I LOVE This Lawsuit! It Might Be the Best “Great Stupid” Lawsuit Yet!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Mohammad Yusuf, a 43-year-old Chicago police officer, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city because it refuses to allow him to change his race from “white” to “of color,” or something. The Chicago police department allows cops to change their gender identity according to whim, and he argues that this is a double standard.

Yusuf “currently identifies as Egyptian and African American.” When he first joined the force in 2004, the Great Stupid had not yet spread darkness over the land, and he only had a few race option to choose from, he says. Now he believes Caucasian is inaccurate, and besides, despite the woke Chicago police department claiming to have a race-neutral and merit-based promotion system, Yusuf claims he has been “repeatedly bypassed” for promotions in favor of less qualified black officers.

No, really? I don’t think Chicago would ever be a party to something like that, do you? Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, as the saying goes.

Did I mention how much I love this lawsuit?

Yusuf even provided his 23andMe genetic testing results to prove he is mixed race and it all depends on which he chooses to identify as when it comes to tribal designations and their DEI rewards. Still, the police department obstinately refuses to allow him to be black. It’s strange, his lawyers argue, that other officers can change their genders on official records, since no genetic test would back that up. That Y chromosome is there for life. Is this not a double standard?

“While other CPD officers are afforded the opportunity to have their gender identity corrected to match their lived experience, Officer Yusuf and others in similar positions are barred from obtaining accurate racial designations that align with their racial identity,” the suit says.

Isn’t this great?

Biden-Supporters Are Officially Ethically Estopped From Complaining That Trump Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

President Biden went on Seth Myers’s late night show this week to bask in a fawning interview by a partisan supporter who wouldn’t ask him any questions harder than “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?,” and still managed to screw up.

After the show’s taping, Biden was confronted by reporters while licking an ice-cream cone and asked when a Gaza ceasefire might occur. “I hope by… the end of the weekend,” Biden answered. “My national security advisor tells me we’re close. We’re close. It’s not done yet. My hope is by next Monday, we’ll have a ceasefire,” Biden said. That was great news for anti-Israel progressives, and right before the Michigan primary, where Biden was likely to face Arab protest votes against his re-nomination.

Continue reading →

Thinking About “The Box”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I recently re-watched “The Box,” which my wife and I had first seen more than a decade ago. It is a horror movie based on the 1970 short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, one of the writers of the original “Twilight Zone,” and Matheson’s conceit, a mash-up of science fiction and ethics as his work often was, had been turned into an episode of one of the reboots of Rod Serling’s creation.

If I recall, I didn’t make it to the end of the film the first time, because the set-up was so annoying. A strange, disfigured man shows up at a couple’s door with a strange box in his hands. It consists of a red button under a locked glass dome that must be opened with a key. The man explains to the stunned wife (her husband is at work, getting bad news about his job) that they have been chosen to be the recipients of a gift. All they have to do is push the red button, and the man will return to hand over a brief case filled with a million dollars, which will be tax free. However, when the button is pushed, someone, somewhere in the world, will die. He assures the wife that they won’t know the doomed individual. They have only 24 hours to consider the offer, at the conclusion of which the man will return and take the box away to offer to someone else.

It is, obviously, an ethics hypothetical that has been posed in many different ways through the years. What bothered me originally, and worries me now, is that anyone I would care to have in my community would ever push the button. (As you can guess, one of the couple does—“Why not? It’s just a box…” and a chain reaction is launched that causes havoc.)

Continue reading →

Regarding THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Apparently, as I have noted before, the Biden Administration doesn’t believe in firing anyone—well, anyone who doesn’t behave like this clown—which is itself a form of incompetence and avoidance of responsibility. A competent President who wasn’t more concerned with avoiding conflicts with the loosely-allied progressive tribes in his party than with upholding standards of conduct, ethics, and performance under his authority would fire everyone behind that screed above.

All right, he would do it immediately after giving Merrick Garland, Pete Buttigieg, Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Dr. Miguel Cardona, Alejandro Mayorkas, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and Karine Jean-Pierre their well-earned pink slips.

No executive in any organization has to tolerate public dissent like this regarding his or her leadership. For a President, such open defiance is divisive, confusing to the public, disloyal and disrespectful. It also erodes trust. The proper way for any staff member in any pursuit at any level to express his or her disagreement with the organization’s policies and actions is to do so privately, through proper channels, or publicly after resigning. Those are the only ethical options, and the latter course has severe ethical limitations based on confidentiality and mutual trust.

