Last Friday Open Forum Before Christmas!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

There are quite a few versions of LeRoy Anderson’s medley “A Christmas Festival” on YouTube. The performance you usually hear had the legendary Arthur Fiedler waving the baton; Arthur was also the one who started using Anderson’s quirky, clever orchestral compositions in Pops concerts. You don’t hear Anderson’s works much any more except at Christmas, when his “Sleighride!” is unavoidable, but “Typwriter,” “The Syncopated Clock” and “Bugler’s Holiday,” among others, were all popular hits in the Fifties and Sixties.

I picked the video above because the Powerpoint reminded me of my wife, best friend, co-founder of ProEthics and indispensable partner Grace, who designed all of the presentations I used. She was proud of them and devoted so much care to making them colorful and interesting. And she asked me how the attendees of my ethics seminars liked each one of them. The sad fact was that nobody cared; the lawyers just wanted their credits. I might as well have been using a blackboard. The presentations were just a point of professionalism for us, and creative expression for her. Grace’s Powerpoints are still better than most of what you’re liable to see today. She was especially fond of the animations.

I don’t know about you, but I’m heading to the end of 2025, my third straight non-Christmas Christmas—-no tree, no wreath on the door, no music in the house, no decorations (well, I bought some red Poinsettias, but they’re all dead now) no parties, no Grace— at a near all-time low in optimism, happiness, financial security, confidence, companionship, self-esteem, trust in my profession, hope for the nation, and respect for my fellow citizens. This is unacceptable, and I am hereby inviting Cher to set me straight.

Thank-you.

Ethics Dunces: The Kennedy Center Board…No, Wait, I Mean the TRUMP Kennedy Center Board!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Oh come ON.

“The Trump Kennedy Center?” As one of my Trump Deranged friends posted on Facebook, quite appropriately, “What’s next, The Trump Washington Monument? The Trump Lincoln Memorial? The Trump Jefferson Memorial…?”

I don’t even want to think about what’s next. Ugh. Ack. Yecchh.

You would think that after his Rob Reiner fiasco, the President would be just a teeny-weeny bit wary for a while. Clearly not.

If President Trump had any sense at all, he would thank the board but turn down the wildly inappropriate honor. But he doesn’t have any sense at all, not in these kinds of things.

I am aghast.

Comment of the Day: “In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In fairness, the spirit of Christmas, and because it’s just an excellent post that interprets the song in a fresh manner that I have never encountered, here is Dwayne Zechman’s rebuttal of the criticism by me and others of the popular Christmas song written by American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. Did you know that the song was first recorded by the Trapp Family singers of “The Sound of Music” fame? That alone raises it a bit in my estimation. I also note that Dwayne, wisely does not defend the wretched lyrics in the David Bowie-Bing Crosby version. That would be impossible.

Here is Dwayne’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Comment of the Day: ‘In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet'”…

***

I have to take issue with all the dunking on “The Little Drummer Boy” that I’m reading here. It’s a favorite of mine, and the reason has nothing to do with the ridiculous scenario.

The reason is that this song is a microcosmic allegory of the Christian experience.

I don’t normally speak of my faith and religious beliefs here. I’m a firm believer in the notion that Truth stands on its own; it doesn’t need the support of religion in order to be true. So this post is definitely a bit of a departure for me.

“Come, they told me.” “A newborn King to see”

This is how it begins. We learn from others about the Gospel of Jesus. We are encouraged to come along on the journey.

“Our finest gifts we bring” “to lay before the King”
“So to honor Him” “When we come”

We begin the journey and quickly learn that, to those who invited us on this journey, it’s a big deal. There are songs we may or may not have heard. There are responsive readings that we almost certainly don’t know. There are people here whose whole lives are dedicated to their faith and their church. Am I expected to do that too? What IS expected of me? What does Jesus actually want from me?

Continue reading →

Cognitive Dissonance Games and Tipping Points: President Trump Made Rob Reiner the Greatest Hollywood Director Ever and Himself Into an “Ogre.”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Among the many reasons that President Trump’s attack on Rob Reiner before the shock of his murder at the hands of his own son had subsided was stupid (as well as unpresidential and cruel) was its ignorance of the Streisand Effect. The completely predictable reaction of the Trump Deranged, always seeking a new metaphorical drum to beat, and the similarly inclined Axis of Unethical Conduct, ensured that the President’s gratuitous Truth Social post would trigger an eruption of outrage that will fuel attacks on the President’s character for months, perhaps reaching into the mid-terms.

For this to really work, of course, Reiner must be elevated to near saint-like status, and sure enough, that’s what is going on. The higher Reiner (he was a wonderful, flawless man, we are now being told) and his films ( one of his movies is a favorite movie of everyone, one article claimed) can be pushed up the Cognitive Dissonance scale, the lower Trump goes by attacking him. Trump is first and last a salesman; how could he not know his gratuitous outburst would deeply wound his “brand”?

