Ethics Alarms Is Ethically Estopped From Criticizing the Casting of Cynthia Erivo as Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Yes, that’s “Jesus Christ” in the upcoming Hollywood Bowl production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Needless to say (I hope!) Jesus was not black, female or lesbian. Moreover, the character’s songs were not written for a female voice, but rather a powerful rock tenor.

Never mind, though. This is stunt casting, maybe even D.E.I casting. It’s not fair to the work, the music, and for audience members who are Christians, it may seem just a teeny bit irreverent. But Erivo is currently hot, Oscar nominated for a (I thought) rather single-note portrayal of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the exhausting film version of “Wicked.”

The story and a lot of the book of “Superstar” is taken right from the Bible, but even the original stage production was attacked as blasphemous when it premiered in 1971. The “rock opera” had begun its cultural life, like The Who’s “Tommy” a bit later, as a recording. Director Tom O’Horgan put it on stage with such innovations as a King Herod who pranced around as a flaming transvestite and Jesus and Judas blasting into microphones. The film version had still more anachronisms. Jesus and the disciples encounter tanks rolling across the Sinai Desert, for example.

Continue reading →

A “Don’t Trust China, China Is Asshole” Classic!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Chengdu Snow Village project in the Sichuan province in southwestern sought to attract tourists over the Lunar New Year holiday by promoting its property as a “winter wonderland,” showing photos of thick, gleaming white snow covering the grounds and the roofs of its cabins. When the tourists arrived, however, the “snow” they saw was obviously puffs of cotton, plastic, beds sheets and other white camouflage. One structure was covered in what looked like bedding material with visible staples.

The Snow Village issued an apology on social media blaming warm weather in the region. No, the warm weather wasn’t the problem. The problem was and is the complete breakdown in societal and cultural ethics in China, a direct result of Mao’s “cultural revolution” that induced the nation’s full embrace of Orwellian government alternate realities in the 20th Century. In 2020, as political correctness censors sought tp protect China from its accountability for the world pandemic, a Hong Kong protester summed up the ethical status of China with the memorable quote, “Don’t trust China….China is asshole! ”

Continue reading →

Sen. Ernst’s Bill Is Exactly the Kind of Responsible Policy Changes Occur When a Government Stops Using “It’s Just a Drop In the Bucket!” As Its Operating Philosophy

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And before you ask, no “It’s just a drop in the bucket!” is not currently included in the EA Rationalization List. But it will be….

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa has submitted legislation, titled the “Presidential Allowance Modernization Act.” Under its reforms, former Presidents would receive a pension of $200,000 a year and a $200,000 allowance with cost of living adjustments every year. However, unlike the system currently in place, the allowance would be reduced if the former President earned more than $400,000 a year.

One is forced to ask, what took so long to come up with this change?

Continue reading →

It Was the Candidate, Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Before I discuss a head-blowing essay (a loooong essay) in New York Magazine arguing that it was not the Democratic Party’s insane, far left, ultra-woke policies that lost the election but that their argument to remain in power wasn’t progressive enough (yes it really does say this), let me relate some of what Kamala Harris said over the weekend when she attended a Broadway show. After the performance, she was fawned over by the performers—you know, actors. My largely deranged Facebook friends from the theater side of my life probably would have behaved similarly.

Kamala said in part, as reported by the New York Post,

“When we think about these moments where we see things that are being taken, but also let’s see it, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. Where there’s a vacancy, let’s fill it. Let us know that the reality is that the progress of our nation has been about the expansion of rights, not the restriction of rights…

…said the woman whose hand-picked selection for Vice-President wants to ban “hate speech” while she insisted that social media should be censored…

“We have to be clear-eyed. And it doesn’t mean we don’t see the beauty in everything. These things all co-exist, but I believe we fight for something, not against something.”

Translation: Ramalamadingdong.

