U.S. Society

Ethics Quote of the Day: Mrs. Q

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“I think I have figured out the new virtue signal of the progressive left. A conversation in the early stages begins with, “in these dark times” or “because things are so bad right now.” What this really means is, “I hate Trump, and I am letting you know that without directly saying it.” It’s almost a test it seems. What are some graceful yet pointed responses to such behavior?”

—-Star Ethics Alarms commenter Mrs. Q, in last Friday’s Open Forum

Mrs. Q’s free-standing comment was prescient, because I had been preparing to post about New York Times’ periodic progressive opinion writer Frank Bruni’s obnoxious “What Do You Tell a College Student Graduating Into This America?” [Gift link!] in his subscriber-only newsletter. Bruni, who has carved out a niche for himself at the Times because he is fat and gay, has been flummoxed (he says) when seniors visit him in his faculty office at Duke (he teaches writing) and ask, as a recent Duke co-ed did, her eyes “red” and “watery,” “Where do you find hope?”

If he were not the most knee-jerk of knee-jerk progressives and crippled by Trump Derangement, he could have answered, “Oh, grow the hell up! You can find hope everywhere, and more here in the good ol’ U.S.A. than just about anywhere else.”

Not Bruni. The piece is a great example of how an essay that is mostly biased foolishness can be enlightening, indeed often more enlightening than opinion pieces that are spot on. For example, Bruni begins by writing, “[M]y students have the privilege of attending one of the country’s most selective and affluent universities and that simply getting a college degree, any college degree, gives them a big advantage.” Yes, it’s a big advantage that graduates from Duke and other leftist indoctrination factories do not deserve, as the weepy senior’s question demonstrates. Leaving the womb of academia for real life in a nation you have been taught has been unrelentingly racist, unjust and evil since 1690 is certain to feel hopeless.

More from Bruni…

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It’s Come to This: Yesterday’s Incompetence Is Today’s Brilliant Innovation

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

When I saw the photo above and followed the reports like this one…

… I was certain that I had posted on an almost identical story a few years ago. And I had…with one significant difference.

The photo above comes from the Montgomery Township in Pennsylvania, where authorities have introduced wavy lane patterns on some streets. The regular lane patterns have been replaced by curved and zig-zagged lines. Montgomery Township officials explain that the erratic lane margins are their solution to too many speeding automobiles on some of the most trafficked streets. They are “traffic-calming measures.” “Our Highway Safety Officers and Traffic Engineers have determined that this is the best course of action for the area to ensure the safety of the local residents,” Montgomery Township police wrote in a Facebook post.

That’s funny: back in 2022, an Ethics Alarms “Res Ipsa Loquitur” post featured this, from Hollister, California:

In that instance, the wavy lines were definitely not by design. Hollister Mayor Igancio Velzaquez explained, “It just comes down to the contractor. Somebody didn’t read the plans correctly. It was not designed to look very odd.”

You may agree with me that the intentional eccentric lines look like a mistake, and the the accidental lines in Hollister look intentional, but that is neither here not there.

And I’m with Hollister. If there’s too much speeding an a section of a street, put up speed limit signs with reduced numbers. Pull over drivers. Up the fines for speeding. Speed humps are a lousy way to control traffic, but they are better than this nonsense. Heck, why stop at wavy lines? Try broken glass! Puppies in glass cages in the middle of the road! Land mines! Okay, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but why not set up fun obstacles, and make the street like a miniature golf course?

Unsolicited Virtue Signaling and Grandstanding Like This Should Be Slapped Down, and Hard

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Anderson Cooper, as we all know, is a weenie, and he proved it in this exchange.

Ms. Thomas may be an activist, but she’s also an asshole. Cooper should have said, “Excuse me, but did you inform me of your favored pronouns? Did I ask what they were? Do they have any relevance to the matter we are discussing? Since the answer to those questions are all “no,” your making a point to correct me on live TV is rude, obnoxious, and uncalled for. Sit down, please.

Next questioner!

