U.S. Society

Easter Sunday Ethics Eggs

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

—-I would respect my various Facebook friends, including many lawyers, posting diatribes about President Trump’s deportation efforts “violating the rule of law” if they had ever, ever, evinced similar concerns about President Biden or whoever…) deliberately foiling U.S. immigration laws while allowing millions of illegal immigrants to breach our borders and scatter, often leaving violent crimes in their wake.

—-As a Greater Bostonian who was brought up in the shadows of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, the Paul Revere House, Fanuel Hall, the Old North Church and other Meccas of the American Revolution (I must not omit the one such landmark in my home town of Arlington, the Jason Russell House, where Jason and several Menotomy Minute Men were shot to death on April 19 by the British while they were hiding in Jason’s closet), I’m going to save the Ethics Alarms celebrations of the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” and related events for Patriots Day, which is tomorrow.

Meanwhile…

1. Just to push Harvard further down the Cognitive Dissonance Scale where it belongs, I want to note that Cedric Lodge, manager of the morgue at Harvard Medical School from 2018 until March 2023, will plead guilty to stealing body parts that had been donated for research and selling them for thousands of dollars to non-medical personnel, aka ghouls, who collect them as trophies. Nice! He had been entrusted with handling cadavers that were part of the medical school’s Anatomical Gift Program and were supposed to be cremated after the research on them had been completed. Instead, Lodge “turned the morgue into a shopping emporium for brains, skin and other body parts, that were purchased by collectors.” Investigators say that he drove the stolen body parts to his home in New Hampshire.

2. Baseball Ethics alert! New York Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. was ejected from Thursday’s game against the Tampa Bay Rays for arguing balls and strikes with home-plate umpire John Bacon. That’s an automatic ejection now. Immediately thereafter, the angry player referred to the incident on in a Twitter/ X post, writing, “Not even fucking close!!!!!” I can’t say he was wrong…

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“What’s Going On Here?” Is This Incident Just A Single Teenage Idiot In Love Or Does It Have Larger Cultural Significance?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The time is January 2024. A few minutes after a Carnival Sunrise cruise ship left the port of Miami, Florida for Jamaica, Carnival Cruise Lines received an anonymous email saying: “Hey, I think someone might have a bomb on your sunrise cruise ship.”  This triggered security protocols that involved both the US and Jamaican Coast Guard. More than 1,000 rooms on the ship had to be searched, and were. After a delay of many hours, the ship was ruled safe to sail and continued the cruise.

An investigation eventually traced the email to 19-year-old Joshua Darrell Lowe II of Bailey, Michigan. He confessed to making the false bomb threat, explaining that he was trying to prevent his girlfriend and her family from going on the cruise without him. Though Lowe could have been sentenced to five years in prison, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney this month sentenced him to only eight months behind bars. The judge was apparently impressed by the teen’s letter to the Judge taking full responsibility for his actions, expressing remorse, and apologizing profusely.

There is no question that such an act is unethical as well as potentially dangerous. I am interested in whether our political and popular culture sends messages to the young, impressionable and stupid that this kind of extreme conduct in the name of love or other passionate feelings is admirable.

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Friday Open Forum, and, Incidentally, How Much Worse Can the Trump Derangement Get?

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

This is unbelievable, or would be if the U.S. news media hadn’t become a parody of itself.

On the home page of the New York Times, it is virtually one long scream. “A Startling Admission From a G.O.P. Senator: ‘We Are All Afraid’” ominously hints one headline. (Two guesses who the Senator is). David Brooks is calling for an “uprising.” because apparently, a President trying to fix throbbing problems and fulfilling promises he ran on isn’t “normal.” (A senile President being puppeteered by unknown, unelected individuals was normal enough for Brooks, I guess.) If the U.S. doesn’t invade El Salvador to spring an illegal immigrant, Trump is defying the Supreme Court and defying the rule of law! (There are three articles just on this). As I predicted, Trump saying that Harvard should be taxed is represented in another story this way: “With Harvard Threat, Trump Tries to Turn IRS into a Political Enforcer.“

In yet another freak-out, the Times assembles three of its most Trump Deranged pundits—nah, no balance needed, why would you want that?-–to declare “Trump is disappearing people like the Soviet Union.” (The “people” are that single illegal immigrant in the Salvadoran prison.)

Meanwhile, over on my Facebook page, a smart, usually rational and well-read individual I have previously mentioned posted an anti-Trump declaration and in the replies, wrote in response to a comment that only “racists, misogynists and redneck voted for Trump”, “I loved Harris and Walz: smart and experienced.” I had to wrestle my fingers to the ground.

Bring some ethics sanity to my world, would you please?