Having a staff express disagreement with a President and his administration as the letter jaw-dropping above does is unprecedented, and it had better not become institutionalized, because no government—indeed, no organization—can function effectively and with the full confidence of its constituency and stake-holders that permits such rebellions.

Moreover, even if such grandstanding could be justified—there must be an exception out there somewhere—this surely wouldn’t be an acceptable precedent. The letter above absurdly supports an act of self-terrorism by a mentally-disturbed fool, thus aligning themselves with the radical agent of chaos who issued this tweet…

Brilliant. This New York-based writer and apologist for terrorism lumps protesting peacefully, dissent, marching and heckling politicians in the same category as suicide, rioting and law-breaking. Yet even he has a better grasp on reality than “the Staffers for Ceasefire.” In a related tweet, he suggests to these fools, “The best eulogy you can offer Bushnell is resigning en masse.”

Exactly. By all means, honor that pathetic would-be martyr.

Theirs isn’t even smart dissent, persuasive dissent, or patriotic dissent. The letter represents a group of people who are making policy recommendations above their pay-grade, literally, and displaying their biases and ignorance while doing so.

Biden should fire each and every one of them. That he doesn’t and won’t would be proof of his unfitness to lead and incompetence as a Chief Executive even if he could sing ” I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General General” backwards in 12 languages, including Urdu.

OK, I Know “Mary Poppins” Well Enough That When I Heard That the BBC Had Ruled That It Contained “Offensive Language,” I Immediately Knew Why

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Why, that is, other than the fact that the UK has been lobotomized by The Great Stupid even more than the U.S. has.

Do you know what was “offensive” in one of my all-time favorite movies without cheating? Think, now…

Time’s up!

It’s this: Admiral Boom, a senile neighbor of the Banks family whose sole purpose in the plot is to set up a running gag showing how the Banks’ and their servants routinely deal with his shooting off a cannon (the house shakes, furniture slides around, things fall off shelves, hilarity reigns), twice refers to “Hottentots.”

The British Board of Film Classification announced that the film was resubmitted for a rating this month in preparation for a theatrical re-release. The Borad reclassified if from “G” to “PG” for discriminatory language, a spokesperson explained. “Mary Poppins (1964) includes two uses of the discriminatory term ‘Hottentots’…While “Mary Poppins” has a historical context, the use of discriminatory language is not condemned, and ultimately exceeds our guidelines for acceptable language. We therefore classified the film PG for discriminatory language.” The term was once used by the British to describe the Khoikhoi and San nomadic tribes in southern Africa—surely you remember them?

Continue reading →

The Self-Terrorism of the Late Aaron Bushnell

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I decided that we don’t need to see Bushnell’s last act, setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. You can find the video if you look. Publicizing that pointless suicide only gives some small purpose to a deranged stunt that doesn’t deserve the attention.

The 25-year-old a cyberdefense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas self-immolated Buddhist-style two days ago, dousing himself with gasoline and saying on the scene, “I am an active duty member of the US Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

” I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he continued, “but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”

“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” he added, and shouted “Free Palestine!” in flames as his last words.

Whatever. Ram-a-lam-a-ding dong.

Continue reading →

Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun: Trying to Pretend That Another Murder by an Illegal Immigrant Isn’t Blood on Biden’s Hands

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

On today’s CNN’s “AC360,” host Anderson Cooper described the “horrifying” details of student Laken Hope Riley’s murder on the University of Georgia campus last week, then quickly pivoted to spinning that “the revelation the suspect was in this country unlawfully” had caused the murder to be “politicized.” Earlier, CNN’s Jake Tapper similarly adopted the “Republicans pounce!” tactic, saying “They’re seizing on this as an example of Biden’s failure to protect the American people and secure the border.”

Damn right, because that’s what it is. This death should be politicized: it’s Willie Horton all over again, except that Biden and the open-borders Democrats didn’t just goof by releasing one dangerous criminal to prey on the public, they have released many, and are releasing many more. Trump on Truth Social said the obvious, that Riley’s murder should’ve ‘never happened.’” Of course it should never have happened. Illegal immigrants shouldn’t be allowed to roam free, and this one had already been arrested more than once.