I know, I know: if anyone deserves the pass conferred by the Julie Principle, it’s Harris, at least as long as she fades into the obscurity she so richly deserves along with past national embarrassments like Spiro Agnew, Carol Moseley Braun, Howard Dean and Harold Stassen. I decided her latest attack of word salade niçoise was notable after I read this stunner in the New York Magazine’s ironically named “Intelligencer.” Titled, “Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump: How a misdiagnosis of the 2024 election has calcified into self-defeating conventional wisdom,” the essay by Rebecca Traister is too long to fisk (and so nutsy-cuckoo that it’s not worth the effort), but here are some samples of her reasoning…

  • “The first weeks of Trump 2.0 have featured imperialist promises of foreign conquest, unconstitutional power grabs, gargantuan data and national-security breaches, ICE roundups, and the severing of life-saving aid and medical trials to millions around the world. Thrumming behind the whole shebang has been Trump’s promise to eradicate “DEI,” a term that in MAGA-land stands for the encroachment on our public, professional, and political spaces by people who are not straight, cisgendered white men.”
  • “Trump has falsely blamed a plane crash on diversity and scrubbed information about HIPAA protection for reproductive care, threatening easier surveillance of reproductive lives. Trump’s cabinet nominees have been accused of sexual assault or of having covered it up. Musk’s team includes the “I was racist before it was cool” guy who also suggested repealing the Civil Rights Act.”
  • “Just as every fiber of every testosterone-injected muscle of the executive branch is being flexed in an effort to terrify and threaten people who have still not gained full equality in this country, the press and the dazed opposition remain fixated on the idea that identity politics is what got us here. The problem is that evidence of the unpopularity of “wokeness” — a term for the messy, sometimes pedantic, frequently annoying, occasionally righteous calls for greater awareness of structural privilege based on race, sex, gender, and ability — is thin at best, and at worst undergirds a dangerous misdiagnosis that will ensure Democrats lose again the next time around.”

Traister is convinced that the problem with the Harris campaign was that she tried to represent herself as more moderate when she should have doubled down on the radical positions that got her bounced out of the Presidential primaries in 2020. “Analysts regularly attribute surprise Democratic victories to low-turnout midterms, but at the pinnacle of the “woke” era, Democrats emphatically dominated a presidential contest,” she writes, in a masterpiece of selective history. “In 2020, millions protested racist police violence, sparking a reckoning in which people lost jobs for racist infractions from their past and present. A few Democratic lawmakers did join calls to “defund the police,” and more signaled that they understood the need for criminal-justice reform. Democrats not only won back the White House, but they did so by turning Arizona and Georgia blue and in the process securing two crucial Georgia Senate seats.”

Continue reading →

Confronting My Biases, Episode 18: “I See Stupid People…”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yesterday’s most ridiculous story made me ponder a long-standing bias I know I inherited from my father. The basics:

“A Canadian tourist trying to photograph a shark in shallow water at a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands this month was bitten by the shark and lost both of her hands, officials said….The shark was about six feet long, according to the Turks and Caicos government, but its species was unclear. The tourist had “attempted to engage with the animal” in an effort to take pictures of it before she was bitten on Feb. 7, the Department of Environment and Coastal Resources in Turks and Caicos said in a statement.“

I have two instant reaction to tales like this. The first is, “What an idiot!” The second is to think of puns and mean jokes, in this case, “Let’s give this woman a hand!” I know it isn’t a kind reaction, or compassionate, or empathetic. On the other hand (there I go again!), if I lost my hands trying to take a photo of a live shark close enough to bite me, I would declare myself an idiot and be awash in shame and self-hate.

Last July I wrote about some guy who injured himself grievously after deliberately lighting a firecracker that he had placed on his head. My feelings about this woman (“She wanted to figure out how to take a photo of a shark, but was stumped!”) are exactly the same. I don’t like the fact that insurance premiums go up because companies have to pay health policies for people who do things like blowing their own heads up and playing with sharks.

I know it’s a bad side of my character. Still, does the Golden Rule apply when there is no way in hell you would do what you are supposed to be sympathetic to the “other” who has been hurt by doing it?

Oh…it doesn’t matter what the species of the shark that attacked the woman was. It was a shark.

She’s gonna need a bigger brain…

VP Vance’s Speech and the Complete Unmasking of the Totalitarian American Left: Part II [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That’s the chest of CNN’s Jake Tapper above. He was making a little frowny-face yesterday for the idiots viewing CNN who are too dim to realize that the accusatory headline is a non-sequitur, like “I like ice cream, can you swim?” The White House suspending the AP’s White House privileges—that’s privileges, which are distinct from rights, Jake—has nothing to do with freedom of speech or even the First Amendment, so the implied hypocrisy is more fake news.

