Not Vengeance, Just Competence…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My plan is to do another Post 2024 Election Freak-Out Update today, but this chapter deserves its own post.

Last night while watching the DirecTV news mix, which allows me to sample CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and BBC America simultaneously, I was puzzled to see Rachel Maddow, snearing and mugging as usual, featuring old Watergate headlines about the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when President Nixon ordered a succession of Attorneys General to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who, the assumption went, was getting too close to uncovering Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up.

“What does that have to do with the price of beans?” I asked myself. I clicked on Rachel, which I usually won’t do unless there is a loaded pistol aimed at my head. Of course! Interim D.C. U.S. attorney Edward R. Martin, Jr. had dismissed about 30 federal prosecutors who worked on the January 6, 2021 cases over the past four years. The prosecutors who had worked on Jack Smith’s lawfare prosecutions of Trump for the mishandling of classified material at Mar-A-Largo and his alleged attempt to steal (back) the 2024 election have already been pink-slipped or soon will be. Rachel, repeating the agreed-upon Axis talking point, was saying that this is Trump emulating Nixon, preventing “justice” and hobbling law enforcement. CNN got around to the same narrative a bit later.

Indeed, all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. President Trump would have been incompetent, foolish and naive not to fire all of these lawyers. Maybe some of them were ethical and capable of independent thought (as their ethics rules require), but there is no way to figure out which. Most of them have been poisoned by the “Deep State “Get Trump!” culture seeded bt Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others. As with the FBI and intelligence personnel who are losing their ability to sabotage this President in his second term as they did in his first, those lawyers heading out the door cannot be trusted. It would make no more sense to allow them to undermine President Trump with leaks and worse than it would have made sense to keep Jack Smith around; luckily, he had the sense to resign.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“When you are flying on an airplane with your loved ones, which every one of us in this room has, do you pray that your plane lands safely and gets you to your destination, or do you pray that the pilot has a certain skin color?”

—Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, during yesterday’s press briefing that focused on the tragic Reagan National Airport collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter.

Leavitt, the youngest Presidential paid liar in the history of the position (See? She’s “historic” too!), issued more powerful, well-expressed and memorable statements in her first week than her DEI predecessor did during her entire tenure. That fact, which couldn’t escape even the most biased of the reporters in the room, made her Ethics Quote of the Week more striking. [The transcript of yesterday’s briefing, is here.]

The astounding thing to ponder is that there probably are hard-wired woke fanatics who would prefer to plummet to their deaths in a plane flown by a pilot of the “right” ethnicity.

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Cognitive Dissonance Scale Lesson For Senate Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have mentioned here frequently that one of two things I learned in college that have been most useful in my life and career is Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Scale. The concept illustrated by the scale is also one of the most useful tools for ethical analysis, often essential to answering the question, “What’s going on here?” the entry point to many perplexing situations. Check the tag: it just took me 15 minutes to scroll though the posts that got it. I was surprised to find that I didn’t use the tag until 2014, when the scale helped me conclude that the Tea Party, then in ascendancy, was “doomed by a powerful phenomenon it obviously doesn’t understand: Cognitive Dissonance.” Heard much about the Tea Party lately? See, I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says… I wrote then,

As psychologist Leon Festinger showed a half a century ago, we form our likes, dislikes, opinions and beliefs to a great extent based on our subconscious reactions to who and what they are connected with and associated to. This is, to a considerable extent, why leaders and celebrities are such powerful influences on society. It explains why we tend to adopt the values of our parents, and it largely explains many marketing and advertising techniques that manipulate our desires and preferences. Simply put, if someone we admire adopts a position or endorses a product, person or idea, he or she will naturally raise it in our estimation. If however, that position, product, person or idea is already extremely low in our esteem, even though his endorsement might raise it, even substantially, his own status will suffer, and fall. He will slide down the admiration scale, even if that which he endorses rises. If what the individual endorses is sufficiently deplored, it might even wipe out his positive standing entirely.

The implications of this phenomenon are many and varied, and sometimes complex. If a popular and admired politician espouses a policy, many will assume the policy is wise simply because he supports it. If an unpopular fool then argues passionately for the same policy, Festinger’s theory tells us, it might..

1. Raise the fool’s popularity, if the policy is sufficiently popular.

2. Lower support for the policy, if he is sufficiently reviled, and even

3. Lower the popularity of the admired politician, who will suffer for being associated with an idea that had been embraced by a despised dolt.

This subconscious shifting, said Festinger, goes on constantly, effecting everything from what movies we like to the clothes we wear to how we vote.

