt by unwelcome opinions.

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From The “It Isn’t What It Is” Files: The New Hampshire Voting Rights Lawsuit

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A New Hampshire law protecting the integrity of elections is being challenged in court by Democrats and the Biden administration as a threat to voting rights. The reality is that the law is a threat to Democratic tactics used to win elections illicitly. The fact that the lawsuit exists is more evidence that speculation about the legitimacy of the 2020 election is far from “baseless.”

Senate Bill 418, signed into law by NH. GOP Governor Chris Sununu last year, requires those who register to vote on Election Day without photo ID to send in verifying documentation to the New Hampshire Secretary of State. Such voters submit an “affidavit ballot” on Election Day, which will be excluded from the final vote count unless the citizen complies with an identity-verification process within seven days of the election. If such a voter misses the seven-day deadline, his or her vote will not be counted under the law, and the Secretary of State would be required to turn over the voter’s name to the state attorney general’s office for possible criminal investigation.

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Last Minute Christmas Eve Ethics Shopping, 12/24/2023

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Dean Martin’s renditions of popular Christmas songs like the one above, along with “Let It Snow,” “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (among others) just make me smile. Dean wasn’t the right singer for the carols, but I’m convinced his recordings and his memory will endure because of the innate sense of fun and irreverence he brought to the lighter ballads. Who fills that niche today? I can’t think of anyone.

Since I mentioned Frank Loesser’s controversial contribution to the popular holiday canon, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” allow me to digress. It seems like the withering away of #MeToo as a result of the revealed hypocrisy of the movement social justice warrior advocates has restored this unfairly maligned song (which won an Academy Award!) to respectability. If so good, and I hope John Legend’s certifiably awful politically correct version (with lines like “It’s your body and your choice!”) is mocked mercilessly forever more. Yesterday, I heard one of the gay male hosts on the Sirius Broadway channel (all the men on that channel appear to be trying to sound as gay as possible) talking about the song, and saying that the context of the lyrics are everything. Then he said that the version he was going to play (from “Glee’) was a perfect example of how the song, in the right context, could be sweet and inoffensive. It was sung by two gay men, not that thee’s anything wrong with that, but as far as I could determine, it was no different in “context” from any version in which a male is desperately trying to talk a woman into a winter sleepover.

1. Speaking of LRTBQ+ matters, this would seem to be a superfluous headline: “Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity.” Gee, ya think? I wonder if feminists will ever have the integrity to support Ethics Heroes like Riley Gaines, the collegiate swimmer who has become a vocal advocate for keeping trans-males out of women’s sports. I didn’t get around to highlighting her testimony in Congress, in which another incompetent member, Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Summer Lee, accused Gaines of engaging in “transphobic bigotry.” Gaines, who is gutsy and outspoken, returned fire by calling Lee a misogynist, goading Lee into making an ass of herself when she stopped the testimony to demand that Gaines’ insult be stricken from the record. (Statements that are unwelcome to Democrats and progressives are “hate speech,” you see.)

2. Regarding the previous post: my Harvard alumna sister opined that beleaguered president Gay will be able to hold on for enough time that Harvard can credibly claim her withdrawal for “personal reasons” isn’t the result of pressure from the Evil Right. I agreed with her at the time, but now I’m not so sure. The mockery of the school is wide ranging, sharp and effective…

..and the ridicule of Gay herself is apparently irresistible, as with this parody letter of resignation by the plagiarizing scholar:

[Source: Power Line]

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Harvard’s Claudine Gay Scandal Just Keeps Getting Better, Though I Guess We Shouldn’t Be Surprised That An Unethical University Uses Unethical Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s really a shame that I have to post this today, when the Ethics Alarms traffic consists largely of metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing down the empty dusty streets. However, we know most of the news media is trying to bury the series of revelations that prove that the leader of higher education rot hired an unqualified president because she was black, female, and a DEI agent, and that because she is black and female, Harvard is employing lies, excuses and rationalizations to avoid dumping her when a white male president who had been revealed as a plagiarist in scholarship and a blathering fool before Congress would have been fired in a flash.

I know this blog is a small, tinny voice in the vast wilderness, but it’s something.

Above you see excerpts from a 15 page letter sent to the New York Post threatening to sue on Harvard’s behalf if the paper continued to report the discovery by conservative reporter Christopher Rufo and others that Gay had plagiarized the works of other scholars by using their words and ideas as her own without attribution in dozens of instances, including her Harvard dissertation. The Post points out that Harvard, through its attorneys at Clare Locke, stated that there was no plagiarism and that the allegations were false before Harvard had bothered to investigate the claims. This also means that Gay approved of the letter, which she knew was itself “demonstrably false”:

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Stop Making Me Defend Eric Adams!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

PIX11’s Dan Mannarino interviewed New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week and at the end asked a Barbara Walters-ish question. “Mr. Mayor, we’ve come to the end of what was a very eventful 2023. So, when you look at the totality of the year, if you had to describe it in one word, what would that word be? And tell me why.”