Added: On “Twitter/X” J.D. Vance responded to another journalist making the same “point”:

The remarkably negative (and ignorant, and biased) Axis media reaction to J.D. Vance’s speech in Germany proves one again that as often as President Trump exaggerates, calling the news media the “enemy of the people” was neither excessive, unfair nor untrue. That’s exactly what it is. It is now the enemy of democracy as well, and nothing illustrates that better than the rush to condemn the Vice-President for telling European leaders to stop censoring speech based on political content.

It takes special chutzpah for any media organization to accuse Trump of stifling press coverage when he has made himself more accessible to the news media in less than a month than Joe Biden was in four years. I would also venture that the Associated Press could get more useful information surfing the web that it ever got from Biden’s idiotic, stumbling, incompetent, lazy paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre. The AP has proved itself conflicted, partisan and anti-Trump as well as unreliable. Why should it be entitled to attend press briefings instead of, say, Ethics Alarms?

Also on CNN, Nick Paton Walsh attacked Vance’s speech while defending censorship to prevent “authoritarian regimes.” This was the excuse used to justify banishing Trump from social media. I suppose it was also the excuse for blocking coverage of and commentary on Hunter Biden’s laptop on news platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Those who would punish and censor speech always have “reasons,” but the real reason is maintaining their own power and crippling the functioning of democracy. Just listen to this hack…

“Vance’s complaints struck at the heart of a key difference in the role of free speech in Europe and the United States, a much fresher democracy. In Europe, free speech is paramount and enshrined in law, but so is responsibility for the safety of citizens. Some European legal systems suggest this means you cannot falsely shout there is a “fire” in a crowded theater and escape punishment if the resulting stampede causes injury simply because you had the right to shout “fire.” In the United States, the First Amendment means you can shout whatever you want. In the smartphone and post-9/11 era, Europe has prohibited some extremist activity online. It is still illegal to advocate for the Nazis in Germany, and it should not be controversial or mysterious why. The wildly rebellious press across Europe are a vibrant sign of its free speech. And the fringe parties Vance objected to being absent in Munich are growing in their popularity. Nobody is really being shut down.”

Hilarious! Enshrined in law “but”! If speakers, writers and artists can be censored and punished for words and opinions that some authority rules “unsafe,” then there is no free speech. It’s amazing that advocates for censorship still use Oliver Wendell Holmes’ thoroughly discredited “shouting fire in a crowded theater” analogy. Ken White of Popehat, perhaps the sharpest and most eloquent blogger in captivity until he was infected with the Trump Derangement virus, decisively explained in “Three generations of a hackneyed apologia for censorship are enough” how Holmes’s famous opinion has been misused to defend government censorship of speech that mentions or threatens violence without actually inciting it on the spot. This includes “hate speech,” which is what many of the European countries outlaw and what the totalitarian Left here would love to outlaw in the U.S. “Hate speech” would mean “speech that progressives hate.” (Knucklehead Tim Walz said on national TV that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment.) Walsh, like Walz, literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he is quoting an opinion he hasn’t read, and he definitely hasn’t bothered to read White’s explanation of why that defense of censorship is based on legal and constitutional ignorance.

CNN’s censorship rationalizing pales before CBS’s efforts, however. Incredibly, “Face the Nation’s” Margaret Brennan really and truly asserted to Marco Rubio that Hitler’s Germany used “freedom of speech” to spark the Holocaust. Kudos to the Secretary of State for not channeling Dan Ackroyd from the old Saturday Night Live “Point/Counterpoint” skit and responding, “Margaret you ignorant slut!” She deserved it.

Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet of the Month: CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Could we possibly have more irresponsible, untrustworthy, detestable broadcast journalists than we have now?

CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins supported the assassin of UnitedHealthCEO Brian Thompson in the “Twitter/X” post above, directing readers to a site set up by the shooter’s lawyer that featured a prominent link to a GoFundMe for the murderer’s defense. Luigi Mangione, who strains the use of the term “alleged” as he was caught on camera shooting the victim in the back and arrested with incriminating evidence on his person has become the darling of the sickest of the sick among progressives. Leftists ranging from Elizabeth Warren to the most unhinged of my Facebook friends have rationalized Mangione’s cowardly crime as “understandable.” “You can only push people so far. And then they start to take matters into their own hands,” slimed Warren (BOY she’s horrible!) Mangione faces charges of first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism.

