U.S. Society

Last Head Explosion of 2025 (I Hope)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Before I post a more substantial essay today I will have to puck the skull pieces and brain bits off of my living room ceiling, carpet, furniture and TV screen after making the mistake of watching CNN’s Abby Phillip show for ten minutes. As usual, her panel of partisan idiots (with the exception of CNN token Republican Scott Jennings) were babbling on with today’s Trump hate. I expected that, but as I routinely switch channels whenever this thing passes my eyes, I did not expect that the level of discourse would be beneath what I would expect late in a cast party when all of the woke actors are half- or totally crocked.

There was no expertise, useful analysis or objective commentary at all, just indignant repetition of Axis talking points as fact: gaslighting, or fake news for the ignorant and gullible. “Trump has used the Executive Orders to get around Congress, and changed the Presidency by doing so!” (Barack Obama openly and specifically established this as a “norm.”) “Trump just defies the Constitution and the Supreme Court lets him get away with it!” (The comment came up regrading SCOTUS taking up the birthright issue, regarding which the Trump administration has made a legal argument, and has not defied the Constitution.) “Yes! It’s just like abortion…” (No, you idiot, it is not “like abortion.” Abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution: an activist Court bent the document out of shape to turn abortion into a right that not a single Founder would have endorsed. Birthright citizenship IS in the Constitution, which is why it is unlikely that the Trump theory will prevail.) “Everything Trump does is to line his own pockets!” (Pure talking point, and one that I read or hear every single day from the Trump Deranged. How does enforcing the immigration laws, purging illegal discrimination against whites and men and trying to dismantle mainstream media and educational political manipulation “line his pockets”? “The economy is in bad shape!” (The third quarter (July-Sept) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by a 4.3% annualized rate, the best in two years, which means that the economy is not in bad shape, but never mind.) And so on. All the women on the panel were wild eyed and angry (this is not professional deportment for television “journalism,” and the men, with the exception of Jennings, sat back and sagely nodded their head,s quickly shutting up if they tried to make a factual correction and were shouted over. Jennings just composed his next articulate rebuttal in his head, and waited for an opening.

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Unopened Ethics Gifts, December 26, 2025…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

On the topic of Christmas movies: I missed several this year, despite leaving it to Hollywood to make up virtually my whole celebration. I saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” (really a Thanksgiving movie), “White Christmas,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “The Bishop’s Wife,” and “Home Alone 2.” Also “The Santa Clause,” and lesser modern efforts like “Four Christmases.”I did not see “The Homecoming” (but will, tonight), and also missed the original “Christmas in Connecticut,” all of the Dickens “Christmas Carols,” “Elf,” which I object to because Ed Asner is a terrible Santa Clause, and “Die Hard,” because it is not a Christmas movie just because it takes place during an office Christmas party. I’d concede that “Die Hard 2” is more of a Christmas movie because the whole plot revolves around holiday air travel gone horribly wrong. (“Sleepless in Seattle,” the Dead Wife movie that I foolishly continue to watch, is a Christmas movie because the plot is set in motion by a child’s Christmas wish.)

I also watched three Christmas horror movies: the excellent original “Black Christmas,” the surprisingly good “You Better Watch Out,” and the violent black comedy “Santa’s Slay,” in which Kris Kringle morphs into a super-powered serial killer, putting a real cramp in the Christmas spirit.

But Amazon Prime Video was responsible for an almost equal Christmas horror: the streaming service has been offering a butchered version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that is 22 minutes shorter than the original 130-minute film because it cuts out the whole sequence when George sees how awful everything turns out in a world where he’s never been born. He goes to the bridge to kill himself, Clarence the angel intervenes, then George goes back into town to find that his friends and neighbors have chipped in to solve his crisis. That’s like showing a version of “Titanic” without the part where the ship sinks, or “Old Yeller” where the dog doesn’t get rabies.

The excuse has to do with some copyright disputes, but Amazon Prime carries both the full and abridged versions—I know because I watched the full version to write this year’s Ethics Companion. The platform does not clearly explain the difference, however, leaving unsuspecting viewers to click the wrong one.

Meanwhile…

1. A “Don’t Confuse Me With Facts, My Mind’s Made Up” classic! Here MS Now (formerly MSNBC) host Paola Ramos resolutely and condescendingly tells two unusually nerdy guests that there is no scientific evidence of any genetic differences between the black and white races.

