This Is J.D. Vance’s Real Job During the Campaign: Interpreter

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Grilled by a CNN reporter over Donald Trump’s comments at the black journalists convention about Kamala Harris’s, uh, fluid ethnic identification, his running mate replied that they “don’t give me pause at all.” Vance continued, “Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon. She goes to Georgia two days ago, she was raised in Canada, she puts on a fake southern accent. She is everything to everybody and she pretends to be something different depending on which audience she’s in front of. I think it’s reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did.”

Bingo.

Trump needs an effective interpreter to periodically decipher his stream-of-consciousness riffs, and since it is clear that attacking, spinning, and misrepresenting the GOP Presidential nominee’s words as proof that he is a lying madman, racist, sexist Hitler monster Marvel supervillain is going to be the primary approach the mainstream media will take to cover this campaign, it is very fortunate that Trump named an articulate and fearless interlocutor to share the ticket with him. Vance is an interpreter.

Among the myriad reasons that Presidential nominees have selected their VPs, almost none of them having anything to do with whether the selections have sufficient experience, ability and qualifications to lead the country, that’s a better reason than most.

It Seems Increasingly Likely That Nobody Is Running the Government, the News Media Is Hiding It As Much As It Can, And the Public Is Too Dumb To Care. Nice.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

What’s going on here?

Oh, nothing much: just

a) a demented President who has been forcibly removed from his party’s ticket despite already engaging in a Presidential debate and being voted onto that ticket by millions of Democrats,

b) a DEI VP who has never received a single vote from anyone to be President being summarily installed, Soviet-style, by a shadowy body of party leaders, some out of elected office (like Barack Obama), as the new candidate,

c) the anointed Presidential candidate and the actual President who was kicked to the metaphorical curb both making appearances and meeting with foreign officials like they were President when quite possibly neither is acting in that role, without

d) the news media showing the least curiosity about…

…and instead following DNC memos dictating that it keep emphasizing that the DEI VP didn’t do what she really did, hadn’t said what she really had, and is “exciting” while it concentrates on calling the Republican VP candidate “weird”—you know, like Harrison Butker-–and throttling him for what he blathered indelicately in a single interview seven years ago, as

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Being Fair To Imane Khelif

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I sure am glad I had the sense (for a change) to wait a while before writing about what is likely to be the most lasting ethics controversy of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The initial hysteria in the conservative media didn’t add up. My prize for the worst headline goes to the conservative sports blog Outkick: “Olympic Boxer Pretending To Be A Woman Pummels Opponent in 26 Seconds, Making Her Cry.” Nice.

What happened to launch this mess was an Olympic women’s boxing march pitting Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini against each other. After 46 seconds Carini quit, something that almost never happens in in Olympic boxing. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee raised it, then sank to her knees, weeping. She told reporters that she quit because of the pain from those opening punches from her opponent, saying that she has never been hit so hard in her life. Instantly, critic made the episode part of the trans women in sports controversy, a la Lia Thomas et al. That was simply wrong, careless, sloppy and unethical. Here is how the conservative commentary collective PJ Media described the scene:

On Thursday, the Olympics put on a disgraceful show, pitting a man with XY chromosomes against a biological woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the 16 welterweight bout over Italy’s Angela Carini after pummeling his opponent’s head over and over again. After having her head slammed by the biological male for 46 seconds, Carini was done. She removed herself from the match and then crumbled to the mat in tears. Everyone who watched saw that the Italian boxer was no match for the Algerian, who had been disqualified from previous competitions for testing positive for male chromosomes. 

Wrong. Imane Khelif is not a biological man, but intersex, meaning that the proper analogy for her dilemma in Olympic competition is the intersex runner, Caster Semenya, whom I most recently discussed last fall. Here is how that post ended…

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Wow! An Ethical Quote of the Week From The Most Unlikely Source Of An Ethical Quote Imaginable…Black Lives Matter!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate Black voters by anointing Kamala Harris…and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public…. While the potential outcome of a Harris presidency may be historic, the process to achieve it must align with true democratic values. We have no idea where Kamala Harris stands on the issues.”

—–Black Lives Matter in a statement released last week.

I did not see that coming. What a wonderful example of how one must always try to judge the message rather than the messenger. The BLM position is true beyond dispute, and in some respects BLM is the ideal messenger to deliver it, were it not for the little matter of the organization being corrupt, racist, dishonest and untrustworthy. Let’s check: does the BLM website still say that Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown were murdered because of their race? Why yes, it does!

