More Naming Ethics: Oakland’s Airport

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Among the eight posts on Ethics Alarms officially filed under “naming ethics” controversies there are four children (“Hades,” “Adolf,” a suicide in the family…), college buildings, helicopters, a mountain, and a law school. To that select group we now add an airport, and this case looks suspiciously like deliberate mischief if one is conspiratorially inclined.

I am not, of course.

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland that “There is no there there,” and apparently the Port of Oakland Commission wants to embrace that description. It is preparing to rename the Oakland airport, currently “Oakland International Airport,” to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.” This would seem to intentionally encourage confusion with the better-known (and more heavily used) San Francisco International Airport, just across the bridge and 25 miles away. Before it started falling apart in chunks thanks to being nearly at Grand Zero in The Great Stupid, San Francisco was the glamorous, popular, golden girl on campus and poor Oakland was her fat, homely girlfriend.

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Houston, We Have an Idiot…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The post on Sheila Jackson Lee most recent outburst of ignorance demands this follow-up post. I wouldn’t pick on this silly woman over the same incident if she had just put a paper bag over her head and laid low as a normal person would do, but then why would I expect her to do anything appropriate, ever?

First, in the original post I didn’t focus on her audience, which was raided in the comments. I didn’t because what she said about the moon (it is mostly gas and emits “unique light and energy”) and the rest of her gibberish was equally damning in any context: it would have been inexcusable if she were talking to herself. Or a lamp post. However, giving some more though to this debacle, I realize that spouting false astronomical facts to students (of Booker T. Washington High School in Houston, named after a renowned black educator who must have been spinning in his grave) was infinitely worse than if she had been talking to adults, the majority of whom, I hope, would have known she was talking nonsense. She was there to educate young minds, and instead she handicapped them. Despicable.

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On the Dumbing Down of Scrabble

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was going to make this story an ethics quiz, but thought better of it. After all, there’s nothing unethical about Scrabble (now owned by Mattel) spinning off “Moron Scrabble.” Okay, the exciting Scrabble mutation is called “Scrabble Together.” Nonetheless, I find it hard to resist the feeling that this is a Great Stupid event.

The Mattel statements didn’t help. Ray Adler, vice-president and global head of games at Mattel, said: “Scrabble has truly stood the test of time as one of the most popular board games in history, and we want to ensure the game continues to be inclusive for all players.”

Oh-oh. Inclusive. Next we can expect “DEI Scrabble,” where minority players get twice as many points for their words as those privileged white, male players.

“For anyone who’s ever thought ‘word games aren’t for me'” Adler addled, “or felt a little intimidated by the classic game, Scrabble Together mode is an ideal option.” If someone is intimidated by Scrabble, she has more serious problems than new rules can solve.

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This Lawyer’s Incredible Ignorance Prompts Me to Propose a New Standard For Disbarment

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s the outspoken, racist, Dunning-Kruger suffering lawyer on “The View,” Sunny Hostin, saying out loud and on national TV that climate change causes eclipses (yes, also earthquakes, but we’ve already heard public figures make fools of themselves on that topic, like here and here…). This was so bad that even Whoopie felt compelled to correct her: Whoopie’s problem is that she’s uneducated, but she’s still easily the smartest lady on “The View,” which admittedly is faint praise.

We could have an entertaining debate over whose statement is more idiotic, Rep. Jackson Lee’s claim that the moon is “mostly gas,” of this head-exploder from Hostin. But that’s not the point of this post.

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 8: People Who Don’t Speak English Clearly

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I don’t know why it took me until #8 to hit this one, which has raised my metaphorical blood pressure (actually, my blood pressure is remarkably stable) for a very long time. I do know why I’m mentioning it now, though: my last month’s hellish dive into customer service departments, where the only good thing I can say about the crazy-making automated phone systems is that at least the faux humans on them speak distinctly and can be understood. Not so at least 70% of the agents I eventually reach after screaming myself hoarse. (A good freind, generally civil, told me that she has discovered that when caught in and endless loop in customer service phone system, screaming “fuck” continuously always gets you to an agent. In my experience that usually works, but I’ve encountered two systems that just disconnect you.)

Look, my grandmother was a Greek immigrant. She learned English diligently and quickly (unlike her sisters and brothers), but she never was able to ditch her strong Greek accent. That’s fine: I have complete sympathy for (legal) immigrants having difficulty mastering English. I am hopeless with foreign languages: I can’t imagine what it would be like committing to a life in a country where I had to learn a new one…..but I would still commit to learning it as a high priority, and constantly strive to master that new tongue as an obligation of living in that society and culture.

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tx)

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

When we last looked in on the astoundingly dim-witted, ignorant, unqualified Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee here at Ethics Alarms, she was setting out to violate the Constitution with her brain-dead on arrival (BDOA) Leading Against White Supremacy Act, which has to be read to be believed. A junior high school civics class could use the thing as a final exam: “Please explain why the U.S. Supreme Court would declare this proposed law unconstitutional.” In the same post in which I discussed that monstrosity, Lee’s invention, I wrote of her self-evident intellectual caliber,

She’s a fanatic supporter of reparations for slavery; she’s a knee-jerk race-baiter (any criticism of President Barack Obama, a serial bungler, was racist in her view). She’s one of those not very bright people who speak assertively and defiantly because they are laboring under the delusion that they are intelligent, thus fooling others who aren’t very smart either.