The duo is understandably aghast and frustrated as this progressive shill frames their factual statements as vestiges of white supremacy, and that’s that. In addition to being unethical because it’s terrible journalism and science to be spewing into the public discourse, I suspect that the former MSNBC chose those two stereotypical geeks to make them easy targets.

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Christmas Hangover Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I had a really strange Christmas Day, being a guest of two strangers as I was asked to play the role of surrogate father to a fiftyish neighbor who wanted me to be her guest at dinner with her new boyfriend and his incredibly old mother. My neighbor would not take “no” for an answer, so what the hell. It was better than sitting around in a bleak house having a lot of memories sitting around staring at me.

I had neglected to include Nat King Cole’s signature Christmas song among the ones I highlighted this month, but it’s one that’s appropriate for the whole holiday season, so here it is. I wonder if anyone else noticed that “The Christmas Song,” by Nat, the Carpenters, Dean Martin, among others, or its author, Mel Torme (How must it feel when you are a renowned singer in your own right and the best song you ever wrote is identified with a rival singer?) seemed to get less play on this year than usual. Please tell me it isn’t because the song has been “cancelled” due to political correctness. You know: “Eskimos.”

I once tried to come up with a minimally disruptive lyric change to accommodate “Folks dressed up like Inuits” but the best I could come up with was “Jack Frost nipping at your tits…”

Uh, no.

Nat King Cole is another brilliant, unique vocal artist whose only hold on the culture’s memory is his single Christmas classic. Future generations won’t know what they’re missing. Cole died in 1965, still in great voice at 45. Here’s this marvelous balladeer at his best without chestnuts…

But I digress. If you had any disturbing or amusing encounters with the Trump Deranged yesterday, this would be a good place to relate them. (I did!)

Flashback: Depressing How Little Has Changed In 16 Long Years…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was looking for an appropriate “Night Before Christmas” post and found this instead, a parody I wrote on Christmas Eve in 2009, the very first year of Ethics Alarms, in reaction to the ethically-tainted passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which didn’t make health care affordable. I knew the bill was smoke and mirrors and that it would not accomplish what it was supposed to do.  I knew that we would be in one mess or another as a result of the ugly thing, supposedly the signature legislation of the Obama Administration…and sad thing is that it probably was. What does that tell you?

I was struck, as you will be, how much of my mordant satire seems relevant today, and how little has changed.

So let’s travel back to that halcyon year, and the day before Christmas…

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The Tide May Be Turning Against DEI, And It Had Better

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the post earlier this week, “Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part II: The Important Stuff,” one of the items I included as important was Jacob Savage’s disturbing essay on how white males of the Millennial generation were crushed by the DEI policies that even predated the term. He wrote in part,

“As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules…This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.”

The rest of the article was so powerful regarding how white males saw their ambitions and futures hamstrung purely because of their race and gender, with striking statistics to back up his narrative, that it landed like a splash of ice water on the still-raging policy debate. DEI was, and is, simply wrong, unethical, as well as being unconstitutional and illegal. My Trump Deranged Facebook friends keep calling the President “inhuman,” but, strangely, he was the only one with both the power, the guts and the perception to set out to end what has been a cruel form of societally- approved prejudice and discrimination.

I should have devoted a whole post to Savage’s article, but a substack called eugyppius: a plague chronicle did, and expands on what Savage began, well, savagely. He writes,

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Stop Making Me Defend Chevy Chase!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I didn’t know until this morning that Chevy Chase was left out of Saturday Night Live’s anniversary reunion show this year, SNL50: The Anniversary Special, Chevy Chase. I don’t know because I stopped watching the show many years ago when it stopped being a cultural satire program without a political agenda and converted to an all-woke, all-progressive, anti-Republican Axis member like all the other late Night Shows. In SNL’s prime, however, when Don Pardo was still the announcer, I never missed an episode.

In CNN Films’ upcoming documentary, “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not,” the original “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” host reveals how hurt he was that he was left out of the program. “Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” Chase says. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?” “Why was Bill Murray [hosting “Weekend Update” on the show] and why was I not? I don’t have an answer for that.”

Oh, I bet Chevy does. He was disliked by much of the cast and regarded as a toxic asshole. But that shouldn’t have mattered, and it was petty and wrong for the producers to snub him.

