U.S. Society

First Open Forum Of 2023!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Here is as good a place as any to note, since Ethics Alarms is also concerned with leadership as a sub-category to ethics, that Kevin McCarthy’s only ethical course at this point is to withdraw from the Speaker of the House race. It is clear that he cannot lead Republicans in the House, and the compromises and concessions he will need to make to get the support of the 20-plus member faction that opposes him would cripple his leadership as well as his party. Now it’s just selfishness, obstinacy and ego that has him holding on. None of those are ethical reasons to inflict yet another weak GOP Speaker on the nation.

McCarthy’s allies should also recognize this and 1) shut up or 2) move on. One, of course, is Donald Trump who can’t shut up, but who should be completely irrelevant to the Speaker battle. Another is Sean Hannity. It’s depressing that such a dim-wattage Fox News pundit as Hannity has the influence he does, and he proved his Peter Principle creds again in an argument on the air with conservative House member and anti-McCarthy leader Lauren Boebert. Sean apparently thought he had a “gotcha!” by calling Boebert on her statement that McCarthy should just give it up because he didn’t have the votes to win the Speakership. “But he has over 200 votes, and your group has just 20!” Hannity replied. “Shouldn’t you be the ones who give up?”

Uh, it’s like a filibuster, Sean, you dummy. Or a veto. The 20 don’t represent an alternative to McCarthy; they don’t have to elect a candidate to win. Their purpose is to block his ascension to the job, and they have enough votes to do it.

And this guy was advising President Trump…..

Anyway, you talk about what you want. I just needed to get that out. As Jimmy Durante would say, “It showed up on my last X-ray as a safety pin!”

Oh, NOW Football Is Too Violent?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Kurt Streeter, the New York Times’ uber-woke, progressive sports columnist, had the nerve to post a column this week headlined, “We’re All Complicit in the N.F.L.’s Violent Spectacle.” Uh-uh, no sir, not me, baby. I have always found pro football repulsive and barbaric, and for many years have worked here and elsewhere to ensure that the NFL is accountable for crippling and killing its players for profit, which is what it does. A single player for unknown reasons goes into cardiac arrest mid-game this week, and suddenly people are discovering what a sick,  unethical sport professional football is? “My prayer, aside from seeing Hamlin leave that Cincinnati hospital able to live a fruitful, productive life, is that we never watch a single snap of an N.F.L. game the same way again,” Streeter intones. Oh Kurt, you’re so sensitive. You won’t watch it the “same way,” but you’ll keep earning money covering it, won’t you? Continue reading →

Mid-Day Ethics Missives, 1/5/23: Fakes, Ghouls, Creeps, Hacks And Liars

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Finally! I had fallen hopelessly behind in my efforts to compile the various Twitter Files releases in readable form, because, as they used to say, “the hits just keep on coming.” Now Matt Taibbi helpfully has compiled them all on his substack site, here: “Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary.”

I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad about falling down on the job since it isn’t my job, though it is the news media’s. Those disgraceful full-time propagandists have made the disturbing revelations about how Twitter was manipulated into censoring conservatives, Republicans and actual news by Democrats and the FBI the Jumbo of all Jumbos: “Censorship? What censorship?”

Among the revelations this week was that Rep. Adam Schiff hectored Twitter to suspend journalist Paul Sperry. I’d call a House member conspiring with social media to silence a journalist a First Amendment violation, but that’s just me. (As the original reporter of the hunter Biden laptop story, the New York Post is an exception to the “mainstream media” slur. The New York Times—you know, the iconic newspaper in the city—hasn’t mentioned this story at all.)

1. Oops! Sorry we wrecked the economy, our children’s education and social development, the travel industry, the entertainment industry, the restaurant industry, and so on, and so on, but we had to DO something…A new research paper indicates that the pre-vaccination case fatality rate was extremely low in the non-elderly population, meaning that the reaction to the pandemic was hysterical, irresponsible and unsupported by reality. At a global level, the pre-vaccination infection fatality rate may have been as low as 0.03% and 0.07% respectively for 0–59 and 0–69 year old people, respectively, with rates in the U.S. lower still.

The frustrating aspect of this is that there was no practical and politically feasible way for policy makers to resist the panic and hysteria deliberately created by health care professionals and the news media.

2. These are the kind of people our young regards as role models and “influencers.” Here’s actress and ethics dunce Gabriel Union explaining on the “Armchair Expert” podcast why she was “entitled” to cheat on Chris Howard during their “dysfunctional” marriage:

“I was paying all the bills, I was working my ass off and I felt like that’s what comes [with it]…Like my dad before me, whoever has the most gets to do whatever the hell they want, is what I thought.”

