U.S. Society

Friday Open Forum, “Two Things” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

In Billy Crystal’s hit comedy “City Slickers,” famous for getting old pug-ugly actor Jack Palance something nobody ever was thought possible for a performer like him, an Oscar, Jack’s character, a grizzled old cowboy called Curly, liked to say that life comes down to “just one thing.” This early morning post comes down to just two things, but I am counting on you to add to the total.

Thing One: Fitch Ratings affirmed the United States’ “Long-Term Foreign- and Local Currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDRs) at ‘AA+’ with a Stable Outlook” yesterday, stating,

“The United States’ ‘AA+’ rating is supported by its large economy, high per-capita income, dynamic business environment and exceptional financing flexibility due to the U.S. dollar’s role as the preeminent global reserve currency. However, high fiscal deficits, a substantial interest burden, and high and rising government debt levels constrain the rating. Debt is more than double the ‘AA’ rating median. The government has not taken meaningful actions to address the large general government (GG) fiscal deficits (averaging 7% of GDP since 2022), and spending pressures will mount over the next decade due to an aging population…“

This sparked the Axis newx media to start its doomsday act, suddenly showing interest in the National Debt, while the anti-Trump conservative outlets did the same. The Triple Whammy of two Democratic Presidencies and two Trump terms has exploded the National Debt beyond all reason or fixing, both parties are complicit, and the only reason the issue is being raised now is because Trump is President and Democrats think the Iran War makes government spending useful as a campaign issue before midterms. Anyone who takes political warfare over the dept seriously is so dumb they’d probably vote for Kamala again. It’s obvious that no party is ever going to do anything about the National Debt, even though it is a ticking time bomb. Fixing the problem takes sacrifice, and any party in power that doesn’t ensure short term gratification for voters with 95 IQs and the attention span of mayflies is going to lose power. But accepting short term pain, giving up some overly expensive benefits and not just balancing the budget but achieving a surplus and then using the surplus to reduce the debt guarantees political disaster, so it is never going to happen. Never. Everybody figures that the disaster will happen after they are dead, so why worry? Brilliant. Ethics Alarms used to discuss how irresponsible and incompetent this is. The topic is now officially in my “Futile Ethics Grandstanding” category along with demanding that guns be banned, an end to all wars, the “two state solution” for Palestinians, and slavery reparations.

Thing Two: During the first Trump Administration a refrain on conservative blog Instapundit referring to the Democrats was, “All they had to do was not be crazy, and they couldn’t do it. “Yesterday President Donald Trump’s handpicked board at the Kennedy Center voted to add an inscription below the Kennedy Center’s sign, saying the arts complex was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” This is designed to get around the court order rejecting the attempted at re-naming of the performance complex to include Trump’s name. There is no defending this obsession. It is crazy, petty, the kind of thing that triggers the “No Kings” fools, and accomplishes nothing but stroking Trump’s massive and frequently bonkers ego.

Now go find more things…

Abortion On Demand Up To Birth

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I have two simple questions for pro-abortion (or perhaps “pro mothers and doctors being able to kill viable infants at will” is a more accurate label…a bit long, I admit) advocates.

How can you honestly and sincerely defend the new Massachusetts abortion law? If you can, how do you look yourself in the mirror or sleep at night?

Abortion will now be allowed at any time before birth in Massachusetts after Governor Maura Healey (D, or course: what other party would do this?) eliminated the state’s abortion limits yesterday. Previously, the Bay State had allowed abortion only up until 24 weeks. Now a fully developed unborn infant can be killed any time during the 40-week gestation cycle, even second before birth. That means that the child could be delivered via C-section and instantly be protected by law as a living human being, but an unborn infant at the exact same state of development and fully viable can be murdered in the womb after the mother’s water has broken and contractions have begun.

To be fair, now, the home of my birth and happy childhood isn’t the only barbaric state with such an immoral law. Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia of course, also believe that being able to kill living and viable infants in the womb is a human “right.” Peter Singer, the Princeton ethics professor, once caused an uproar when he said that as long as we were allowing abortions up to birth, why not let the mother see her baby first after it is born and then have the option to kill it? He was right: morally and ethically, either homicide is exactly the same. The distinction between born and unborn at that point is arbitrary and a legal fiction, created to let mothers feel better about a monstrous act.

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Flagrant Media Bias And Disinformation of the Year: NPR

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Here is how National Public Radio reported those statistics on D.C. crime on the one-year anniversary of President Trump ordering the National Guard to patrol the National Capital.