The Guardian’s Blue Origin Flight Critique: Into The Mind of America Haters, Where No One Rational Has Gone Before!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

What a fascinating article from the British hard left tabloid “The Guardian!” Simultaneously taking aim at a legitimate target and exploding into a furious attack on the United States and Donald Trump, it is invaluable for plumbing the depths of how the extreme progressive Left takes in information, filtering it through a confirmation bias to reach false but—for them—comforting conclusions. Stephen Green nailed some of what’s wrong here, “writer Moira Donegan’s utter lack of self-awareness while decrying our lack of self-awareness.” She uses Blue Origin’s all-female passenger flight to as evidence of U.S. decline, but the too-obvious-to-mention reality is that the U.S. has more than one private company capable of putting humans into space, and the crumbling U.K. can’t come close to producing the same.

How can an essay be simultaneously astute and idiotic at the same time? Easy. Donegan accurately writes that for the most part, the high visibility female celebrities taking this expensive joy ride embarrassed themselves and their sex by acting like sorority girls exclaiming, “Like, omigawd! Stars!” Leaving out the gratuitous political shots, Donegan writes in part,

Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic….the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man….There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur…But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness. In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women…but mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said…“Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” “Who would not get glam before the flight?!” asked Sánchez, who evidently can’t imagine that women might prioritize anything else. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe, too, joined in, saying that she had gone to extreme lengths to make sure that she would be, of all things, well coiffed for the experience. “I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good,” she said. “I took it for a dry run.”

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President Trump Is Trying To Reform Harvard? Good! [Part 1: The Letter]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Add to the deserving targets of President Trump’s campaign to remove forced progressive ideology from American culture and society Harvard University and its proverbial ilk. You can also add Harvard and the other anti-American, destructive ethics corruptors the government supports to the list of unsympathetic bastions of Axis influence that are unlikely to get sympathy from the non-Trump Deranged public. The institutions are not quite as ethically repellent as criminal illegal immigrants or as indefensible as government waste, fraud and abuse, nor are they as obviously unnecessary as National Public Radio. Nevertheless, bravo! This needs to be done.

I’m tired, depressed and busy today, so I am tempted to just link to all the essays I have written over the past decade regarding the spreading ethics rot at my alma mater. The posts under the tag “Harvard” are here; the larger list of posts that include references to Harvard (and that in many cases should have that tag, but I sometimes am in a rush and I hate adding tags) here. Have fun reading all of that awful record: I’ll see you back here in about a month. Still, I feel it is my duty to “drill down” a bit, so here it comes.

Let’s look at what the Trump Administration is asking of Harvard, why, and why it is responsible. We’ll begin by noting that Harvard, as an independent, private institution, can do whatever it wants; it just can’t have its metaphorical cake and eat it too. If the school, like virtually all elite American institutions, is going to be an indoctrination camp for the far Left, it can fund its activities itself, becoming a Hillsdale College of the anti-American sect.

In an April 11 letter to Harvard president Garber (who took over when Harvard’s DEI, anti-white, anti-male president was forced to resign), the Trump Administration made (mostly) excellent points and what would be reasonable demands to a reasonable university, which Harvard is not (see above links). Here are selected features in that letter, with my observations in italics.

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The Unethical Obscurity of Larry Doby

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Yesterday was “Jackie Robinson Day” in baseball, with every player wearing the civil rights and baseball icon’s retired uniform number 42. April 15, 1947 is the day Robinson, following the bold plan of Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey to desegregate baseball, officially broke the game’s color barrier in an event with national, cultural and societal significance. (I’ve written a lot about Jackie, a great man as well as a great baseball player.) Baseball is justly proud of its role in advancing civil rights (and justly ashamed of its long exclusion of black players before and after Robinson’s trailblazing), but commenter “Old Bill” reminded me this morning of the undeserved and unfair relative obscurity of Cleveland Indians great Larry Doby, the second black man to play Major League Baseball.

“It was 11 weeks between the time Jackie Robinson and I came into the majors. I can’t see how things were any different for me than they were for him,” Doby once said. Well, they weren’t. Doby’s courage and fortitude while battling bigotry and hostility to integrate what had been a white man’s game were no less than what Robinson displayed.

Lawrence Eugene Doby was born on December 13, 1923, in Camden, South Carolina. Larry’s father, David, was a stable hand, grooming the horses of many wealthy New Jersey families. When Larry was eight years old, his father died in a tragic accident. After that the boy was cared for by his aunt and uncle as well as his mother and moved from locale to locale, finally settling in Patterson, N.J. Even before graduating from high school, Doby was playing second base in the Negro Leagues under the assumed name of Larry Walker for the Newark Eagles. Despite is tender years, he was considered a rising star. He entered college, where he was a basketball stand-out, and was drafted and joined the Navy during W.W. II. Doby was honorably discharged from the military in January 1946, and inspired by the news that the Dodgers had signed a black player, Robinson of course, he changed his career plans from teaching to baseball. Doby sensed that the times they were a-changing. He rejoined the Negro League Eagles, believing that might be a path to the Major Leagues.