Continue reading →

Did Oscar Hammerstein Jr. Have an Ethics Problem?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A series of random events have caused my mind to wander over to “Carousel,”the second musical by the legendary team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), following their ground-breaking “Oklahoma!” The 1945 work was adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play “Liliom,” and although it is a favorite of most critics (declared by TIME as the best musical of the 20th Century, for example, but what does TIME know?), its plot and characters become more troubling the longer one thinks about them. Rodgers said it was his favorite of his musicals with Oscar, and he was definitely in top form; I think his Overture to “Carousel” may be the best thing he ever wrote.

For the “hero” of the musical, Billy Bigelow, is a thug, a dolt, and a domestic abuser. I found the musical hard to take even as a kid for those reasons. When, in his justly famous song “My Boy Bill” after learning that he is going to be a father, Billy suddenly realizes that he might end up with a daughter instead (this only occurs to the big dummy two-third of the way through), his immediate conclusion is that he’ll rob and steal if that’s what it takes to raise her. Sure enough, that’s what he does: ultimately Billy gets himself mixed up in a dumb robbery scheme that goes sideways, and he is killed. The whole show is about his bad decisions and an ultimate opportunity given to him by God (or someone) to leave Purgatory (where everyone has to polish stars) and go back to Earth for a day to try to clean up the mess he’s made.

Continue reading →

Curmie’s Conjectures: Court Storming and the Absence of ‘Sprezzatura’

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

by Curmie

After the Wake Forest Demon Deacons beat the Duke Blue Devils 83-79 in basketball Saturday afternoon in Winston-Salem, hordes of Deac fans stormed the court .  Actually, the previous sentence isn’t quite accurate.  Video footage shows that several fans who had gathered under one of the baskets ran onto the court and were already at the free throw line before the game even ended.

These incidents are increasingly commonplace, abetted by television coverage of the events, even as the networks pretend to be appalled by the potential for injuries resulting from the practice.  Court-storming may be part of the culture of the sport, but there are—or at the very least should be—limits.  I have no problem with displays of post-adolescent exuberance, but the safety of players, coaches, and officials must be paramount.

The inevitable finally happened, and Duke star Kyle Filipowski was not merely jostled, but injured, in the melee, seriously enough that he had to be helped off the court.  As the recipient of a degree from the University of Kansas, I am morally and ethically obligated to despise all things related to Duke basketball 😉, but whereas I want them to lose every game, I don’t really want anyone to get hurt.

The exact extent of Filipowski’s injury is still unclear, but it certainly could affect both the Blue Devils’ chances for the rest of the season and post-season, and, importantly, Filipowski’s future.  He’s projected as a first-round draft choice, possibly even a lottery pick, in the upcoming NBA draft.  He stands to make tens of millions of dollars over the course of his career… assuming he can play.  There is such a thing as a career-ending injury, especially when we’re talking about knees, and that’s what this is; if this injury wasn’t severe, that’s only because of what Jack would call “moral luck.” 

The video shows that at least three different Wake Forest fans made contact with Filipowski as he was trying to leave the court.  Whether or not the bumping was “intentional” and “personal,” as Filipowski alleges, it was at best reckless and at worst criminal.  Let’s face it: the man is seven feet tall; it’s not like he couldn’t be seen.  The ethics of the situation, of course, would be the same if it had been a bench player, a student manager, a coach, or a referee who was injured.  The incident attracts more headlines because it was Kyle Filipowski who needed to be helped off the court, but the rationale for banning court storming would be the same. 

At least two other visiting players have been bumped into by opposing fans in court stormings this season.  One of them is Iowa’s Caitlin Clark , probably the most famous women’s basketball player in the country—even more so than WNBA stars.  She was “blind-sided” and actually knocked to the floor by an Ohio State fan in a court storming in Columbus. 

Imagine if she’d been seriously injured.  She wouldn’t have broken the NCAA scoring record for the women’s game, and she wouldn’t be closing in on the real record, held by Lynette Woodard.  (The NCAA wasn’t the organization in charge of the women’s game when Woodard played, and they’re being predictably petty, narcissistic, and anal retentive about recognizing Woodard.)

Oops.  Once again, I indulged in a little inaccuracy.  What I referred to above as “the inevitable” had long since happened, as ESPN’s William Weinbaum reports:

 In a 2004 court storm, Tucson H.S. star Joe Kay suffered a stroke & was partially paralyzed. “It’s way too long that we’ve been putting up with this,” Kay told ESPN Sat. after Duke’s Kyle Filipowski got hurt. “I’m completely in favor of banning court storms & field storms.”  Now 38, Kay said, “The police should arrest people for going places they are not allowed to go… enforce the rules as they do at other places. It’s exactly the same thing.” “Hopefully people will now come to their senses.”

