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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Unethical Quote(s) of the Month: The New Republic

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Head-explosion warning!

“[T]heir all-stick-no-carrot approach to autocracy has only created a suddenly vibrant resistance that’s protesting local Tesla dealerships and storming Republican town halls.”

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor at The New Republic, in The New Republic, in a column titled, “The Fight for the Post-Trump Future Has Already Begun.”

Linkins had served as a senior editor at ThinkProgress, and was a long-time staff writer at The Huffington Post, which should tell you all you need to know about his biases. I know Jason a little: his wife was an occasional cast member in productions of “The American Century Theater,” and he won some brownie points with me by being loved by such a talented, delightful woman. But as you can tell from the quote, he’s a manipulative Far Left activist, either completely deluded or  following the unethical mission of conning the public into seeking, then accepting, government domination of their lives.

By what perverted interpretation are the protests (read: domestic terrorism) at Tesla dealerships “vibrant”? They are unethical, cruel and moronic. Like the “storming” of town halls, these are pretty clearly organized efforts fueled by paid operatives, just like yesterday’s protests. Democrats aren’t even doing a good job hiding the artificial nature of these “resistance” efforts. Then there’s the predictable and dishonest framing of a President using legitimate Presidential power as “autocracy.” One seldom sees so many tells in a single sentence that all scream, “I am an Axis hack trying to deceive the public!”

That wasn’t the worst quote, in truth, just the one that struck me first as ridiculous on its face. Here are some others:

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More Saturday Facebook Trump-Deranged Freakouts! Pop Ethics Quiz: Which of These Is More Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Are you ready?

This…

Or this…

Tough choice, don’t you think? Both posters are educated, intelligent and, on most topics. rational and responsible. Yet the first has posted a viewpoint that can only emanate from a communist or confirmed socialist: Unlimited health care and food assistance for “the poor”? It exudes the kind of hyperbole that earned Donald Trump the reputation for lying: “destroy” the educational system by getting rid of the wasteful and inept Department of Education and telling colleges that they can no longer enable anti-Semitism and practice racial discrimination? “Abuse desperate <cough> illegal immigrants? And who said that the United States “believes in Christianity” or any faith, when the Constitution explicitly prohibits a national religion?

The second, however, was initially circulated by a group protesting MSNBC’s firing of Joy Reid, a virulent anti-white racist, and the level of cognition it demonstrates shows it. The thing revels in apples vs. oranges comparisons, and its primary concern is that Trump dared to criticize the wonderful President whose only claim to anything but destructive mediocrity is his color. Finally, it appeals to the authority of un-named Presidential rankings regardless of the evaluator, when such ranking have been dominated by liberal and progressive historians since I was six.

Please let me know which you think is worse and why. And if your genuine reaction is, “Both sound about right to me!,” somehow you got here when you really want to be here.

__________________

Incidentally, I fully intended to put up a substantive post as well as two or more Comments of the Day, but I made the mistake of checking Facebook, had successive head explosions, and this was the best I could muster…

Today’s Trump-Deranged, “Bias Makes You Stupid” Facebook Post of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The poster, whose output I have featured before, is Harvard educated, rational and erudite. Yet he posts things like that, clearly misleading and intellectually dishonest.

Never mind that quoting Winston Churchill on taxes as an appeal to authority on tariffs is a cheat. Never mind that the quote is misquoted (Churchill: “I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”). Never mind that Churchill, who indeed detested tariffs, knew the difference between a tariff and a tax.

The current Trump tariff assault has nothing to do with “making a man richer,”as even the opponents of his policy acknowledge. Furthermore, any quote relating to economic policy during the first half of the 20th Century by an individual who has been dead for 50 years is of dubious relevance at best. But most absurd of all, my friend’s “side,” literally every day on my Facebook feed, is advocating using taxes to redistribute income. My friend knows this: he has to. What is his post supposed to accomplish? Whom is it supposed to persuade?

And the “Great Stupid” Continues to Spread Its Dark Wings Across the Earth…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

On the bright side, I guess, it appears to be much stupider across “the pond” than here, which is astounding. However, the fact that anybody has been so addled by the various Woke and Wonderful agenda items as this story indicates has to concern everyone. My reaction to it is barely contained in the catch phrase, “I can’t even…”

Emma Pinchbeck is chief executive of the U.K.’s Climate Change Committee (CCC). She recently announced the group’s conviction that frequent flyers should pay higher taxes so that less affluent Brits can take nicer vacations.

Oh. What??