Nice explication of “The King’s Pass,” there, Gabriel! Continue reading →

These Are Poisonous Fruit Of Squandered Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A just-released Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that 49% of American adults believe it is likely that Wuhan virus vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths. Twenty-eight percent think it’s “Very Likely” that the side effects of the vaccine have been deadly to many  in contrast with 37% who don’t believe that a significant number of deaths have been caused by vaccine side effects. Fourteen percent are not sure, the usual group that isn’t sure of anything.

You can question the accuracy of this poll or all polls, you can believe that the vaccine skeptics are hysterics, you can believe that these numbers are in large part the result of “misinformation.” However, there is no question that even if they are inaccurate, the numbers show a shocking level of distrust in the pandemic vaccines, and, by extension, vaccines in general as well the health professionals and elected officials who have promoted them. When asked if there are legitimate safety concerns surrounding the shots, or whether doubts have been seeded by conspiracy theorists, 48% said there that concerns are valid. Only 37% indicated that false conspiracy theories were behind the public’s fears.

Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the most widely read conservative blogger, has it exactly right, writing, Continue reading →

Apparently Congress Is Stuck With George Santos [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I’m afraid I implied in an earlier post regarding New York’s pants-on-fire Congressman-elect George Santos that the House could refuse to seat him or force him to resign. That was wrong. His conduct, while unethical, did not breach House ethics rules because he wasn’t a member of Congress when he lied his head off gulling voters into electing him based on his complete misrepresentation of his background and qualifications. It’s a matter of jurisdiction. Why, punishing him would be like impeaching a former President who was no longer in office!

Prof. Turley, a Constitutional scholar, clarified the situation in a column for The Hill. He wrote in part,

The problem is that, for the most part, he is accused of something that is no crime in Congress: lying…More practically, Santos has constitutional defenses to any effort to bar him from taking his seat to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District…. [Promised]investigations appear to be premised on the notion that a member of Congress can be denied a seat due to running on false claims….Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly, a Republican, announced an investigation into “the numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos.” She added that “the residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress. No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”

The fact, however, is that no congressional district anywhere in the country is guaranteed “an honest and accountable representative.”…[Santos] must be seated if he is guilty only of lying about his credentials and background…Many Santos critics cite the fact that the Constitution expressly mandates in Section 5, Article I, that “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own Members.” Those decisions on the outcome of elections have been treated as largely final and non-justiciable. However, this case is not a question over the counting or certification of votes but, rather, over the claims used to gain votes.

Continue reading →

2023 Ethics Warm-Up, 1/2/23: Buckle Up!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well, I’m beginning the new year sick, and it hasn’t even done anything really sickening yet…

1. What does a Harvard grad’s high GPA mean? Nothing! A column in the Harvard Crimson revealed that the average GPA at Harvard is now 3.8 out of 4.0. Data analyst Aden Barton points out that this is up from 3.3 in 1991. “Are we supposed to believe that college students are just that much smarter now than decades ago?,” he asks? No. We should believe that college and higher education have become that much of a scam. Harvard had to abolish the “Dean’s List” because not making it proved you were an idiot: 92% of students were receiving the honor.

2. To be fair, Harvard is still serving as a role model...High schools are working hard to make sure that all of its students are also rated as outstanding. Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools paid almost half a million dollars to Oakland, California’s Performance Fact whose “Equity Imperative” is that all students’ academic performance result in “equal outcomes without exception.” Here’s the PowerPoint presentation for a Fall retreat.

3. If only anybody paid attention to boxing… World Boxing Council president Mauricio Sulaiman announced that the WBC is developing a system in which transgender fighters will compete against opponents who share the same biological sex. “In boxing, a man fighting a woman must never be accepted regardless of gender change. There should be no grey area around this, and we want to go into it with transparency and the correct decisions. Woman to man or man to woman transgender change will never be allowed to fight a different gender by birth,” Sulaiman said. “We are creating a set of rules and structures so that transgender boxing can take place, as they fully deserve to if they want to box. We do not yet know the numbers that there are out there, but we’re opening a universal registration in 2023, so that we can understand the boxers that are out there – and we’ll start from there.”

I’m not exactly sure what the system would be: he sounds a little confused, but who can blame him? At least he’s taken the first step toward sanity, ruling out the myth that a male boxer can become a female boxer by saying it’s so.