After the disgusting tweet attracted appropriate criticism ( “This is @CNN — pimping the GoFundMe for a left wing assassin,” tweeted Ace of Spades, completely accurately) Collins took it down–this is known as “subsequent repairs” in negligence law—and then employed manifest deceit to defend herself. “In no way did I share a fundraising link for him,” she protested.

No, she posted a link to a website that had the fundraising link displayed at the top of its page. Her claim that the fact the website existed was “newsworthy” does not explain or excuse her promoting it on social media. Jorge Bonilla on Newsbusters rightly asks what the reaction would have been to a Fox News journalist who posted the address of a site that linked to a GoFundMe for J-6 rioters.

The Trump White House has opened the long overdue debate over whether openly biased, partisan, unprofessional and untrustworthy journalists should continue to have press credentials at White House briefings. I would expand that discussion to whether people like Kaitlan Collins should be recognized as journalists at all.

In the Rear-View Mirror: “Reflections On President’s Day, 2012: A United States Diminished in Power, Influence and Ideals”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

On President’s Day in 2012, I wrote a dispirited assessment of where the United States stood regarding spreading American ideals and values to other nations. This was in the context of Barack Obama’s feckless foreign policy, which, as with his puppet stand-in later, Joe Biden, consisted of threats and warnings (remember Obama’s “red line” in Syria?) without credibility of resolve. I thought about the post as I was contemplating how J.D. Vance was getting mockery and criticism from the Axis because he exhorted our allies in Europe to begin a new commitment to freedom of speech.

The main thrust of the essay was the question of whether the United States should be “the world’s policeman,” a situation that now has fallen into ethics zugzwang: it is irresponsible for the U.S. not to accept the role of world policeman, and irresponsible for us to accept it either.

“Quite simply, we can’t afford it,” I wrote. “Not with a Congress and an Administration that appear unwilling and unable to confront rising budget deficits and crushing debt with sensible tax reform and unavoidable entitlement reductions.” I found the 13-year old post useful and thought provoking for perspective purposes. It raised many questions. Is the U.S. better off today than in 2012, when I was so depressed about its prospects and integrity? What does it mean to “make Amerca great again” in 2025?

I’ll have some more 2025 thoughts at the end. Here is the rest of that post:

***

Yesterday Congress and the President passed yet another government hand-out of money it doesn’t have and refuses to raise elsewhere, among other things continuing to turn unemployment insurance, once a short-term cushion for job-seekers, into long-term government compensation for the unemployed. Part of the reckless debt escalation was caused by the last President [George W. Bush] unconscionably engaging in overseas combat in multiple theaters without having the courage or sense  to insist that the public pay for it. The current administration [the Obama Administration] is incapable of grasping that real money, not just borrowed funds, needs to pay for anything. The needle is well into the red zone on debt; we don’t have the resources for any discretionary military action.

Ron Paul thinks that’s a good thing, as do his libertarian supporters. President Obama, it seems, thinks similarly. They are tragically wrong. Though it is a popular position likely to be supported by the fantasists who think war can just be wished away, the narrowly selfish who think the U.S. should be an island fortress, and those to whom any expenditure that isn’t used to expand  cradle-to-grave government care is a betrayal of human rights, the abandonment of America’s long-standing world leadership in fighting totalitarianism, oppression, murder and genocide is a catastrophe for both the world and us. Continue reading →

VP Vance’s Speech and the Complete Unmasking of the Totalitarian American Left: Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Prelude.

Well, here I am again, starting off the Ethics Alarms day with a post related to politics and government. This is not a political blog, and I strive mightily to prevent it from being one. However, I cannot operate an ethics information and analysis site that fulfills (or, to be realistic, attempts to fulfill) the mission I have set for it and ignore massive, serious, indeed historic events and issues that have ethics principles not only at their core, but at risk because of them.