Among other gifts to Trump’s political enemies. this Cognitive Dissonance Scale botch makes defending or even continuing to support the President perilous. If you link yourself to President Trump (based, as it must be based, on his policies and actions rather than his character) by defending him you are simultaneously proclaiming your opposition to “The Princess Bride,” “Stand by Me” and “When Harry Met Sally” and the unassailable murder victim who made them.

This, in turn, poses the real danger that Trump’s revolting post will prove to be a tipping point, that last, tiny, thing that makes the Jenga tower fall or Mr. Creosote’s stomach explode as it does after eating the “wafer thin” morsel offered him in the clip above from “The Meaning of Life.” Trump’s stupid, mean words may well tip public opinion against his whole Presidency permanently and completely. If so, it will undoubtedly be the most trivial verbal tipping point in U.S. political history. By comparison, George Romney saying he had been “brainwashed,” President Ford saying in a debate that the Soviet Union did not dominate Eastern Europe, or President Carter claiming in his debate with Ronald Reagan that he consulted daughter Amy on nuclear weapons policy seem positively earth-shattering.

And yet if attacking a recently slaughtered director crushes Trump’s chances of holding off the Far Left’s siege on American values and core individual liberties, it may prove to be the most consequential moment in his Presidency.

Additional points:

Continue reading →

The “Other Woman” Scorned Asks The Ethicist: “Is It Ethical To Wreck the Bastard’s Marriage?”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I’m surprised she didn’t ask if she could cook his little girl’s bunny too, like Glenn Close did in “Fatal Attraction.”

It amazed me that someone like this reads a NYT column called “The Ethicist.” She’s sounds like she’s never heard of the concept. She writes,

Last summer, I was dating a man in our weekender community outside New York City who seemed like a wonderful guy. A month after we became intimate, he told me that he was married but that he had been separated from his wife for a year. He explained that the reason he has not gotten a divorce is that she has cancer and is on his health insurance. He said she had just had surgery and was recovering. Naturally I felt compassion and said I wouldn’t push him. Eventually, I ended the relationship, because I started feeling I wasn’t getting the full story. When I mentioned our relationship to a friend who also knows him, I learned that my instincts were correct. Apparently, he is very much still with his wife, and she is healthy. I am so shocked by this. Should I contact his wife and let her know this is what he is doing and saying? Given that they are both journalists, I would think veracity would be a priority.

Translation: “I hate this lying bastard and want to hurt him, and his wife too. That’s OK, right?”

Uh. no. I haven’t even read The Ethicist’s answer, but Prof. Appiah, for all his faults and weaknesses, surely can get this one right. Let’s see…

Yup. In a mealy-mouthed way, but he agrees.

The Crucial Ethical Values the Trump Team Lacks

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This is serious. The last week or so has been disastrous for the Trump Administration, almost entirely because of its own foolishness, recklessness, and lack of competence. As I have noted more than once in this period, its missions are too important to be placed in jeopardy by hubris and stupidity, but that is what is happening. This is a phenomenon for which the President himself is entirely at fault. I have scant hope that he is capable of either recognizing the peril he is placing the nation in, or reforming. The President and his hand-picked loose cannons aren’t just shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot. The photo above is more accurate.

First, of course, we have the President’s own cruel, useless, gratuitous post insulting Rob Reiner after the director and his wife were murdered. Trump might as well have hit himself in the face with a cast-iron frying pan on national TV. It gave people who already hate him ammunition to say, “See?” It made moderates question his stability, self-control and character if they already didn’t, and it put his defenders in the position of defending the indefensible, thus diminishing their credibility and influence.

Continue reading →

Holly Mathnerd Is Right that Effective Gun Control Is Impossible Without Govt. Gun Confiscation by Force, But Doesn’t Everyone Know That?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Right on cue, the Brown mass shooting was instantly the inspiration for the usual gang of anti-Second Amendment zealots, utopians,”Imagine” fans, fact-phobic progressives and nascent totalitarians (funny how they hang out together…huh!) to again scream for “common sense gun control.” Joe Biden did it, or whoever was standing near him barely moving their lips or pretending to drink a glass of water.

Last week, quirky, smart, logic-obsessed substacker Holly Mathnerd issued a typically thoughtful essay called “The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control…the math behind the policy.” Holly gifted me with a subscription to her blog a while back as a gesture of professional courtesy so I pass her analysis on to you. I have written essentially this exact post on Ethics Alarms before and long ago, however, and probably more than once. My reaction to Holly’s work is, “Yes, of course. Why do we keep having to explain this?” Her delivery is a lot less abrasive than mine, so if that helps, great.