Why Hasn’t This Been a Headline Yet?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My Wuhan Virus-phobic friends and relatives pooh-poohed my assertion that the pandemic death statistics were being hyped and inflated by the news media and the CDC to keep the public terrified and in doors (and, quite possibly, unable to participate in a fair election.) For all I know they still don’t believe it, in part because the infuriating hasn’t been shouted from the roof-tops. A lead story on ever news network and a headline in every newspaper would be appropriate. It shouldn’t take all that, of course: I figured out we were being conned when the New York Times started running scare obituaries about 92-year-old black women who were “killed by Covid” while they were also suffering from cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

I had, frankly, forgotten about the fact that the news media still hasn’t taken responsibility for their unethical fear-mongering until I stumbled upon this, from July 18, 2023, in the 17th paragraph of a New York Times subscriber newsletter piece called “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt. He was one of the worst of the Times’ progressive op-ed writers until he was demoted. Leonhardt wrote: “The official number [of Wuhan deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death….CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Why aren’t progressives on Trump‘s side here? The issues of consumerism, labor conditions, slavery, and environmentalism are all on Trump‘s side, and we’ve got progressives crying over the drop in stock prices.”

—Bloggress Ann Althouse, neatly noting, regarding the Axis’s fury over tariffs, why Trump’s tariffs  against China, the Left’s hypocrisy and incoherence.

Gee, thanks, Ann! I’ve been asking this exact question of my various Trump Deranged relatives and friends, though not on social media. No answers, of course, except this one, which isn’t exactly ennobling: “Because I just lost thousands of dollars in the value of my stock portfolio!” Wait, I thought it’s the bad guys that only care about their own wealth and everyone else be damned.

Ann adds Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s statement earlier this week: “I’m not happy with what’s going on in the market today, but the distribution of equities across households? The top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities. Eighty-eight percent of the stock market. The next 40% owns 12%. The bottom 50% has debt. They have credit card bills. They rent their homes. They have auto loans. And we’ve got to give them some relief.”

Political parties have never been known for integrity, but in a very long time of watching the Donkeys and the Elephants, I have never seen a party descend into such complete self-destructive chaos as today’s Democratic party.

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Ethics Quiz: The Good Deportable Immigrant

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The New York Times has a variation on its routine “Won’t someone please think of the good illegal immigrants’ children?” sob story; this time it’s “Won’t somebody please think of the good green card conditions violator’s disabled American friend?”

For four years, Alfredo Orellana, 31, has been a caregiver and pal for Luke Ferris, a 28-year-old with severe autism. “The pair worked out at the gym, got tacos and played video games together. They exchanged elbow bumps,” the Times says.

Awww!

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Honors Inflation In The Age of “The Great Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Today we were given the “historic” news that Billie Jean King has become The First Female Athlete to Be Honored With A Star On The Hollywood Walk of Fame!!!! That’s funny…I always thought the Hollywood landmark and tourist attraction was designed to honor entertainers, and not athletes. But for some reason—in fact, the reasons will become obvious shortly—the Walk of Fame added a Sports Entertainment category in 2021. Few noticed.

The Walk is a fake honor anyway. Its approximately 2,800 five-pointed terrazzo-and-brass stars are embedded in the sidewalks along 15 blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street. The star began being installed in 1960 and are supposed to be are monuments to achievement in the particular categories in the entertainment industry. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce chooses who gets a star based on mysterious criteria when a celebrity or his or her sponsors will fund the creation, installation and maintenance of a star. Currently, the price for the honor is $75,000. The Chamber obviously calculated that sports stars are rich and have big egos and fan bases. That means that they deserve to be considered “entertainers.”

How long before the Hollywood Chamber decides to install stars for TV news pundits on the Walk? Politicians! Murderers! O.J. could have three stars: athlete, movie actor, and for being the most entertaining defendant in a murder trial ever.

So far, no white male athletes have been deemed sufficiently entertaining to rate a star. The current ranks of starred athletes number three: Billie Jean, Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed in “Rocky” and an actor whose accomplishments as an athlete amount to an undistinguished career in professional football), and Michael Strahan, a better NFL player (he made the NFL Hall of Fame) and successful TV host.