Here, for the heaven-knows-how-many-th time, is the scale in simplified form…

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A Nelson For Disney and “Snow White”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“The Nelson,” the Ethics Alarms designation for very special episodes of swell-earned schadenfreude, was introduced in 2023 in a post about…Disney’s live-action reboot of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the 1937 animated film that began building the Disney entertainment empire. Thus it is nicely symmetrical for Nelson to give his trademark “Ha ha!” to the trailer of this slow-motion disaster, which has set what is believed to be a YouTube record with, as of yesterday, 40,383 “likes” and 1,012,299 “dislikes.” The film is hitting theaters in March. Ethics Alarms warned Disney about what was bound to happen if and when this botched project ever got out of the cutting room. I wrote in part,

The ethics value defied here is competence, and what we are seeing is the classic sunk costs fallacy in its classic form. The Vietnam War was the most painful example of this breach of life competence and common sense, which holds that devoting a lot of time and/or resources to a failed project argues for devoting more of the same, lest those “sunk costs” go to waste. In reality however, what is being missed is that fact that whether or not one has invested a great deal in a lost cause, its status as a project that has proven itself unworthy of investment is unaltered. Doing what Disney is doing with the “Snow White” project is called “throwing good money after bad.” It is bad business—incompetent, wasteful, and irresponsible.

First, Disney woke fanatics thought it made sense to cast a Snow White-of-Color, which makes no sense since the story makes such a big deal about how “fair” the heroine is. Then, because a single au courant little person actor complained about the dwarfs in the classic fairy tail, Disney eliminated them in favor of these dorks…

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 17: My Hanging Up Hang-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Two days ago I had a terse disagreement with a (another) Trump-Deranged relative who kept throwing Axis talking points at me like bread crumbs to pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Then when she was out of legitimate arguments…actually, long after she was out of legitimate arguments, she hung up on me in the middle of my sentence.

I have never been tolerant of that rude, insulting tactic. I regard it as the equivalent of a slap in the face or a punch in the mouth, except more cowardly. She almost immediately called back to apologize with a classic “I’m sorry but…” message, but so far, I am not in the mood to take her calls. I have never hung up the phone on a friend, relative or colleague. Unsolicited salespeople, yes, in fact, almost always. Not anyone whom I respect, however, and I expect the same courtesy.

I know that some of my extreme reaction to that tactic is because my late wife, in the worst of her alcoholic relapses when she was defensive, feeling guilty and hardly in her right mind, hung up on me a few times. Nonetheless, my bias against that conduct is emotional, visceral and, frankly, justified.

Is that a gender-linked thing, I wonder? I have never had a man hang up on me, but more women than I could count on one hand have done it. Grace also had friends and family members hang up on her, to which her response was to call back, then hang up on them.

There’s the mad-hanger-upper calling me again on my cell, fourth time today.

I think I’ll let her stew a bit longer. Yeah, I think that’s what I’ll do…

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

As I turn the topic choice over to you, I’m going to choose now to mention the astonishing gaslighting going on yesterday at Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing and on CNN and MSNBC as they did their best to echo the nonsensical fantasy version of the FBI being painted by such hucksters as Senator Amy Klobuchar. Patel has been a harsh critic of the FBI, as anyone who has paid any attention in the past decade or so is forced to be. The organization is political, frequently incompetent, and untrustworthy. Yet over and over yesterday I heard that it was completely non-partisan, had no agenda but to serve justice, and is staffed by heroes. Even though Patel’s opening statement documented many examples that contradict this idealized image (which is promoted in the entertainment media to an absurd, indeed boring extent), the same message kept coming: the FBI is wonderful. How dare anyone criticize it?

Given the ugly history of the agency, this “It isn’t what it is” defense is especially weird.

There. Whew! As Jimmy Durante used to say, “I’m glad I got that out. On my last X-ray, it showed up as a safety pin!”

Again: How Does One Ethically Respond When One’s Friends Are Slipping Into The Throes Of Madness?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Nah, the Trump Deranged aren’t losing their frickin’ minds…

That’s the most recent cartoon from Ann Telnaes, that witty, subtle, objective and non-partisan political cartoonist who quit the Washington Post who didn’t think her juvenile submission was worth publishing. So now she’s operates from her substack, issuing brilliant art like that. Incredibly, one of my oldest and most accomplished friends posted that crap—it’s the equivilent of a schoolboy drawing of the unpopular kid with blacked out teeth and horns—with approval on his Facebook page, where his decision was roundly praised as he revealed that he subscribed to her visual hate-fests. This is the equivalent of someone announcing that he has decided to subscribe to the “Turd of the Week” service. Another equally rational, intelligent Facebook friend until he went bonkers posted a long, irrelevant quote from the Nuremberg trials about the nature of fascism, and everyone metaphorically nodded and applauded as if it has anything to do with current events.