By purest coincidence, I wrote and co-directed my own 50th anniversary reunion show this year. We invited everyone who had ever been involved in the organization’s productions, and if they were willing, I worked them into the performances, no mean feat if I do say so myself. Did I personally like everyone we invited? No, of course not, nor did several prominent performers care much for me. That didn’t matter, and shouldn’t have mattered. The production was a salute to the group itself and its continued success and longevity. Every single key figure in its history available should have been on that stage or participating in the project.

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Remembering “Lynch v. Donnelly,” When SCOTUS Saved Public Manger Scenes With “The Reindeer Rule”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Before you make a public statement that will guarantee that you will become a poster-mayor for the usual “War on Christmas” battles, it might be wise to check legal history regardless of which position you take.

Mayor Miko Pickett, the “historic” first black mayor of Mullins, South Carolina, ordered this season’s Nativity scene removed from a public parking lot due to “separation of church and state.” The town happily ignored her. Not surprisingly, she had based her decision on “diversity” and “inclusion” principles and the “separation of Church and State.”

Naturally, she opted for the politically correct “Happy Holidays.” But the mayor may have had a point.

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A Dead Canary in Our Political Mine: The U.S. Mayor Who Can’t Understand English

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I must confess, if you had told me even ten years ago that this was possible in the U.S., I would have laughed heartily. I certainly underestimated the damage to American culture about to be wreaked by the Democratic Party’s open borders lunacy.

The mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Brian DePena requested the assistance of a translator during a court appearance last week.

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Stupid Cognitive Dissonance Tricks: Who Cares What Nicki Minaj Thinks? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Nicki Minaj, the most successful female rapper in music history (a distinction in my book that ranks right up there with Eddie Gaedel being the only midget to play Major League Baseball), made a surprise appearance at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest convention, walking out hand-in-hand with CEO Erika Kirk, to close the conservative organization’s annual event in Phoenix, Arizona yesterday. The conservative media and blogosphere was ecstatic. (The Axis media was shocked and horrified.)

Minaj is a woman, black, and not native-born: she’s supposed to hate Trump, MAGA, conservatives, Republican, the whole basket of deplorables. But there she was, gushing on stage, “I have the utmost respect and admiration for our President. I don’t know if he even knows this, but he’s given so many people hope,” adding that Trump was “handsome,” “dashing” and a good “role model.”

So what? The news media presuming that Nicki Minaj’s opinion on anything should matter one iota to anyone is endorsing the fatuous delusion of the Harris campaign, which paid out millions to get endorsement from celebrities who have no policy credibility whatsoever. Nevertheless, the Right is celebrating Minaj’s endorsement for the same reason Democrats became Liz Cheney fans: these are Cognitive Dissonance Scale games, the most cynical kind imaginable. Minaj figures to have a fan base made up of demographics that tend to favor Democrats, but cognitive dissonance theory dictates that if someone high in their estimation embraces the MAGA cult, Trump, Turning Point and the rest will be forcefully pulled up the scale, maybe even into positive territory!

(Of course, the scale also dictates that Minaj’s popularity will take a major hit as well.)

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The Progressive Nonsense Gene

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Madison Wisconsin Ann Althouse, who tries admirably hard to suppress her natural left-leaning biases and I admire her for that, wrote a statement over the weekend that perfectly encapsulates what is so seductive and destructive about the progressive mindset.

I didn’t know what to do with it. I was temped to make it an Unethical Quote of the Month, but it’s not really unethical; it’s just dumb. (Also Trump’s outrageous attack on Rob Reiner locked up that distinction. I’m pretty sure it is also the most unethical quote of 2025.) It is so dumb, however, that I am tempted to say Althouse failed her duty of influence and expertise. Smart people who are expected to provide intellectual and emotional guidance have to take care that they don’t mislead the people who trust them.

Her statement was…“It shouldn’t be possible to become famous through murder, but it very clearly is.”

What a silly, utopian, “Imagine”-esque thing to say, out loud or on a blog (the internet is forever). It is, however, a near perfect example of the how the progressive delusion gene makes people believe in, advocate, and administer terrible policies that can’t possibly do anything but backfire horribly, and can’t possibly work.

It is one thing for someone to think along those lines in a moment of panic or stress. That’s excusable, though my late wife, “E2” in the EA comments, was always annoyed when characters in movies or TV shows would scream, “This can’t be happening!” The political Left is constantly gulled into thinking the realities of life can somehow be banished by a well-meaning program, law or policy. That’ where communism and socialism ooze from: surely there’s a way for everyone in a successful society to be happy, healthy, safe and having the benefit of sufficient food, living space and employment!

Uh, no.

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