Lee once mixed up Wikileaks and Wikipedia in an interview. She has complained that the naming of storms is racist, because the names are “too white,” but we know that if we gave hurricanes names like “LaShonda” to hurricanes, she’d complain that blacks were being deliberately compared to destructive forces.

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A Popeye: I Just Have to Say This Regarding the Coverage of the Solar Eclipse

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I’ve been wrestling with myself over whether to post on this topic, especially after I obviously annoyed my very nice next-door neighbors by making my sentiments known yesterday while they were out on the front yard enthusing over Northern Virginia’s not-quite total eclipse view and offering me magic glasses. But as Popeye so eloquently said often, “It’s all I can stand, cuz I can’t stands no more!”

The ethical issue is a common one raised here: journalism is obligated to make the public better informed, not dumber. The media’s breathless, silly, pseudo-pagan coverage of the eclipse in Indiana yesterday on every news network was, in my view, insulting and horrifying, or should have been.

If you took their outbursts seriously, who knows what else you’ll believe?

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Stop Making Me Defend Justice Sotomayor!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s flagrant DEI choice for the Court, is a poor jurist and one of the weakest SCOTUS intellects ever, as her Ethics Alarms dossier makes depressingly clear and as she makes clear herself every time she authors a dissent or a concurring opinion. Nonetheless, I’m 100% in her corner as the desperate Left tries to push her into resigning so Biden and the narrow Democrat majority in the Senate can put a 28-year-old transgender Muslim midget of color in her place.

Sotomayor is a target ostensibly because shes 70 (a spring chicken in Supreme Court demographics), diabetic and had one parent who died at a young age, so there is a non-negligible chance that she may shuffle off this mortal coil after Biden vacates the White House, allowing the evil Donald Trump to appoint Darth Vader to the Court or someone similar. This may be part of the reasoning, but I strongly suspect that progressives know that The Great and Powerful O screwed up and selected a liberal justice who lacked the gravitas and acumen to do battle with the SCOTUS conservative majority beyond metaphorically crooning “Feelings,” which is what the “wise Latina” is all about.

Well, tough. The Left made their bed by confirming Sonia, and they are stuck with her. It serves them right for placing ethnicity over scholarship and competence in such an important government institution.

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Ethics Hero: The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In a 20-0 vote, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA for short), the governing body for small colleges, ruled that it was unfair to allow transgender athletes to compete against biological women in women’s sports. The NAIA now becomes the first college sports organization to have the courage and integrity to make such an obvious and necessary rule to protect women’s advances in athletic, as the other groups, like the NCAA, waffle, stall, engage in double-talk and duck the issue while female athletes are hurt.

Yesterday the National Organization for Women, which has betrayed women in this controversy in order to keep its Far Left creds burnished, quietly took down its tweet of last week claiming that “White supremacist patriarchy”was behind objections to cheaters like Lia Thomas (above) dominating female competitors in college competitions. South Carolina’s women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley, similarly bowing down to Woke World and making no sense in the process, blathered that “If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports, or vice versa, you should be able to play.” Wags on social media had fun musing about what “vice-versa” meant in that statement: “If you consider yourself a sport and want to play women”? (Staley’s an idiot.)

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I Am Almost Glad Grace Can’t Read This Post…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

…because it would have made her cry. Heck, it very nearly made me cry. But as much as I hate posting this awful story of animal cruelty on what would have been my wife’s birthday (I guess it still is) attention must be paid. Attention must be paid, and this vicious asshole needs to be shunned by all decent people.

It is things like this that prompted me to designate Animal Kind International as a charity Grace would be proud to have someone give to in her memory.

That’s Wyoming ethics villain Cody Roberts, 42, smiling and raising a can of beer in the picture above. Next to him is the cowering, terrified, injured wolf he disabled by running it over with his snowmobile. Instead of putting the wolf out of its misery, Cody, who calls himself a hunter, dragged it to a bar with the wolf’s mouth taped shut to show it off in front of his friends, all of whom are obviously assholes too since they didn’t tell him to stop. After everyone had a good laugh, Cody took the suffering beast behind the building and killed it, but not before reportedly torturing it some more, you know, for fun.

After an anonymous tip was received from some weenie who witnessed this atrocity but who didn’t have the guts, integrity or decency to intervene, Wyoming Game and Fish investigated. Roberts was fined only $250 for a a”wildlife violation,” the only penalty that Game and Fish said it had the power to enforce because animal cruelty is only applied to cases involving pets and domestic animals. Yes, in Wyoming it’s not a crime to torture wild animals. No wonder Cody Roberts lives there.

I guarantee Grace would have adamantly argued that Roberts deserves to tortured and shot himself. He’s a monster, after all.

Be proud, Wyoming…as if Liz Cheney wasn’t embarrassment enough.

I don’t think I want to write about this any more. Grace’s birthday made me too sad already.