“Multiple studies have since found that the National Guard presence in D.C. has had no effect on violent crime, although there has been a decrease in opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins.”

That summary arrives after NPR spends nine full paragraphs burying the lede, only to lie about what the lede is anyway.

When I read that [Aside: NPR had the gall to send me a solicitation for a contribution via email, signed by the NPR host who blackballed me as its ethics commentator for telling the truth about late-hit sexual harassment complaints, because I “seemed to be defending Donald Trump.] this morning I was genuinely puzzled. When I surfed past Fox News last night, Laura Ingraham was declaring that the statistics proved that Trump’s use of the National Guard was prudent and has been a great success. Two completely divergent news reports. This is why our journalism has become untrustworthy and dangerous. This is why civil discourse is nearly impossible, with citizens operating under competing distortions of reality.

And this is why President Trump was and is right to call our news media “enemies of the people.”

However, NPR’s distortion and deceit qualifies the network as a media Ethics Villain and an Ethics Corrupter. Note the chart above from the D.C. police site. A 32% decrease in murder is not “no effect” on violent crime. That isn’t just spin or bias, that’s a lie. NPR also plays language games, because that’s the Left’s specialty. “Opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins” is the euphemism this nauseating excuse for a news organization uses to describe the following crimes that have decreased significantly in the past year in the District:

  • Robbery
  • Arson
  • Motor vehicle theft
  • Theft
  • Property crime
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A Jacques Brel Award for Film Reviewer Marya E. Gates

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Gates is one of the contract film reviewers on Roger Ebert.com, a website I find slightly unethical for the same reason I regarded the Sirius-XM Sixties Channel running old tapes of the Wolfman Jack radio show unethical. The Wolfman was long dead ( the show did not make that clear), and Roger Ebert died in 2013, but the website he once issued reviews from has continued to use his name to make readers think what appears there is, like Ebert was, perceptive and competent. As Gates’s bitter review proves, that is a misrepresentation.

As every other review and the trailer seem to indicate,“One Night Only” is a standard issue romantic comedy with a contrived set-up. Never mind: Gates decided to use her film review as a platform to spew pure partisan bile. Political bias tainting reviews is a long held target for me: the 20-year run of my professional theater company was a constant victim of it because the Washington Post reviews dismissed almost all of our productions of classic American works as insufficiently supportive of 21st century progressive values. I particularly recall our revival of Gore Vidal’s political satire “The Best Man” being panned because the concept that a Presidential candidate’s “private sexual conduct” was relevant to his fitness to be POTUS was absurdly “dated.”

Guess who was President at the time?

Pauline Kael of the New Yorker soaked her otherwise astute reviews with her leftist bias. For example, she panned every John Wayne movie because he was too conservative for her. To be fair, she was one of my earliest introductions to New York City liberal media group-think. Kael wrote that she was shocked when George McGovern lost to Nixon in 1972 because she knew literally no one who wasn’t voting for the Democrat. (George lost in a landslide.)

As the silly reviews for “The Odyssey” recently demonstrated, reviewers reading politics into films that have nothing to do with politics is obnoxious and unprofessional, but Marya Gates is under the misapprehension that she has the standing and intellect to use her reviews to rant about politics like a smug, Trump Deranged college sophomore majoring in Critical Race Theory.

Here are some excerpts:

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Addendum To The Previous Post Because I’m Pissed Off…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
The Race-baiters can bite me,

I just left my hot cup of French Roast coffee and a Tastycake downstairs because a comment to the post “On Abdul El-Sayed” ruined my morning.

Somehow, I left out “except Richard Nixon” in the paragraph that was supposed to note that every U.S. President except Obama and Nixon had blue eyes. I don’t know how that happened: I thought I had written it. But while the comment, from a good friend, should have offered a correction (as is, sadly, often necessary especially when I write one late at night), instead the commenter accused me of being racist. The eyes bit was mentioned in a section about American leadership templates, which, while I might have written it slightly differently has it been mid-day and I were a bit fresher, I stand by it nonetheless Here’s the corrected version:

“Not too long ago, it would be impossible to imagine a serious candidate for the U.S. Senate named Abdul El-Sayed. Americans just didn’t elect people who had non American-sounding names. It was a silly bias, but a comforting one. When I wrote my thesis hypothesizing an American Presidential type, I noted that no American President had been elected who didn’t have an American-sounding name. (No, nobody thought of Dwight Eisenhower as German, for obvious reasons.) Not only that, every American President from Washington to Bush except Richard Nixon has had blue eyes. Barack Obama blew that template to bits, both in name and in eye-color.”