Depressed Ethics Considerations, April 8, 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Today is my late wife’s birthday, and I’m surprised how much it is affecting me. And I really can’t afford to be off my metaphorical game right now.

Here’s a Facebook post from another once reasonable, calm, considered lawyer Facebook Friend: “We entered The Great War 108 years ago today. Don’t tell The Orange Dick-tater that name or he’ll get jealous and want to start an even Greater War.” Another anti-Trump warrior—and former staffer of mine— claimed that AG Bondi has announced a new policy allowing the Feds to “seize” the gun of anyone deemed to be a “threat.” I couldn’t find any news reports on such a development. “They said the Democrats were coming for their guns!” she wrote in high dudgeon today. The only gun policy development, posted on today by WaPo, is “Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday that she would rescind a Biden-era gun policy that yanked licenses from federally licensed firearm dealers if they intentionally falsified records or sold weapons without running a background check.” That’s deliberate fake news. The Biden gun policy yanked licenses from federally licensed firearm dealers if they were deemed to have intentionally falsified records or sold weapons without running a background check under a “no-tolerance” perspective. Opponents said that this would cause dealers to lose their licenses for paperwork errors.

It is increasingly difficult to find straightforward, honest and complete reporting.

Meanwhile,

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I’d Say This Shows a Serious Ethics Deficit On the Leftward Side of the Ideological Scale, No? I Mean, I Could Be Wrong….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab and The Network Contagion Research Institute performed a survey to assess support for political violence in the U.S. Among the findings: 55% of those who identify as progressive said murdering Trump can be justified. Forty-eight per cent said killing Elon Musk might be reasonable as well. Of the group surveyed as a whole, 38% said it was at least arguably justifiable to murder Trump with 31% feeling the same about Musk.

“The findings signal a threat to political stability and public safety,” NCRI/Rutgers concluded after thinking really hard about it. The NCRI/Rutgers survey also found that 39.8% of respondents said that they could justify destroying a Tesla dealership to protest DOGE.

Be proud, Democrats! You now are the party of violent morons.

David Winston’s opinion piece for Roll-Call accurately describes how dangerous this kind of “resistance” culture is for the party, never mind for its hit targets. He writes in part,

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R.I.P Walter “Rip” Claassen (April 6, 1962 – March 24, 2025)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ugh. The ethical dilemma of the impossible friend.

Today was Rip Claassen’s birthday, and also the day I learned that he had died of a massive stroke two weeks ago. Rip was involved in many aspects of my life: he was my son’s homeschooling tutor and his first employer, he was the costume designer that I turned to most frequently as artistic director of The American Century Theater, and I also hired him as a stage director on a couple of occasions. He was a very talented, sweet, kind and sensitive man.

He was also a very eccentric man with a lot of problems. That photo above is how he looked and often dressed in his later years, but Rip—and this not unusual for a costume designer—was likely to wear the damnedest things, including pajama bottoms, in public. He was, as he would usually tell you soon after he met you, what they used to call an Asperger’s sufferer—apparently Asperger was a Nazi or something, so the name has been “cancelled”; I don’t what the condition called now—which means that he was bad at reading social cues and tended to get obsessed with certain topics to the extent that he couldn’t focus on anything else. But Rip did a marvelous, courageous job of coping with and minimizing the damage caused by this malady, and I respected him for that. In fact, I urged him to market a service of helping parents of children with that autism-spectrum problem. (He never did.)

Rip bought a theatrical supplies business which he promptly drove into bankruptcy with his quirks. Grace and I loaned him a substantial amount to help him buy the business (okay, it was Grace’s idea), and it was money we never saw again. After that disaster, Rip started asking us for more “loans”—not just us, but my wife was generous and sympathetic to a fault. Eventually, it was the only reason we ever heard from him: he was desperate, the wolf was at the door, he was homeless, nobody would hire him. I gave Rip pro bono legal services and other assistance, but after handing over a couple hundred more dollars that we really couldn’t spare, I finally convinced Grace that we weren’t going to take his calls and emails any more. The Marshalls were having their own problems, and a friend in need who only contacts you to fill that need is a perplexing friend indeed.

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