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From Maine, A “Nah, the Democratic Party Doesn’t Embrace Censorship!” Head-Exploder….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Reacting to Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby‘s tweet above, the Maine House speaker and majority leader (Guess which party…) demanded that she take it down. Libby refused, so the body’s Democrats introduced a censure resolution. Their contrived reason: her post included photos and the first name of a minor, the male athlete who was allowed to compete in female-only sports. Both the photo and student’s name were publicly available and had been published by media sources. Obviously, this was an effort to silence an effort by an elected official to have the public understand “what’s going on here,” and, as we all know from the motto of an Axis-supporting newspaper of note, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

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What’s Up, Doc? UConn Med School’s Unethical, Woke, Ridiculous “DEI Hippocratic Oath”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Unbelievable.

In August of last year, UConn School of Medicine’s class of 2028 became the first to recite a newly revised version of the Hippocratic Oath:

“I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

No, this is not a sick joke. No, I am not making this up. Yes, our institutions of higher education really are in the clutches of maniacs who think this kind of indoctrination is part of their job.

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The Naked Mayor Principle ( or “What an Idiot!”)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Tom Ross, the “non-partisan” mayor of Minot, North Dakota, has resigned. Guess why. He accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to City Attorney Stefanie Stalheim. For some reason, this moron waited for a city investigation to be completed before doing what he should have done the moment it happened, which was back in January. The investigation found that the mayor and Stalheim had concluded a town business related phone call about a Minot police officer who had committed suicide and the mayor sent her the “Ew!” video shortly thereafter.

Ross insisted he sent the video to the wrong address and had intended to send it to his girlfriend. So what? The Naked Mayor Principle, though never explicitly stated here because no previous mayor has been this stupid (or stupid in this particular way), is a natural corollary to the Naked Teacher Principle, which states that a secondary school teacher or administrator who allows pictures of himself or herself showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses to be seem online cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result. A high elected official who sends such a photo or video to an employee is in an ethically similar position. Bye!

The frisky mayor handed over his resignation letter prior to a Minot City Council special meeting called to deal with the scandal. The city investigator found that due “to Ross’s position as one of increased visibility, responsibility, and trust, and due to his decision to use a personal cell phone to conduct city business, that the fact that he would use that device to record and send videos of this nature is in and of itself reckless enough that he knew the risk he was taking by engaging in such behavior.” Yah think? The investigator also concluded that the incident met the city’s standard for workplace harassment, whether or not it was accidental. I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t matter. The town’s mayor takes naked photos of himself and sends it to people. Ick. Pooie. Elected officials shouldn’t be behaving like teenagers, even competently. He’s an idiot. Idiots shouldn’t be mayors.

Case closed.

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

I begin today more distressed than ever about the situation in today’s “fourth estate,” as there are a welter of “bombshell” stories the conservative media and blogosphere are freaking out over while the Axis media are ignoring them entirely…and vice-versa. I have no way to figure out “what’s happening.”

If you can, please: speak up.

I should mention that the clip above from “Poltergeist,” one of the most frequently used in the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive, is a small measure of immortality that I can confer to the memory of Dominique Dunne, the actress who played “Dana.” She was murdered by her boyfriend in 1982, the same year the movie was released. Dominique Dunne was 22.

“The Ethical Dilemma Of The Successful, Failing, Local Small Business,” the Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In 2016, I posted about a dilemma I faced regarding a neighborhood carry-out restaurant. “It opened the same year my wife and I moved into the neighborhood,” the post began. “It quickly became our reflex fall-back when we were too tired to make dinner or wanted a treat for lunch….The food was consistently delicious, fresh and authentic… the little Greek lady greeted you with a knowing smile when you walked in the door, and you knew you were going to be treated like a neighbor.”

Then, I explained, a long-time employee who had worked in various jobs there over the years took the restaurant over. He was a nice guy, and I knew him, but though his new, ambitious version of the place seemed to be thriving, the food declined noticeably. After several months of disappointing experiences with our old standby, my wife and I resolved that the next bad meal there would be our last. A carry-out so-called gyro sandwich came covered in a ton of shredded lettuce without onions or the mandatory tzatziki sauce. The young woman who was running the kitchen that night argued with my wife about what the order was supposed to include, saying “That’s the way we always make a  “jy-row,” causing my wife to correctly note that NOBODY makes gyros buried in lettuce and with no sauce. “Well, maybe you should find another restaurant then!” she said. Bingo! We resolved never to go back to the place again.

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