When his team went on to win the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946, Doby attracted the attention of maverick Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck, now best known as the man who sent a midget up to bat. Veeck, like Rickey, had long sought to integrate baseball, which for Veeck was the American League. He became convinced that Doby was the right player to do it. Veeck decided that he would purchase Doby’s contract and bring him up to join Cleveland right after the 1947 All-Star break. Doby’s white team mates on the Indians refused to look at or speak to him. Doby told an interviewer in 2002, “I knew it was segregated times, but I had never seen anything like that in athletics. I was embarrassed. It was tough.” 

He didn’t win a place in the Indians regular line-up until the next season, when the Indians won the AL pennant with him playing the outfield every day. That fall Doby became the first black player to hit a home run in the World Series, winning Game Four 2-1 and sending the Indians to a World Series victory the next day. A remarkable photo taken after Game Four showed Doby embracing white Cleveland pitcher Steve Gromek. (I was told that this photo is famous: I’ve followed baseball and baseball history most of my life, and I had never seen it. But there is a statue of Pee Wee Reese with his hand on Jackie Robinson’s shoulder! ) in what was supposedly a watershed for race relations.

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No, Trump Does Not Have a “Plan” to Deport Citizens

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

My son, who should know better but who is unfortunately surrounded by Trump Deranged hysterics all day long, told me today that he is terrified that he will be deported. He was adopted from Russia, and naturalized when he was less than a year old. Then he got updated citizenship documents when he was 18. He was convicted of a felony, reckless driving and eluding when he was still in his teens, and there is no chance, none, zero, that he will or could be deported. Nevertheless, he refuses to believe me.

I blame a lot of despicable people for this, including President Trump, who thinks trolling the hysterics is funny. It’s not. My son says he can’t sleep, and he already suffers from intermittent anxiety and depression. The main culprits, of course, are the same people and institutions who claimed that Trump is Hitler reincarnated, that he colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, that he’s a Bond super-villain who wanted the Presidency so he can achieve world domination. Trump, being an incurable jerk, deliberately feeds their false narratives and paranoia by saying things like, “I may serve a third term” and riffing about invading Greenland.

The worst culprits may be, as usual, the news media. Consider this report on NBC, headlined, “‘Obviously illegal’: Experts pan Trump’s plan to deport ‘homegrown criminals’” Well, that’s a lie right up front: Trump said nothing about any plan: there isn’t a “plan.” Then the story undercuts its own headline, saying, “Trump has suggested that “homegrown” criminals who have been convicted of certain crimes should be deported, but the idea raises significant legal questions.” Ideas don’t raise any legal questions, they are just ideas. I think child sexual abusers should be castrated and forced to eat their genitals with chocolate sauce, but I’m not seriously proposing it. This is the Big Lie technique again: Trump says something on a whim, the news media and the Deranged treat it as a serious proposal, and then gullible people (like my son, unfortunately), lose their minds.

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‘The Great Stupid’ Marches On: “Good Morning” Is Racist, Apparently

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is woman beyond help, miserable because she sees racism in everything, and is actively searching for features of daily life to make her feel insecure, unsafe, and angry:

What can you say about such a poisoned individual? How did she get this way? Does she think Gene, Donald and Debbie are sending racist “dog whistles” to white supremacists in the audience? Oh probably. But now she can solemnly lecture anyone who greets her with “Good morning!” about their racial insensitivity.

There has to be a clinical name for this proclivity, but for now, “The Great Stupid” will just have to suffice.

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Pointer: Moonbattery

The Trevor Bauer Story Proves That Baseball Really Is “The National Pastime” (Or At Least Tries To Be)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The last we looked in on the ugly and strange tale of ace MLB pitcher Trevor Bauer was in 2023, in two epic posts, “The Amazing Trevor Bauer Ethics Train Wreck: It Has Everything: #MeToo, Kinky Sex, Ethics Zugzwang, Predatory Women, ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent,’ “The Asshole’s Handicap,” Legal Ethics And Baseball! [Part I: The Story]”and “The Amazing Trevor Bauer Ethics Train Wreck, Part 2: Villains, Victims, Heroes And Confusion.” Here’s the short version: In 2021, Bauer was an ace pitcher with a rich contract with the Dodgers until a former sex partner of his tried to shake him down for cash by threatening to claim sexual assault and domestic abuse. Baseball is tough on domestic abusers, and it suspended Bauer while it investigated her (calculated) accusation. Bauer refused to capitulate to the woman, and insisted—still insists—that the rough sex was consensual. Law enforcement concluded that he was likely the victim here, but the Dodgers no longer wanted him as damaged goods, and no other team has hired him. Bauer hasn’t pitched in the U.S. since his suspension was lifted.

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Ethics Dunce: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was unsure how to categorize the astounding photo above, depicting Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan behaving like an arrested mobster hiding his face from photographers as he is escorted by police to the paddy wagon because she has been “caught” visiting the White House. So it’s come to this, has it? So insanely hateful toward the elected President of the United States is the Democratic Party base that aspiring leaders of the party regard even meeting with their nation’s leader as such a brand of shame that they must act like the lepers in “Ben Hur.”

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