Adams answered, “’New York.’ This is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center, to a person who’s celebrating a new business being open. This is a very, very complicated city. And that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”

Republicans, conservatives, the social media mobs and even some on the Left “pounced.” “Eric Adams gives the worst answer any politician has ever given to a softball question,” MSNBC contributor (and you know what THAT means) Tim Miller tweeted. echoing the reactions of many Adams critics. (Adams is also being mocked this week for joking that he will occasionally “look at myself, and I give myself the finger.”)

Refreshing as it is to see a Democrat getting the Donald Trump treatment for an off-hand remark that critics deliberately interpret as negatively impossible, Adams doesn’t deserve the brickbats for the 9/11 gaffe. It’s obvious what he meant, isn’t it? Searching for contrasting extremes that illustrate what an exciting and unpredictable place his city is, his mind jumped to the most shocking of all Big Apple events, putting him in instant peril. It reminded me of a scene in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” when the baseball team’s manager (played by one of my favorite character actors, Vincent Gardenia) is trying to give an inspirational speech to his players, who have just learned that their back-up catcher (Robert DeNiro) is dying. He’s determined not to mention that metaphorical elephant in the locker room, but the first words out of the manager’s mouth are “When I die..” Gardenia’s eyes roll in disgust with himself as soon as he hears what he said—the perfect expression of someone thinking, “I can’t believe that I did that!” But it’s like trying not to think of a hippopotamus.

Anyone who speaks often in public and spontaneously is going to have these moments. I speak unscripted for a living, and I think I’m good at it, but now and then the words I hear coming out of my mouth are horrifying. Talk show hosts, reporters, politicians, stand-up comics, teachers—this is an occupational hazard. Most of the social media-dwellers attacking Adams have never given a pubic speech or an unscripted public statement in their lives.

What Adams was trying to say was that his single word description of 2023 from his perspective was “New York” (that’s two words, by the way) because you never know what’s going to happen, and have to be ready for anything. Sure, he would have been safer breaking into a verse of the theme from “New York, New York,” but he didn’t, and once he committed to the “good vs bad” approach, he was stuck. (If he had chosen the Jets losing their starting quarterback on the first play of the season instead of 9/11, he would have been attacked by Jets fans.)

Mayor Adams has had a rocky year to be sure, but as failing Democratic big city mayors go, he’s been lapped in incompetence by the mayors of D.C., Chicago and Boston, among others. He deserves a break.

Christmas Countdown Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Presumably you know what to do by now…

About the song: apparently Harry Belafonte never performed this classic for TV; if he did, no one’s put it on YouTube. Every year, I admire his rendition of “Mary’s Boy Child” more. The singer introduced the song into the popular Christmas canon in 1956, after hearing it sung by a choir. It has been covered many, many times by singers ranging from Andy Williams to Charlotte Church, but is one of the very few Christmas songs without an interpretation by Bing Crosby.

Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”

Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:

***

Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.

Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?

Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.

  • You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
  • You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
  • Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
  • If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
  • Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.

There are a couple obvious options.

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Hump Day Ethics Bumps, 12/20/23

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You may have noticed that there has not been the same frequency of Christmas-related posts on EA this year. I’m sorry; it’s the most ethical time of year, but even hearing a Christmas carol depresses me right now, and I need to be in top form because challenges and crises are accumulating on all fronts, professional, familial, financial and personal. No tree, no decorations, no parties or festive social events…no fun. Sometimes life forces tough choices, and though this is one I never imagined I would have to make, here it is. It’s time to be a responsible adult. I hate being a responsible adult…

1. The City Journal (an excellent site) on the Harvard president’s scandal:

“…The hypocrisies are mounting at Harvard. The school’s academically undistinguished, DEI-happy, and arguably malevolent new president has been unmasked as a repeat plagiarist by Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, Isabel Vincent and her colleagues at the New York Post, and Phillip W. Magness. After apologizing for her words before Congress with the admission, “Words matter,” President Gay, along with the rest of the Harvard machine, went straight back to disregarding basic codes of conduct and acting as though words didn’t matter. No more legalese for this president or for the 11 other members of the Harvard Corporation: just a behind-the-scenes legal threat of defamation against the Post, which was poised already in late October to break the story.

Unlike the conflict in the Middle East, which even I—an ardent supporter of Israel—admit is complicated, academic dishonesty is rarely complicated. In most cases, including Gay’s, there is no middle ground: either you are a plagiarist or you aren’t.

Gay is guilty of plagiarism by the code of conduct of any modern academic organization, certainly including Harvard and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she went to school and was a trustee until this past June.

Gay’s record of dishonesty is extensive. At last count, incontrovertible examples of plagiarism have been uncovered in seven publications spanning 14 years, including her Harvard dissertation. Any one of even her less egregious infractions—shorter phrases lifted from cited works without quotation marks—would land a Harvard student in hot water. Any one of her larger infractions—paragraphs lifted from works not cited at all—would almost certainly result in suspension. And any student who displayed this full range of behavior would be expelled.

Everyone knows this. The members of the Harvard Corporation know this. The five living former presidents of Harvard who “offer[ed their] strong support” know this. Those scholars from whom she plagiarized but who inexplicably deny that she did so, or say that they don’t care, know this.…Gay herself knows this, surely, despite saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.”

As long as Gay remains president—indeed, as long as she remains a member of the faculty—Harvard is in greater trouble than its higher-ups appear to understand.

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