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Look! Another Study Showing That What Everybody Knew Anyway Is Probably True…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A new study concludes that parents probably do have a favorites among their children.

Parents always deny this, of course. Such a preference would make any parent feel guilty, so they are in permanent denial. The favorite child reaps the benefits of his or her status, and the lesser regarded children are told that they are petty, jealous, and paranoid. Frequently, in my experience, the “Mom likes you best!” accusation works wonders, and the guilt-ridden parent will then bend over backwards to avoid any appearance of favoritism, even to the point of favoring the other child or children.

The study in question, however, seems pretty worthless. Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta and the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Studies in Population, thinks that all the study does is confirm what most people already believe. The researchers acknowledged limitations in the study, and write that “the reasons why parents treat their children differently are likely more complex and extend beyond the factors explored.” Oh.

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Ethics Notes on the Reagan National Airport Collision Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I live less than 15 minutes from Reagan National Airport, so last night’s deadly collision between an American Airlines commuter jet and an Army helicopter from Fort Belvoir was just about the only news available on satellite or network after 9 pm. yesterday. Why, after all this time, is this still the practice in news reporting? All four local networks, plus the PBS outlet, and CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, reported exactly the same lack of developments for the rest of the evening. This used to puzzle me when there was a major news story when I was a kid. The practice makes no sense, wastes money, and leads to not-so-bright people, which is to say most talking heads and reporters on the scene, to resort to saying silly things to fill dead air. What is this, virtue-signaling? To show they care? Why don’t all of broadcast news sources have an advance, rotating agreement for one of them to cover these things after the others put up a screen that states, “We at [station or network] care about X, and you will find complete coverage at [the designated pool broadcast location]. We will let you know about any substantive developments”?

Literally nothing happened last night after the crash itself and the rescue teams arrived. Reagan quickly announced that it was suspending flights at least until morning. Meanwhile, we were hearing dumb statements. A couple of far away videos of the accident showed a tiny light, the aircraft, being met by another tiny light, the copter, followed by brief flash and a hint of something falling into the Potomac. These videos would have had to be explained if one saw them out of context, yet one of the newscasters introducing one felt required to issue a trigger warning: “We must warn you, these images are extremely disturbing.” No, they weren’t. Anyone who is extremely disturbed by little flashes of light needs to be in a home for the bewildered.

At around 11 pm, someone on CNN felt the need to ask some guest in the airline industry who had nothing substantive to say, “What would you tell anyone watching who fears for her life and those of her loved ones in future flights as a result of this tragedy?” The guest blathered something innocuous, but should have said, “I would recommend that anyone who reacts like that brush up on their understanding of statistics and critical thinking. This event has literally no significance as far as calculating the safety of air travel.” The exchange reminded me of the argument I had just had with my occasionally woke-addled sister, who said that she was fearful of going to a movie theater because of the risks posed by legal semi-automatic rifles being legal. (She isn’t really, but was desperate for an anti-Second Amendment argument.) Even asking a question like that makes the vulnerable, the hysterical and the stupid (Hey, wasn’t that the title of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western?) dumber still. It’s irresponsible and incompetent.

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Let’s Thank Ex-Senator Menendez for Giving Us Such A Valuable Review Of Rationalizations At His Sentencing

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I find miscreants and wrong-doers who whine, grovel and weep as they face the just consequences of their crimes particularly despicable. Give me the defiant, unapologetic variety, like Ruth in “Ozark,” who when looking down the barrel of a pistol wielded by the mother of a cartel leader she had assassinated, says, “I’m not sorry. Your son was a murdering bitch, and now I know where he got it from.” As the woman aims the gun at her heart and pauses, Ruth shouts “Well, are you going to fucking do this shit or not?”

Bang.

Yesterday a sobbing Robert Menendez begged the court for mercy after being found incredibly guilty of accepting bribes from foreign governments and businessmen in exchange for cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz convertible among other riches. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison for selling out his Senate office to enrich himself. The New Jersey Democrat and former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wept as he argued, “Your honor, I am far from a perfect man. I have made more than my share of mistakes and bad decisions. I’ve done far more good than bad. I ask you, your honor, to judge me in that context.” Let’s see, that’s…

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