About That Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony…

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

A bizarre sequence in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony has created instant anger, controversy and, of course, social media controversy. At one point, a group of drag performers, transsexuals performers costumes to look like something in that range created a tableau that seemed to evoke a very weird version of the Last Supper. Many critics, including Elon Musk, declared the number blasphemous and an intentional insult to Christians. The organizers, cowards and liars as such functionaries tend to be when controversy strikes, claimed that any resemblance to The Last Supper was unintentional, and this was supposed to comment on “the absurdity of violence against human beings” because a giant platter with a representation of the Greek God Dionysus had the drag Last Supper as its backdrop, or perhaps representing the menu at the Last Supper. See?

Oh.

Okaaaay.

You got that? Do you believe it?

Was it ethical to include this spectacle in televised, live entertainment seen all over the world? This seems like a good opportunity to use one of the ethics decision-making models. Let’s roll out the “TWELVE QUESTIONS TOWARD ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING,” adapted from Harvard Business School Professor Laura Nash’ s 1981 Harvard Business Review article, “Ethics without the Sermon.” (The ceremony also included this…

…an image of a famous French queen holding her own severed head. Someone else can figure that one out. At least it wasn’t Kathy Griffin).

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Incompetent Elected Official and Ethics Dunce: VP Kamala Harris (Surprise!)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This shouldn’t be hard to grasp: incompetence really does matter in a President, as does trust.

Kamala Harris had a private discussion with Benjamin Netanyahu, a head of state. Diplomacy 101 dictates that when sensitive matters are discussed, neither party to such discussion reveals the details of what is said, nor does either party make statements after the meeting that undermine either the relationship between the two individuals, nor their respective nations, nor the interests and objectives of those nations.

This isn’t hard, nor should it be.

But for Kamala Harris, it is. This is a problem.

Having met with the Israel Prime Minister, Harris initially said that the U.S. has an “unwavering commitment” to Israel, its right to exist and its security. She called Hamas a “brutal terrorist organization.” Then she said,

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The Ethics Mission, If You Choose To Accept It: Don’t Let The News Media Deceive The Public About Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I don’t think the Citizen Free Press is being dishonest or misleading in its characterization of the compilation above. Kamala Harris has, many times, expressed her support for basic Marxism, as indeed the “equity” component of the Left’s current obsession (and cover-phrase for “good” racial and gender discrimination) is a Marxist buzzword. Harris’s assertion that fairness demands that “everybody ends up in the same place” is both alien to American values and Communism exemplified (or what Communists claim to seek, snce the real goals of political leaders under Communism is to dominate and dictate to the public).

That’s a valuable set of clips for many reasons, prime among them is that it shows who and what Harris is just as the news media—the Enemy of the People, as Donald Trump correctly said in one of his most perceptive moments—is trying mightily to re-introduce Harris to the public as something she isn’t. Many things, in fact. Moderate. Competent. Trustworthy. Genuine. “Exciting.” Likable. Honest. Smart. Harris is none of these things.

In the one of the clips above, Harris actually says that equality means “everyone should get the same thing.” That’s NOT what equality means; it has especially doesn’t mean that in this country. Equality means that everyone has the same rights under the law, among them the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not mean that everyone has some right to “get” the same thing regardless of their ability, talent, willingness to take risks, work ethic, determination, diligence, virtue and skill. Kamala Harris is either ignorant, not very bright, confused, or lying: personally, I think she’s all four, which makes her smug demeanor while spouting this garbage particularly infuriating.

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Stop Making Me Half-Defend Kamala Harris…Well, Maybe 1/3. Or 1/8?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The old Ethics Alarms Mailbag—okay, my email account—yielded an intriguing question from esteemed commenter JutGory, who wrote, “Should Harris be criticized for leaving up a tweet that she knows is not true, which she acknowledged in a follow up tweet? I know you have criticized people who have removed bad tweets as covering something up.  Then, is it unfair to criticize Harris?”

You remember the despicable Jussie Smollett, right? Ethics Alarms did several posts on this Fick. In 2019, Smollett, an African-American actor, claimed he was just minding his own business in Chicago on a cold winter night when he was attacked by two MAGA crazies in ski masks who doused him with bleach and slipped a rope around his neck while calling him racist and homophobic slurs. Smollett’s tale made little sense and immediately attracted suspicions that it was a hoax, which, in fact, it was. But Kamala Harris immediately posted the tweet above…because she’s a race-baiter and bigot, as well as an asshole. Never mind “believe all women,” Harris advocates “believe anyone who accuses MAGA supporters of being racists, no matter how far-fetched the accusation is.” Unity! Harris foments hate and division, because it’s good for Democrats, or so they think.