Gun control is also on my list of policy objectives that I view as unethical because they are impossible, and arguing for them is 1) a waste of time, 2) misleads the slow of wit into thinking they aren’t impossible when they are, 3) constitute virtue-signaling and 4) would be terrible mistakes even if they weren’t impossible. Read Holly’s whole argument, but the short version is…

If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms. Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality. What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.

In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone. Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades. So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns. That requires locating them.

There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification. Anything less is symbolic. Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.

That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale. At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door. This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime. Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups. Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.

There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.

Continue reading →

The Song “White Christmas” Is Sad, and It’s Meant To Be

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m rewriting a post from last Christmas that I liked, in part because the ethics news is ticking me off, in part because I am once again having a non-Christmas because I miss my late wife Grace too much to celebrate anything, and in part because the song means a lot to me. I foolishly posted the first version of this last year on Christmas day, guaranteeing that few would read it. I’ll try a bit earlier this time.

I co-wrote two Christmas revues for my late, lamented (by me, anyway) professional theater company in Arlington, Virginia, The American Century Theater. The most popular of the two (though not my personal favorite) was called “If Only In My Dreams,” a title taken from the lyrics of another wistful Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent. It was introduced by Bing Crosby in 1943—it’s amazing how many of our secular Christmas songs were first recorded by Bing. Well, maybe not so amazing: what was amazing was the range and warmth of his voice. 

“If Only In My Dreams” was constructed around the letters written by GIs overseas during World War II to their families or  girlfriends as Christmas loomed. They were published in an issue of American Heritage, a wonderful magazine now, sadly, in the company of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, gone and nearly forgotten. I alternated those letters with narration and the popular Christmas songs of the period. The brilliant Jacqueline Manger directed the show, which was being written as she rehearsed it. 

The most famous and important of these songs was, of course, “White Christmas.” Bing Crosby’s version is still the best selling single of all time, and deserves the title. When Irving Berlin handed the song over to the musician who transcribed his melodies (Irv could not read music and composed by ear, just like another brilliant and prolific tune-smith, Paul McCartney), he  famously announced that he had written, not just the best song he had ever created, but the best song that anyone had ever written.  Continue reading →

Most Unethical Substack Essay of the Month: David Hirsch

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I know this guy (not the guy in the picture: that’s Ben Stiller as “Mr. Furious” in “Mystery Men”), an opinionated retired lawyer convinced of his own intellectual superiority. I was still surprised at the bias and incompetence of his recent substack post titled “Trump: Death by Yesbuts.” Yet because it is another manifestation of extreme Trump Derangement, my Trump Deranged Facebook friend, another retired lawyer whose intellect is to Mr. Hirsch’s as Elon Musk’s is to a sea sponge, actually linked to this thing approvingly on Facebook. It is to weep. Is stupidity contagious now? Do we need a vaccine?

The author signals his incompetence and ethical vacuum in his very first paragraph by mocking jurors in a hung jury who told him, “Of course there was a reasonable doubt, but he was guilty.” We are not even told which side the jurors voted for, a factor rather crucial to making sense out of his analogy. That statement by itself would be consistent in the mouths of any of the jurors in Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” who finally acquit the almost certainly guilty accused because the prosecution didn’t sufficiently prove the case against him. It was very reasonable for any juror to conclude that the kid committed the murder but that nonetheless, he was not proven guilty in court. In fact, this was my conclusion after watching the whole O.J. Simpson trial.

The rest of the article quickly devolves into standard anti-Trump distortions, name-calling and bias, as well as the familiar narrative discussed in my previous post. Hirsch writes,

Back in 2017, [Trump] told the Conservative Police Action Conference that “Nobody loves the First Amendment more than me.” But, he added, “The fake news doesn’t tell the truth. It doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people. We’re going to do something about it.”

In other words, “Yes, but….” “Freedom of speech” is a great phrase but the speech better not say bad things about me!

False translation, but then bias makes you stupid. Fake news doesn’t serve the people. Fake news is a blight on democracy, and it is very important to do something about it. Trump was not talking about news “saying bad things,” he was talking about the deliberate manipulation of facts for partisan gain.

Continue reading →

The President Sues the BBC, and It’s the Right Thing To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Florida states:

‘In the BBC Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance”… first broadcast on October 28,2024, the BBC intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021…. The Panorama Documentary deliberately omitted another critical part of the Speech in such a manner as to intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said. The Panorama Documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”… 

President Trump never uttered this sequence of words. This fabricated depiction of President Trump during the Speech was false, deceptive, and defamatory given that President Trump’s actual and full remarks during the Speech were (a) “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressman and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:12p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 14:52 into the Speech), and then, much later, (b) “[B]ut I said ‘Something’s wrong here, Something’s really wrong, can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021 at 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 69:30 into the Speech). 

“Moreover, the BBC purposefully omitted President Trump stating, less than one minute after urging supporters to cheer for their senators and congressmen, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 15:48 into the Speech).”

Continue reading →