Continue reading →

More “Do Something!” Climate Change Hysteria!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The New York Times published a serious opinion piece that argues that one good way to save the planet from climate change is to shrink the human race. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Smaller people leave less of a carbon footprint. Brilliant! Thus, Mara Altman writes,

Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash)….Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked)….When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

You can’t mock people like this enough. They don’t have any practical solutions for preventing what they fear, so instead, in a “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!” frenzy, they propose nonsense and people actually take them seriously, because they are also in a state of media propaganda-induced terror. I ultimately decided that now was an ideal time for Sidney Wang to make his first Ethics Alarms appearance of 2023, but I was sorely tempted to use this (From “Dr. Cyclops”)…

or even this, from a comic fantasy about how women could finally take over the world… Continue reading →

Trump’s Tax Returns And Trump Derangement

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m using the Fredo clip from the Ethics Alarms clip library because I was right in my assessment of the Trump tax return nonsense when it surfaced in 2016. So were a lot of other commentators. I didn’t write all of the conclusions down on Ethics Alarms, but I had plenty of discussions about it with my Trump Deranged friends and others. A summary:

  • Trump was obviously lying in 2016 when he said that there were legal reasons he couldn’t release his tax returns as had become the norm for Presidential candidates, but that he would release them as soon as the issues were resolved. He’s the first business tycoon to run for President, and he knew that the returns would show exactly the kind of legal tax avoidance that the returns of every other wealthy, risk0taking, entrepreneurial individual shows. This would arm Democrats and others to make the usual “rich people are crooked and evil” attacks, as is their wont, and he judged, probably correctly, that his chances of being elected were better if he kept the returns private, as he had every right to do. He could have and should have done this and been honest about the reason.
  • Everyone should have known not going to be anything illegal in the returns, because the IRS accepted them. Sure enough, when they were released this week, there wasn’t.
  • The Washington Post headline, “House panel releases Trump tax returns in another setback for former president,” is incompetent, biased, and insulting to anyone who isn’t Trump Deranged or ignorant. The returns are a triumph for Trump. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was counting on their being released. Democrats had essentially promised that there would be evidence of dark doings: as with the Mueller Report, it is a dud. Now the question is why Democrats were allowed to breach the guaranteed confidentiality of a citizen’s returns when there was no evidence of a crime.
  • The returns show that Trump lost money while he was President. Of course he did…yet the Big Lie spread by the Axis of Unethical Conduct is that he became President to enrich himself. A Trump-Deranged troll on another thread repeated that talking point yesterday. Becoming President made the Obamas rich; it made the Clintons rich. Trump was rich already: his Presidency made him poorer, and he almost certainly knew it would.
  • Now come the tit-for-tat arguments demanding that members of Congress explain how they have become wealthier during their tenures in office. Well, good. Liz Cheney’s net worth reportedly increased from $6M to to $36 in six years. How did that happen? The House blood-lust just handed Trump a potent weapon to expose his enemies.
  • David Cay Johnston wrote a Trump Derangement classic for the Daily Beast headlined,  “Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison.” It’s a funny headline, because the “best case” is in fact lousy: if the Justice Department is foolish enough to indict Trump based on the weak investigative tea brewed by the January 6 Commission witch hunt, it might be a tie. It reminded me why I no longer waste time with the Daily Beast, which is like an online MSNBC now. Seth Barrett Tillman wrote an easy and unduly respectful rebuttal of Johnston’s desperation post, and concludes,

“At this juncture, can you point to even one specific entry in any of Trump’s tax filings which you know to be fraudulent or, even, merely in error? That being the situation, your article’s title mentioning “prison” seems overly ambitious given what is now known about Trump’s past tax filings.”

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/31/2022: Good-Bye 2022 And Good Riddance Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I want to take this opportunity to thank the Ethics Alarms stalwarts who have kept the comments lively and substantive over the holidays. December usually is a wasteland here, indeed the cyber-tumbleweeds start rolling through the abandoned streets the week before Thanksgiving. This year the traffic fall-off was hardly noticeable due to the quality and quantity of the participation. Thanks.

1. What can be said about this depressing video? An unshakeable progressive is confronted with damning facts about the current child gender-swapping fad on the Left, and he insists that it is a conservative conspiracy theory lie, until he is shown convincing proof. Then his objection to the conduct evaporates, and he announces his approval.

Here’s what I can say…

  • The mask is a tell. Outside, and he’s still virtue-signaling to the mask-fascists, “I’m one of you!”
  • This could be staged. If so, the actors are excellent.
  • Partisans like this guy roam on both sides of the political spectrum, They are blights on democracy, and why we can’t have nice things.
  • Two likely trolls commenting on this post give every indication of being like that Masked Man. I’ve got a bet with myself that the get themselves banned by Monday. We shall see.

Continue reading →