U.S. Society

In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of “The Little Drummer Boy” & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I was pleased to see today that bloggress Ann Althouse devoted a post to how awful “The Little Drummer Boy” is. She wrote, quoting from a post from an earlier Christmas season,

“[I]f you ever feel like giving me a gift, and you think all you’ve got to give is that drum number you’re threatening to perform, realize you are making a mistake. There’s also the gift of silence. I’d prefer that. I know baby Jesus reputedly appreciated the gift of drumming — according to that nasty song — but consider the possibility that Jesus was just being nice. I know, politeness is a quality alien to infants, but — come on! — it was Jesus! Put the damned drum away.”

I know I have written on EA in the past about how I rank Christmases by how many times I have to listen to the Harry Simeone Choir recording of that song. Ann also quotes Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri’s column condemning “The Little Drummer Boy, in which Petri wrote in part,

“I cannot stand it. Nothing will fix it, even the application of David Bowie to it. Every year I say, ‘I hate this song,’ and every year people say, ‘Have you heard David Bowie’s version?’ Yes. Yes, I have. It is still an abomination.”

EVEN the application of David Bowie to it? That is, beyond question, the worst rendition of the song in existence, and I would rather pluck out my eyes and puncture my ear drums rather than experience that monstrosity by Bowie with Bing Crosby’s complicity ever again. Here’s what I wrote about the “creepiest totalitarian lyrics to a Christmas song that was already bad” in 2022:

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Ethics Quiz: The Kamala Harris Bust

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read that Kamala Harris, in an interview with the New York Times, proudly proclaimed herself “a historic figure.” Harris noted the tradition of creating a marble bust for every U.S. Vice President after they leave office, saying: “There will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”

This has sparked mass mockery in the conservative news media and social media.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is this mockery fair?

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SCOTUS Finally Figures Out That It’s Unethical To Ignore the Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Well, the majority of the Supreme Court, anyway.

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court hosted arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, which challenges the constitutionality of the “independent agencies” Congress has voted into existence over many decades. Their leaderss are not under the control of the President of the United States, though they are considered part of the Executive Branch. Go figure.

President Trump fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, not for cause, as authorized by the FTC statute, but because her service was “inconsistent with this Administration’s priorities.” Slaughter refused to leave office, setting up a constitutional showdown.

The New York Times concluded from the argument, “Justices Seem Ready to Give Trump More Power to Fire Independent Government Officials.” The momentum shifted when Justice Gorsuch (above, left) said, “I’ll put my cards on the table. Maybe… there is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government.”

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On Pearl Harbor and American Moral Luck

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Guest post by Steve-O-in NJ

[This excellent commentary by Steve-O was waiting in moderation when I woke up this morning, and I immediately decided to move it directly into a guest post–JM]

The Japanese knew themselves, or at least those with any sense knew, that after the attack they had about 6 months to win an overwhelming victory and force the United States to the peace table before the American production machine ramped up to full capacity and overwhelmed them. Their fatal mistake at Pearl Harbor was not to order the planned third strike which would have targeted repair facilities, fuel facilities, and so forth. As already pointed out by many it was only by great good luck that the carrier fleet was not present.

The damage to the battle fleet was extensive, but not total destruction. USS Pennsylvania was in dry dock and was hit by only a single bomb that caused moderate damage. Tennessee and Maryland occupied inside berths and so could not be hit by torpedoes; they received only moderate damage from two bomb hits each. Both were back in service before the end of 1942. USS Nevada took one torpedo hit, but was also back in service before long, although she rather quickly found herself moved to the Atlantic where she covered the Normandy landings. California and West Virginia were the real miracle repairs, both having sunk onto the mud and West Virginia having been hit by seven torpedoes. Oklahoma, which capsized, and Arizona, where a magazine exploded, were the only US battleship losses in World War II. Arizona accounts for almost half the American casualties at Pearl Harbor, including Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, the highest ranking officer killed.

The following days were the darkest for the Allies, as the Japanese also sank two British battleships, forced the surrender of Hong Kong, and took Singapore and the Philippines. The Americans were fighting back with outdated equipment, a consequence of FDR’s understandable focus on domestic issues since his election in 1932. You don’t hear much about that, and only sometimes do you hear about how near a disaster Midway was, with almost the complete failure of torpedo bomber attacks.

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Comments of the Day: “A New York Times “Expert” Thinks It’s Wrong To Make Informed Judgments About Who Is Fit To Be An American…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I’m featuring two Comments of the Day on the same post, the discussion of whether legal immigration to the U.S. should be more carefully limited by the culture and characteristics of the nation of origin, as the Trump immigration policies seem to be heading. The discussion among the commentariate has been excellent; indeed it was difficult narrowing the COTD field down to just two.

First up is the Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT on the post, “A New York Times “Expert” Thinks It’s Wrong To Make Informed Judgments About Who Is Fit To Be An American…”

***

The primary criteria for allowing immigration should be…

  • a) whether an immigrant would be able to become a good US citizen
  • b) whether the immigrant fills an economic and cultural need for the USA

Take for example Sergey Brin. He was born in 1973 in the Soviet Union, and immigrated with his parents to the USA in 1979, during the Cold War. He is one of the two founders of Google. I would say this his immigration is a success story on both criteria. The Soviet Union at the time was the main adversary (some say enemy) of the United States at the time.

This means that we need to be careful with solely looking at country of origin as a criteria for immigration eligibility. We may want to exclude immigration from certain countries, however allow immigration on humanitarian grounds for those who flee the country due to persecution (e.g. Christians from Iran, Jews from Nazi Germany), and seek asylum.

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“Psychology Today” (Again) Shows Why “Experts” Cannot Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Why is a standard issue anti-gun screed with moldy “common sense gun control” talking points being featured in “Psychology Today” under the guise of a “How to prevent suicides” article? Oh, lots of reasons, such as..

