Funniest Unethical Quote of the Week: The New York Post

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“The precise reason that Biden is struggling to find top-dollar audiences is unclear.”

—The New York Post, in a report on the former President’s attempt to bill $300,000 per speaking appearance.

The “precise reason” is incredibly clear! Not only that, but the Post’s story is clear about what that reason is. For example, this passage: “Biden’s use of “colored” to refer to black people while speaking at a disability conference in Chicago earlier this week has some former aides hoping he will spend more time at his Rehoboth Beach house. ‘This was hard to watch,’ said one former White House official. ‘It felt like seeing someone you care about start to regress. We just wanted him to enjoy retirement like other presidents — not go out like this.'”

The man is suffering from progressive dementia, and has been for years. He was never especially bright to begin with. Biden has little or no influence now, and was an embarrassment as President. Decision-makers for any organization that paid $300,000 for Biden to stumble through a speech written by someone else would be liable for breach of fiduciary duties.

I suppose having him speak might be a draw for the same kinds of people who watched poor Anna Nicole Smith’s reality show, as the late obese and alcoholic model/actress/gold-digger stumbled through each episode, slurring her words and looking ridiculous. It was kind of like watching a geek bite the heads off of live chickens at a carnival: witnessing complate human degradation makes som feel better about themselves. But no carnival paid geeks a $300,000 salary.

I was trying to think of a former President of the United States whom I wouldn’t rather hear speak than Joe Biden. There isn’t any. How could there be? Yeah, it’s a real mystery why Joe’s agents are having trouble finding suckers willing to pay $300,000, plus expenses, for the privilege of assessing how far his dementia has progressed.

“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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Got It: Candace Owens Is An Idiot.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I am happy to say that I was never especially impressed with Owens, but when she first emerged as a conservative black woman who was not deceived by Black Lives Matter and was an articulate and attractive pundit on the Right, many were. Lately the proverbial blush has been off the rose since she has displayed ugly anti-Semitic attitudes, but never mind: that video makes everything that has come before irrelevant.

That’s signature significance. Anyone who believes that space travel is a hoax is, by definition, an idiot. No one should take Candace Owens seriously. Ever.

Let us never speak of her again.

Ethics Drama at RT’s

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

RT’s is a local eatery about five minutes from my house. It specializes in seafood and Cajun/Creole dishes; its she-crab soup is the best I have ever slurped. My house guest—lets call him “Bert”—took me to lunch in celebration of progress we have made on a joint project, the substance of which is irrelevant to the tale.

The RT’s food and service were, as always, terrific, but while we were waiting for dessert, a middle-aged woman, shabbily dressed, came up to our table and asked for money, saying she was hungry. She asked Bert for money, and he said he would be happy to buy her a sandwich. She said she wanted the money so she could buy her own food, and was getting agitated.

Bert finally gave in, and handed her 20 bucks. After she left, he said that he was worried that she might cause a scene, and that it was worth the price to defuse the situation. Our waitress then ran over to our table and apologized profusely, saying the woman had been appearing and bothering diners lately, and that Bert shouldn’t have encouraged her by giving her cash. He told the waitress what he told me: he had felt trapped, and that giving her money seemed like the safest and quickest way to address the problem.

When the waitress brought our check, she told Bert that, again, she was very sorry, and that she had taken twenty dollars off the charges to compensate for us having to deal with a homeless woman. He told her that it wasn’t her fault and that the gesture was unnecessary; she responded that it was the restaurant’s responsibility to protect diners from such intrusions. Bert said that he wanted to give her the $20, and again, she refused.

When he paid the bill, however, he added ten dollars to her tip.

I think everyone did the right thing eventually, at least if the homeless woman really used the money to buy food.

Didn’t they?

CNN Issues Perhaps the Dumbest Factcheck Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Wow. CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez appeared on last night’s episode of Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room” and attempted to refute President Trump’s assessment of Harvard as a “cesspool of leftist thinking.” (Harvard is, in fact, a cesspool of leftist thinking.) Perez thought he had definitive proof that the representation was false.

“Now, what [the Trump administration] is asking for, Wolf, is for Harvard not only to comply with what they say are anti-Semitic, control of anti-Semitic issues on campus, but they want bigger changes. They want to oversee hiring and admissions standards. They want to make sure that conservative views are being represented on campus.”

Here comes Perez’s brilliant argument: wait for it….

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Ethics Dunces: The Breakthrough Prize Organizers

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The lesson here: Even when speech is stupid and inconvenient it is unethical to censor it.

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize ceremony, sometimes called the “Oscars of Science,” was attended by many of Silicon Valley’s major players, including Jeff Bezos. The event had comic actor Seth Rogen as its host: that was ethics dunce move #1. Rogen is only slightly less Trump Deranged than Robert DeNiro, and, though a talented performer, is no more astute in political and governmental matters than the ladies of “The View,” and just as biased. What did organizers think Rogen was going to say while having an open mic all night during a full Trump-hate freakout?

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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?

President Trump Is Trying To Reform Harvard? Good! [Part 2: The Aftermath]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

(Part 1 is here)

The Administration’s demand that Harvard start acting like a non-partisan educational institution rather than a woke ideology propaganda factory was met with predictable indignation, accusations, and deflections. $2.2 billion in federal funding ticketed for Cambridge was cut after the university refused to submit to the administration’s ultimatum, as Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber rejected the letter’s demands. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” he wrote. Apparently Harvard also can’t allow itself to meet its own standards of academic integrity and the duty of teaching students how to think rather than what to think. Garber’s response came after protesters rallied to call on Harvard to defy the Trump administration’s demands, and hundreds of faculty members signed a letter urging Harvard to “condemn President Trump’s attempt to remake higher education.”

I submit that when higher education has become a destabilizing and destructive force in society because it has been taken over by those more concerned with transforming American society than teaching and enlightening its young, it is well within Presidential power and the President’s obligation to take reasonable measures to address that problem.

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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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Game and Parallel Universe Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

An inquirer who doesn’t understand a lot—games, fantasy, reality, ethics, childhood—wrote “The Ethicist” (that’s “Prof. Appiah” to his friends) to settle a family dispute. He likes to play Monopoly with his family, but he has removed the card above from the “Community Chest” deck because he believes it is unethical. When that bank makes an error in your favor, you must give the money back, not spend it on Reading Railroad, he explains. The card teaches bad conduct.

Well, Prof. Appiah sagely points out, so does Monopoly, which encourages you to employ cut-throat tactics to drive your friends into bankruptcy. I would add that Risk teaches you to seek to take over the world by military force, Stratego encourages assassination, and poker requires lying. Even Scrabble includes approved cheating: if you can put down a fake word and not get challenged for it, that’s just good gamesmanship.

“The Ethicist” suggests that rather than burning the card, it would suffice to have a brief comment from a parent about how of course real life has different rules than games, and that when you’re not playing Monopoly, giving back the $200 is the ethical and civilized choice.

Personally, as a long-time games-lover, I find it useful to think of games as a fantasy, parallel universes, each with its own laws, rules and tradition, like Bizarro World. What is right in one won’t make sense in another, including the real world. I thought everyone understood that.

I guess not!