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Perfect! NYC’s Democratic Mayor’s Lawyer Reveals That Party’s Attitude Toward the Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As anyone who can read could have predicted, even New York’s wildly left-leaning Supreme Court ruled against Mayor Eric Adams’ unconstitutional attempt to stop buses full of illegal immigrants from dropping them off in that hallowed “sanctuary,” New York City.

In January, the mayor filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies that had transported asylum seekers to New York City from Texas and Florida.. The lawsuit alleged that the bus companies violated New York’s Social Services Law by dropping off the illegals without providing a means of support, and sought over $700 million to compensate the city for the cost of shelter, food and health care. The suit was breathtaking in its hypocrisy—sanctuary? Hello?—as well as about as close to frivolous as a law suit can be without making me file an ethics complaint against the lawyers. The New York Civil Liberties Union said that the Mayor’s actions were unconstitutional. The court agreed.

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Open Forum: Go For the Ethics Gold!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Ugh. I always forget that the Olympics inevitably sparks lots of ethics controversies that I have to cover here despite finding the spectacle boring, corrupt and annoying. So I’m bound to miss some juicy issues—like this one, Australian swimming coach Bret Hawke accusing the Chinese team of cheating because a swimmer’s performance in the pool was “not humanly possible.” They used to say that about the four minute mile, if I recall. Or is this just more “Don’t trust China; China is asshole” stuff?

You don’t have to write about Olympics ethics, of course. But the starting pistol is loaded…

Olympics Ethics Quiz: The Sexist Commentator

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Horror.

Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.

After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.

Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.

Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was Ballard’s dismissal, fair, proportional and just?

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Presenting a Continuing Ethics Alarms Series Until November: “This Is Kamala Harris”

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I couldn’t get the video to embed, but here’s the link to the Democratic Party’s anointed candidate for President angrily chiding Americans for celebrating Christmas because children illegally transported across the border “won’t have a Merry Christmas.”

Evidence like this will be buried, ignored, or denied by the mainstream media, just like Hunter Biden’s laptop, until enough Americans have been deceived to put Harris in the White House. Meanwhile, of course, each word out of Donald Trump’s ever-open mouth will be spun and fact-checked to put him in the worst light possible. (Sometimes he will deserve it.)

Harris’s distorted values, cracked logic, obnoxious character and arrogance are all intolerable, and most normal people will see that, if they only are allowed to read, watch and hear. The mainstream media is the enemy of the people. Ethics Alarms pledges to do its best to help foil them.

Before Offering Second Thoughts J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy, These Relevant Horror Stories:

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was literally in the middle of a preparing a post about the cultural sickness J.D. Vance was allegedly trying (and failing miserably) to focus public attention on when he mocked “childless cat ladies” dictating U.S. policies when these two awful stories came across my screen.

In the first, I learned that Parker Scholtes, 2, was found dead in her parents’ Honda SUV parked outside their home in the Tucson suburb of Marana. Her father, an irresponsible man-child named Christopher Scholtes, had left the baby “to nap,” that is, to broil, for more than three hours on July 9. He said he left her in the car with the air conditioner on (like a good dad, or his warped idea of one), but got involved playing PlayStation video games and didn’t check on her until three hours had gone by. He confessed to police that he knew the car’s engine would automatically shut off after 30 minutes, but just got, you know, carried away and lost track of time. You know how it flies by when you’re having fun.

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Flagrant Virtue-Signaling of the Year: CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services Yiannis Exarchos

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m sure glad I ignore the Olympics as the corrupt, greed-infested fiasco it had been for decades, because if I gave a rip, the Paris Olympics would have my head exploding more frequently than Old Faithful blows. The whole enterprise appears to be run by silly, incompetent, unethical bureaucrats and con artists.

Here’s a particularly nauseating example: the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) Yiannis Exarchos decided to burnish his woke creds by telling reporters in Paris that his organization updated its guidelines for camera operators, most of whom are men, to inveigh against “sexist” portrayals of female athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics. “Unfortunately, in some events they are still being filmed in a way that you can identify that stereotypes and sexism remains, even from the way in which some camera operators are framing differently men and women athletes,” Exarchos said, making no sense at all. “Women athletes are not there because they are more attractive or sexy or whatever. They are there because they are elite athletes.” Exarchos said that the problem primarily stems from “unconscious bias,” which leads to camera operators and TV editors favoring more close-up shots of women than of men.

Oh, shut the HELL up! TV editors favor more close-up shots of women than men because women are more attractive than men, the demographics of Olympic viewing for many events slants male, and there is nothing offensive or disrespectful about showing Olympic athletes like this German sprinter,

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