  • Anti-gun fanatics will use every opportunity imaginable to repeat their cant;
  • The fact that their objective, to somehow void the Second Amendment, is impossible doesn’t dissuade them from wasting our time;
  • Like most of the print media in the sciences, “Psychology Today” has been captured by the doctrinaire Left and allowed what should be a non-partisan topic be polluted by progressive activism;
  • Too many academics, scholars and experts today have no regard for integrity, and believe that they must accomplish their ideological goals by any means necessary, and
  • To someone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

“Reducing Gun Violence, Particularly Gun Suicides: What we can learn from other countries when it comes to reducing gun deaths” announces its bias and how that bias has made its “expert” author stupid right in the headline. Other countries have nothing to offer us as far as gun policies are concerned. They do not have the same culture as the United States, nor do other nations enshrine individual liberty as securely as the United States. Other nations did not rely on guns and self-determination to the extent that the U.S. population has throughout its history, and other nations are far more submissive to government interference with their rights than Americans are.

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A New York Times “Expert” Thinks It’s Wrong To Make Informed Judgments About Who Is Fit To Be An American. She’s the One Who’s Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

President Trump’s decision that the United States needs to distinguish between nations, societies and cultures as it provides opportunities to become American was overdo and ethical. However, the utopians of the American Left, surely humming the tune of “Imagine” as they gnash their teeth and curse the President to the skies, are still stuck in its disastrous multiculturalism delusion that began in the Sixties.

In “We Rejected This Practice 60 Years Ago. We Must Do So Again Today,” immigration law professor Amanda Frost extols the United States abolishing immigration restrictions based on nationality in 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the legislation he was signing “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong” and makes Americans “truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people.” LBJ was also responsible for welfare and the increased expansion of socialism in the United States, laws that tried to make some states permanent second class members of the union, and other ideas that seemed good at the time but have proved to have unfortunate unanticipated consequences. It is ironic to look back on an immigration policy change that was supposed to make Americans “truer to themselves” that we now know makes the United States less American, stable and viable by the year.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

How does anyone avoid hiding their heads under a bag when they insist that our U.S. media is anything but an ethics-free partisan propaganda machine that validates Trump’s “enemy of the people” analysis every day, and often every hour of the day?

For weeks leading up to Monday’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District pitting Trump-backed Republican Matt Van Epps against Democrat State Rep. Aftyn Behn. to replace GOP Rep. Mark Green who resigned in July, the Axis media was sounding gleeful alarms that Republicans were facing another upset, that the House of Trump was doomed, that the metaphorical wheels were falling off because the President is a senile, blundering Nazi who is mean to all those virtuous and industrious illegal aliens, and everyone regrets not electing the babbling, cackling, incompetent the Democrats tried to inflict on the country after installing a demented puppet in the White House for four catastrophic years.

Sidney Wang had the perfect analysis of the legitimacy of that “narrative” decades before it began:

The media plot, and it was and is a plot, was a replay of what we have observed for a very long time now: journalists seeing their job as demoralizing Republicans and energizing Democrats with pipe dreams, lies, rigged polls, spin and calculated deception, all aimed at the majority of Americans who lack the political literacy and critical thinking skills to know shit from shinola, pardon my French.

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Why Are People Like This Teaching In Colleges…or Anyplace?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Like all holiday movies, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” has ethics at the core of its metaphorical heart, though not to the extent of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” the objects of the three Ethics Alarms holiday ethics companions. (Is there another film I should add to the series?) But it really takes effort—and pernicious bias—to claim that the John Hughes classic contains a “dangerous” pro-capitalist message, as SUNY Purchase College Professor Mtume Gant claimed on the insane leftist podcast “Millennials are Killing Capitalism” with host Jared Ware. 

The podcast describes itself as a “platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world.” Great. And it has to dig so deep for topics that it stoops to searching for sinister messages in a formulaic holiday movie?

Steve Martin plays an up-tight ad exec whose asshole tendencies emerge regularly when he gets involved in holiday travel hell as most of us have. He is desperately trying to get home to spend Thanksgiving with his family because it’s what you do, that’s all: he’s also especially sentimental about it. But circumstances conspire to force him to battle his way from Manhattan to Chicago with a gregarious shower-ring salesman (John Candy) who is his emotional and intellectual opposite.

It’s “The Odd Couple” crossed with “A Christmas Carol,” as Martin learns the values of empathy, kindness and good will by the end of the movie, while Candy, who has no family, is embraced by Martin’s in the misty-eyed finale.

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The Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck Picks Up Steam! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I am officially designating the improvidently admitted legal immigrant ethics train wreck as merely an extension of the Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck, particularly since so many progressives refuse to acknowledge the distinction between legal and illegal in this matter. They also refuse to acknowledge that time marches on, and that policies that made sense in the past often do not make sense, or are not even responsible, today.

Item: One of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends whom have mentioned here several times, as part of one of his daily attacks on the President, cited as authority this section of a speech given by Ronald Reagan shortly before leaving office…

My friend was responding to the Trump Administration’s decision to pause immigration from 19 nations whose culture may not be wise to introduce into American society. The speech, however, cuts against the argument—pro-Somali as well as other immigrant groups uninterested in assimilation—he thinks he is making. Rep. Omar (D-Minn), quite properly excoriated by President Trump (though not in the measured terms he should have used), has said repeatedly that she regards herself as representing “her people,” Somalis first. Omar’s people, like the Congresswoman herself, generally have no intention of becoming Americans in the sense that President Reagan meant. They want to continue to embrace the toxic culture of their failed state but in a more prosperous and accommodating environment among, to be blunt, “suckers.”

Item: I recommend this useful and well-reasoned blog post. Key section:

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