As I wrote just now in a correction prompted by that comment:

“I certainly knew about Nixon’s eyes: there is a controversy over their color: he is stated in some sources as having black eyes, and others call them dark brown. But he and Obama are the only brown-eyed boys: Trump restored the Presidency to its blue-eyed tradition. The Name Game has a chapter in my honors thesis, which was,indeed a controversial one: three chair-holding professors in the Harvard Government Department reviewed it, and couldn’t agree on the grade; eventually they compromised on magna cum laude. The observation about Presidents’ names was not original, and I had it thoroughly footnoted to a historian who specialized in the narrow field of Presidential character. Perhaps today’s DEI, bias-over-reality, conservative thought-suppressing Harvard College would have slapped me down for that section, but then it no longer is a top tier, trustworthy institution.”

I completed the correction this way:

“Fact: the template for the American Presidency in the minds of Americans is powerfully influenced by another fact. Every President before Barack Obama was white, male, born on the mainland and raised by Christians. He changed that mold, and if he had been a good President and better human being, he would have changed it more. I have reached the end of my patience with progressives and Democrats, yes, even Trump-Deranged friends, stooping to race-baiting when they have neither the information, the integrity nor the wit to counter opinions (and facts) they find inconvenient, as they appeal to emotion or worse. I wrote in the reply to an old and cherished friend’s accusation of racism in the comments to this post, ‘Shame on you.’ Shame on all of them.”

I stand by that, too.

They Just Can’t Help Themselves, Can They? The Axis Is Trying to Rename The Civil War To Use It As a Pivot To Rename the January 6 Riot. Guess Why!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

That meme above appeared on the Facebook page of my Trump Deranged history professor friend. I’m starting to suspect that he’s not just Trump Deranged: I think he genuinely hates the United States of America and has for decades. It wasn’t today’s post…today he’s writing about how the United States knew it didn’t need to drop atom bombs on Japan to win the war, it just nuked all those Japanese citizens to scare the Russians. Between hating his own nation and hating its President, my friend has a lot of material.

Today he writes to introduce the latest Orwellian exercise from his fellow radicals on the left,

“Slaveholders’ Rebellion” has the ring of authenticity about it.

名不正， 則言不順； 言不順， 則事不成

Míng bùzhèng, zé yán bùshùn; yán bùshùn, zé shì bùchéng

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” (Analects, XIII.3.5; James Legge, trans.)

He sounds like a professor, doesn’t he? Ironic, since his fellow Leftists who dominate the higher education scene and have poisoned the minds of generations by teaching them the exact reverse of the “truth of things” in so many ways, embrace the tactic of misleading names, especially deceitful names. You know, like “pro-choice” for abortion. “Undocumented workers” for illegal immigrants. “DEI” for anti-male, anti-white discrimination. “President of the United States” for Joe Biden…

My friend’s whitewashing of rhetorical dishonesty was his hand-off to the Facebook post by fellow left-biased historian Eric Gubelman, who, in turn, extols the New York Times essay, “It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” It is so, so crucial to the crypto-totalitarian Left to emphasize slavery in all discussions of the United States. The author of the Times propaganda, of course, is young and black: Anthony Conwright also a writer for Mother Jones and The Nation, and you can’t get much more Left than that.

Where to begin? Oh, let’s start with the argument that’s it’s urgently important to stop calling the Civil War the Civil War.

Conwright begins with a wholly irrelevant discourse on how various factions argued over what label to slap on the conflict that fit with a regional narrative and supported demonization of the other side. Yeah, yeah, so what? It’s been called the Civil War for a very long time, and the name is properly descriptive. Conright, I will assume based on his biases, would furiously defend tearing down the statues of Civil War generals and slaveholding Founders. He writes in part,

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And You Thought Minneapolis’s Mayor Was Unethical! St. Paul’s Says, “Hold My Beer”…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, is an Ethics Villain to be sure, but St. Paul’s DEI mayor, Kaohly Her, is both unethical and ludicrous.