Those who have followed Ethics Alarms for the past decade know that I had made up my mind to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election because I had concluded that Donald Trump lacked literally every character trait, instinct and qualification that my study of leadership and the American Presidency had taught me that a U.S. President must have. I knew that Hillary Clinton and, of course, her husband were corrupt, dishonest and untrustworthy, but I also knew that she had the intellectual ability and at least some of the experience necessary to handle the job. I wrote dozens of posts about how unfit Donald Trump was, and that doesn’t take into account the Trump critiques I had written years before he had announced his candidacy in 2015.

Then, mere weeks from the election, I realized that the Democratic Party had rigged the nomination process to ensure Clinton’s victory, and that Clinton and the Democratic Party were ready, willing and eager to cheat in order to obtain power. How far that party (and the rotted news media that conspired with it) would go, as we now know, was fully revealed over the next eight years.

I decided, a couple of days before I had to vote, that it was a choice between an unfit candidate—Trump—and a dangerous, anti-democratic party ironically called the Democratic Party. I voted for neither as a matter of principle. I found myself surprised when my emotional reaction to Trump’s stunning upset was relief. The American system had, once again, gotten lucky. The public had recognized what I had, though almost too late, recognized myself.

An arrogant, elite, ruthless political party had the culture, society and government by the throat, and by a miraculous confluence of unlikely and indeed accidental events, had been at least temporarily foiled. It was a result that I analogized to the “futile and stupid” rebellion of the Deltas in the finale of “Animal House,” when the expelled Faber College students demonstrated their contempt for the system that had mistreated them by disrupting a parade and humiliating those in power.

And, memorably, the most chaotic of the rebels ended up a U.S. Senator.

The next four years proved my analysis of the Democratic Party correct, in fact too generous. It marshaled its allies in the news media, education, the law, the judiciary, academia, Big Tech, the federal bureaucracy and, of course the news media to launch what I have tagged as “the 2026 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck,” denying an elected U.S. President the mantle of legitimacy as well as the basic deference, respect, honor and cooperation a POTUS must have to carry out his agenda and policies. This divided the country to a dangerous extent. It set terrible precedents that I concluded, correctly, would damage the office and the future functioning of democratic institutions.

Worst of all, perhaps—it is a close competition—I saw an entire political party representing a large proportion of the public actively seeking to weaken and distort the First Amendment, the metaphorical beating heart of the unique structure our Founders created. This was (and is) a party that not only supports but relies upon a journalistic establishment that does not keep the public informed, but rather seeks to manipulate it by withholding information and employing partisan bias and advocacy in what are supposed to be objective news reports. This mutated Democratic Party also endorses censorship, using the usefully vague terms “hate speech” and “misinformation” to justify quashing dissenting views, opinions and analysis that the party deems a threat to its primacy.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The World Anti-Doping Agency, the International Tennis Integrity Agency & Professional Tennis Generally

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I rate this episode as pure King’s Pass misconduct by both organizations and professional tennis.

Jannik Sinner, the top-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, just got a three-month ban for testing positive for a banned anabolic steroid last March. He says he “accepted” the short ban, and why wouldn’t he? It means he won’t miss any Grand Slam tournaments. The French Open, the season’s next major, starts May 25 and the ban ends May 4. This is like baseball banning a starting pitcher for throwing a doctored ball for three games so he doesn’t miss any starts.

The International Tennis Integrity Agency had decided earlier not to suspend Sinner by buying his excuse for why he tested positive: the clostebol in his doping sample was due, see, to the player getting a massage from a trainer who had used the substance to help a wound on his finger heal quicker. Never mind that virtually every athlete caught using steroids has claimed “accidental” contamination. It is why baseball went to a strict liability system after its steroid scandal.

Ah, but professional tennis is more dependent on its big stars than baseball for its gate income and TV ratings, so suspending the #1 ranked player in the world has unpleasant ripple effects.

This convenient resolution of Sinner’s violation, however, is also causing some rippling. After the settlement was announced, three-time major champion Stan Wawrinka posted on X: “I don’t believe in a clean sport anymore …” # 8 ranked Daniil Medvedev, said, alluding to double standards (Ya think?), “I hope everyone can discuss with WADA and defend themselves like Jannik Sinner from now on.”

Continue reading →