The only thing that’s changed is that Filipowski is known by virtually all college basketball fans across the country, whereas Kay may have been a local celebrity, but folks like me in East Texas weren’t saying “OMG, Joe Kay got hurt in a court storm.”  Now, maybe, something will happen… but not unless the powers-that-be actually want it to, and that, despite the copious tut-tutting from the NCAA, conferences, universities, and the media, doesn’t seem to be the case.  Indeed, statements of concern and promises of future action from the likes of ACC commissioner Jim Phillips seem very much to be what my mom would call “balloon juice.”

Among those who have engaged in court storming this season, both in games in which their team beat Kentucky, were LSU women’s star Angel Reese and South Carolina President emeritus Harris Pastides, who even took to social media to boast about his participation.  The problem isn’t going to go away, even in the wake of an injury to a star player, unless there are real, enforceable, guidelines designed both to allow celebrations and to protect the visiting team.  And by “enforceable,” I mean sanctions that will be felt, not petty fines of a few thousand dollars to multimillion-dollar programs.

Jay Bilas, probably ESPN’s best analyst (and a former star big man for Duke himself), is outspoken about this issue:

“It’s got to stop but it’s not going to.  There’s no appetite in college basketball to stop it. The SEC has a rule against it but the institutions are happy to pay the fine because they like the visual. And the truth is, we in the media like the visual too.  We put it at the end of every highlight. Years ago, when people used to run out on the field or on the floor, we wouldn’t show it. That was our policy. We don’t have that kind of policies with court stormings. We like it. It’s not stopping and it’s a shame.“

Duke coach Jon Scheyer said after the game that when he played, “at least it was 10 seconds and then you could storm the court. Now, it’s the buzzer doesn’t even go off and they’re running on the floor.” 

Ten seconds isn’t enough, but 30 probably is.  It wouldn’t be difficult to institute a rule that no fans are allowed onto the court, ever, until 30 seconds after the final buzzer.  The mechanism already exists in the 30-second clock; let it serve another purpose.  The home university can forbid court storming altogether, but they must enforce the ban for 30 seconds.  If fans want to celebrate on the court and the home team doesn’t object, so be it, but not until the officials and the opposing team are out of harm’s way.

And if fans are on the court before the game clock has expired, that should be a technical foul on the home team in addition to the other penalties.  Would it have mattered this weekend?  Duke would have had two free throws and the ball with about a second left in the game.  Could they have forced overtime or even won in regulation?  It’s extremely unlikely, but the chances wouldn’t have been quite zero.

Whatever the exact rules become, violations must be punished severely.  At present, neither the NCAA nor the ACC (in which Wake Forest and Duke play) have any specific sanctions at all in place for court storming.  The home university must be responsible for enforcing the rules; failure to do so should be punishable by a significant fine even for the first offense.  I’d suggest $500,000 for the first offense, with half paid to the NCAA or the conference and the other half to the opposing school.  Subsequent offenses within a 36-month period would involve stiffer fines, loss of scholarships, and perhaps a prohibition against post-season play.

Continue reading →

A Relatively Minor Incident That Explains Why Nobody Can Trust Anybody in Politics, and Shouldn’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A robo call supposedly featuring President Biden urging New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the state’s presidential primary was immediately used by the news media to accuse Republicans of suppressing votes, because, you know, that’s what they do. The media reported that two Texas companies were the source of the calls: Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom, and that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had issued cease-and-desist letters to both companies. Texas companies—well, we all know what THAT means.

Surprise! The deep-fake recording was not the work of those racist Republicans, but of a Democratic consultant who worked for Democrat Dean Phillips’s quixotic Presidential campaign. Phillips has the ethical mission of giving his party’s voters the opportunity to show that they would prefer not to have a rapidly declining dementia sufferer carry the Democratic banner in November.

Paul Carpenter, a New Orleans magician—that’s him doing street magic above— came forward to admit that he was hired to use artificial intelligence to impersonate President Joe Biden for the robocalls. Carpenter explained that he was hired in January by veteran Democratic consultant Steve Kramer, who has been advising Phillips. “I created the audio used in the robocall. I did not distribute it,” Carpenter said. “I was in a situation where someone offered me some money to do something, and I did it. There was no malicious intent. I didn’t know how it was going to be distributed.” He says he was paid $150.

Continue reading →