First, a digression: is it racist and sexist for me to designate an elected official “DEI” just because the individual is female, Asian, and a Laotian immigrant? Yes, except that 1) this female Asian is also bonkers, and obviously so and 2) this in the Twin Cities, Ground Zero for The Great Stupid. Her is a double “first,” meaning that this irrelevancy got her votes in wokism-addled Minnesota (to sensible people, being the “first” is irrelevant to whether one is the best) and her record as a state legislator screams diversity, equity and inclusion. She was a member of the Minnesota Asian Pacific (MAP) Caucus and the House People of Color and Indigenous (POCI) Caucus. She has advocated more diversity within departments, and supported a state House resolution to declare racism a public health emergency. She’s no dummy, certainly, with an impressive educational background and an impressive career in finance behind her. She’s just certifiable.

Normally, I would be inclined to be a fan of the Mayor because of her obvious Abbott and Costello parody potential (“Who’s the mayor?” “Her!” “Who?” “He’s on first…”). Unfortunately, she is approaching new records in the particular form of ethical misconduct I view as most disturbing in high offices, sexual harassment, followed by head-exploding excuse-making.

Her wrote text messages to Shirly (not a typo!) Yang in the spring of 2025, while serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives, that were later offered as exhibits in support of a Yang’s petition for harassment restraining order. She alleged that Her (“Who?”) engaged in a pattern of unwanted communications, intimidation and interference in Yang’s personal and professional lives. But the same month Her was sworn in as St. Paul’s first female and first Asian mayor, a Ramsey County court referee denied Yang’s petition, finding that the evidence did not meet the legal standard required to issue a harassment restraining order.

But now Her faces a separate investigation into allegations of sexual harassment following a complaint filed by St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry. Chief Henry alleges that the mayor sexually harassed subordinate city employees, including members of the St. Paul Police Department. In an April letter, Henry wrote that he decided to become a formal complainant after learning the alleged misconduct extended beyond isolated incidents. A letter by his attorney to St. Paul City Attorney Irene Kao alleges that Her sent “inappropriate, and, indeed, unlawful” text messages to city employees. That letter states Henry came forward because he believed employees could face retaliation if the alleged conduct went unaddressed and said his decision to file the complaint was based solely on principle as well as concern for city employees.

The Chief’s attorney included a screenshot of a text message by the mayor referencing “Weiner Wednesday” alongside a partially redacted image with an accompanying caption that reads: “When she wraps you up in her blanket after you gave her a good weinering,” followed by two laughing emojis.

Yikes.

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Hey Asshole: Look Up and Say “Hello!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I had a doctor’s appointment today. Taking the elevator from the 9th floor to the lobby, I encounter one you man riding in the elevator already, with his face buried in his phone. Two more riders got on at stops as we went down. All walked in already focused entirely on their phones, and their eyes didn’t move. I looked around for a friendly face, a smile, some hint of humanity. Nothing. I came this close to booming out, “Well, hello, everybody!” (I did that once.)

I regard this behavior as simply rude, and its slow but steady development into a social norm as ominous for society and the species. I was already pondering the problem earlier in the week after seeing another one of those Progressive ads about the coach who tries to stop young couples who have become home-owners from “turning into their parents.” It’s a funny series, but in this particular installment, most of the conduct from the young homeowner was simple friendliness to a stranger.

Indeed, my father was always prone to chat up strangers. Not my mother: if you weren’t Greek, a family member, or someone already known to her, you were presumptively an enemy agent or a disguised invader from outer space. In this realm, as with many others, I took Dad as a role model, and experience has taught me that it is the right approach to the world and society around us. For one thing, I have learned how a random act of attention and kindness can brighten an otherwise dreary day.

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It Appears That SCOTUS Admitting That There Is No Constitutional Right To Abortion Didn’t Save The Life Of Anyone: Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I dived down Alice’s rabbit hole after seeing this head-exploder on Twitter/”X”. Planned Parenthood really is evil. It wants to kill as many unborn human beings as possible by bombarding vulnerable women with lies and euphemisms. I went to its website and couldn’t find the illogical nonsense above anywhere on that promotional and fundraising site, but there are many almost as absurd assertions:

  • “The U.S. Supreme Court is now dominated by justices hostile to our freedom.” If anything, this Court is more determined to preserve individual liberty than any preceeding court in memory, notably by reining in the power of federal agencies.
  • “[I]n June 2022, the court took away our federal constitutional right to abortion.” There never was a constitutional right to abortion, because Roe was a legally indefensible exercise of judicial activism and legislation.
  • “[I]t goes against the will of the American people, 80% of whom believe that abortion should be legal.” The Court didn’t say abortion was illegal. The Court says it isn’t a right. The public is too ignorant to grasp the distinction, but Planned Parenthood is deliberately trying to make it dumber: they can have more babies killed that way.
  • “This ruling robbed us of our power to make personal decisions about our own bodies, and gave that control to politicians.” No it did not. Women have the power not to get pregnant. No American has the power to take an innocent human life because it is inconvenient or its existence is badly timed. In a republic, the people delegate their lawmaking to elected representatives. That is the Constitution.
  • “Reproductive freedom means every person gets to decide what’s right for their own body. No exceptions.” Ah yes, the big lie. “Every person”…except the vulnerable, genetically unique, innocent and powerless person who others get to decide that being dead is what’s “right for their own body.”

But “Abortion is gender-affirming care” is worst of all. Planned Parenthood is just parroting a deliberate euphemism for the ugly process of distorting an individual’s mind, organs, hormones and secondary sex characteristics to conform with the current social pathogen of gender-warping, the opposite of “gender affirming.” How could an abortion be gender-affirming? I guess the theory is that if you have an abortion you are female, so congratulations? But being pregnant (without some weird zygote implantation process worthy of Dr. Frankenstein) is also gender-affirming. Is Planned Parenthood saying that a woman who really wants to affirm her womanhood should have an abortion? It would be in character for the group, which is Machiavellian.

Lisa Carr, an abortion opponent writes in part at Victory Girls:

“The language is Orwellian, really. The language has gone from “women’s healthcare” to “choice”, to “bodily autonomy”, to “reproductive freedom” through the years. Now, abortion is “gender-affirming care”. Everything BUT what it actually is.Mutilation of body parts is “gender-affirming”. Murder of an innocent and perfectly-formed CHILD is also “gender-affirming”. Planned Parenthood is not only mutilating lives but language here and this is very dangerous and indicative of the depths to which we’ve lowered. May God help us.”

I think PP is playing cognitive dissonance games. It is working hard to find an metaphor for abortion that leaves out the icky unborn baby-killing part and paints a positive, appealing picture for the Woke and easily indoctrinated. Apparently the little matter of some actual connection to abortion is now dispensable, which is great for abortion promotion. Abortion is a romantic walk on a warm Hawaii beach! Abortion is a basket of golden retriever puppies! Abortion is sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows!

Meanwhile, according to the US Abortion Data Dashboard, the number of abortions—that is, deaths of human beings who would be alive today if given the chance—has increased each year from 2023. Last year’s total: 1,129,650. Oh, but if only it could have been more! (I’m channeling the ghouls at Planned Parenthood.)

If women want to keep killing the unborn, there’s nothing more that can be done about it, is there?

Another discouraging note: approximately 40% of abortions eliminate black babies, in a U.S. population that is less than 14% black.

A Final Complaint About “The Odyssey”…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If I don’t get this posted, it will keep me up all night…

I keep reading that Sinon, that non-Homeric character played by Eliot Page, is crucial to understanding Odysseus’s guilt. Sinon, after he’s dead (above), complains that Odysseus deceived him and set him up to be killed. Odysseus argues that he was necessary collateral damage, which by any standard of warfare, especially ancient warfare, is exactly right, but never mind that: I can’t imagine how the deception of Sinon was achieved. His fellow colleagues were building a huge wooden horse on the beach. It took a long time. Odysseus and the other Greek soldiers had to climb into the horse. Where was Sinon when this was happening?

How was all of the noisy and complex operation kept from Sinon? When did Odysseus communicate the “This horse is a gift from the gods so be sure to tell the Trojans that” lie to him? Then what, he told Sinon to close his eyes and count to ten, and when Sinon opened his eyes, he didn’t suspect that his general had climbed into the wooden horse? Or did wily Odysseus leave a note for Sinon on the beach that said, “Hey, sorry, I’ve left with the rest of the ships, but I saw a big wooden horse on the beach. My guess is that it’s a gift from Poseidon. Hang around and tell the Trojans. Good luck!”?

The classic myth about Sinon is that he was a willing martyr to the cause, and stayed behind to assist in the deadly deception of the Trojans. That makes sense, but Nolan’s rewrite seems impossible.

It’s like the mystery of the Mary Celeste! No matter how I try, I can’t construct a plausible sequence where the Greeks fake leaving, everyone climbs into a wooden horse that was assembled on the beach, and Odysseus lies successfully to the sole remaining Greek soldier about the provenance of the horse.