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Most Competent Campaigner of the Year: Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Say what you like about Donald Trump, and if it isn’t one of the Big Lies, I may well agree. But this….

…holding another rally in Butler is pure political genius, and gutsy too. Imagine if Booth had missed, and Abe had announced, “I’m going back to Ford’s Theater to see how that play turned out!”

John Wayne would have loved it…BOTH John Waynes, the real life political conservative, and the icon he played in movies. It’s the equivalent of Rooster Cogburn taking the reins in his teeth and charging at Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang. The message is “You don’t scare me, assholes, and here I come!”

It is political genius, and a great display of classic American defiance.

Bravo.

Busted! The “Completely Independent” Government Transparency Website” Proves It Is Just Another Democratic Party Propaganda Agent [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The effort across the news media and elsewhere in the Axis to distort Kamala Harris’s past record and documented positions sufficiently to render the public totally misinformed regarding the candidate whom Democrats are offering for President in November is rapidly reaching comic proportions. It reached Orwellian proportions some time ago.

GovTrack promotes itself as being independent, unbiased,and trustworthy. For five years, it included an entry on that esteemed site that ranked Harris as the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2019—more liberal than, for example, Bernie Sanders, who is a proto-Communist, and Elizabeth Warren, who advocates a confiscatory wealth tax, wants to cancel most student loan debt, proposes to break up Big Tech companies, and wants a $20 trillion “Medicare for all” program paid for by taxing the living daylights out of businesses. Kamala’s more radical leftist profile is not, one may assume, a policy agenda the majority of Americans favor, so our unethical journalists and related villains are trying mightily to convince voters that Harris “isn’t what she is.”

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Ethics Quiz: Bury My Medal At Wounded Knee [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Once again, I thought a headline was a joke when I first read it:“Pentagon to review Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers for 1890 Wounded Knee actions.” The headline was at Stars and Stripes, though, not The Babylon Bee.

The reassessment was requested by Congress in 2022 on a day when it was feeling particularly woke and I guess had nothing better to worry about. Now Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a “five-person panel of experts”—experts on what it was like to be in the cavalry in 1890, I guess?—to review the legitimacy of the Medals of Honor awarded to twenty U.S. soldiers for their actions during the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, eventually regarded as a massacre of Native Americans after Dee Brown’s best-selling account of the battle won acclaim and its own awards.

“The scope of the [panel’s] review is limited to reviewing each [Wounded Knee Creek Medal of Honor] awardee’s individual actions during this specific engagement on or about Dec. 29, 1890,” Austin wrote in a memo made public this week. The panel “may consider the context of the overall engagement as appropriate, including as necessary to understand each … recipient’s individual actions.”

The now infamous battle saw the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry kill or wound over 350 members of the Lakota tribe, with about half of those killed being women and children. 25 U.S. soldiers also died in the incident, which was not planned as a massacre or even a confrontation.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it fair to revoke a soldier’s medal of valor under these circumstances?

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Does It Matter If Biden’s “Live” Oval Office Speech Wasn’t Really Live? [Significantly Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Does it matter? Are you kidding? Of course it matters! It matters a great deal. It also matters that the news media seems remarkably uninterested in determining the truth. This is because they can’t handle the truth, or rather are afraid that their letting the pubic know the truth will undermine “democracy.”

I know. It doesn’t make sense. But this is what the corruption of our institutions has done to the nation.

Sharp-eyed viewers, perhaps already inclined toward conspiracy theories after realizing that they have been lied to for three years about the President’s mental condition, claimed that the time displayed on Biden’s watch during the speech last night about his decision to abandon his re-election campaign (after telling George Stephanopolos that he would only quit if God himself ordered him to) was different from that time the “live” speech was broadcast.

This would be easy to settle if the White House didn’t lie routinely, and if the hack news media were diligent about exposing such cheats. Determining what is really happening, happened, or will happen with this administration, however, is well-nigh impossible, and our betters in power like it that way. Let’s see: what is the more likely explanation for the time discrepancy? We have…

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Still More Mandated Rhetoric From the Axis of Unethical Conduct

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ann Althouse put that montage together, highlighting the sudden use of “selfless” among the agents of the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats, and the mainstream media as they work to rig this election the way they tried to rig the last—let’s see, at least four, to favor the Democratic Party’s candidate. I wrote about the same phenomenon yesterday here, and it looks like this will be an ongoing theme until November. The sooner the public realizes how Orwellian this is, and how fond the Left is of the tactic, the safer we will all be.

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