The Rotting American Public School System’s New Philosophy: “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Call Failure A Success.”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the ultimate expression of “The Great Stupid,” New York has gone to a bad Jerry Lewis movie (no, they aren’t all bad) for inspiration in revising its education policy. Faced with terrible math and reading scores for students—in some school, not one achieved what was considered minimum proficiency— a state school board lowered the standards so more students would “succees”. This was the measured response after, as one media source reported,

“A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight. Some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

No doubt? There are several reasons this crash is occurring. One is that the disastrous decision to close the schools in response to the health “experts” and news media-driven panic over the Wuhan virus seriously (and perhaps permanently) set back the intellectual development of America’s young. Before that, there was already evidence that U.S. IQs are declining, and not just in the White House. The politicized public school system now devotes crucial class hours to teaching black kids that they face a lifetime of permanent oppression in a racist nation, and making white kids believe that their skin shade signifies evil embedded in their DNA. Then there is the little problem of the education profession being riddled with incompetents from top to bottom, as well as today’s children spending more time on social media and video games than reading, while their parents have abdicated their traditional duties to stimulate their children’s intellectual life at home.

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Biden Lies, The Conservative Media Says Twitter Flagged It, And I Can’t Find Any Evidence That It Did

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

l don’t know who to believe, who to trust, or what the hell is going on. And unlike most Americans, I try hard to find out.

Joe Biden—you know, that President who was going to restore trust in the Presidency, not lie all the time and unite the country?—allowed this to be issued under his name by some anonymous intern (which itself is a lie):

Of course this is nonsense, though standard progressive cant. I know it’s a lie without further study because, you know, I read stuff.

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The First Thing We Do, Let’s Fire All The Principals…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Oh, there are many things that need to happen in the wake of Seattle’s Lincoln High School’s leadership demonstrating that it doesn’t comprehend that government-supported racial segregation is illegal and that openly favoring black students is exactly as contrary to core democratic, Constitutional and American values as openly favoring white students. First, however, we need to fire the smiling, racist, woke-poisoned, incompetent fools above.

Here is what they allowed to be published to students and parents:

Our student leaders in our Black Student Union (BSU), Latino Student Union (LSU), and Asian Student Union (ASU) have been hard at working planning our upcoming Multicultural Week March 13th-17th…On Friday of Multicultural Week, students and staff of color and/or those who identify with any group represented by BSU/LSU/ASU are invited for a lunch potluck.

In other words, white and Jews stay away. These alleged education professionals saw nothing wrong with that, directly in contradiction of Brown v. Board of Education though it was. No ethics alarms sounded, because those alarms are as dead  as Thurgood Marshall in these products of the thoroughly rotted culture currently metastasizing in the state of Washington. Continue reading →

Exhibit A On Why “They/Them” Preferred Pronouns Must Be Mocked And Rejected Rather Than Respected

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Here is a really weird question posed to “The Ethicist,” offered not for the issue raised (which is not exactly a tough one) but for the manner in which it is presented. The bolding is mine:

When my father died, my family took photos of his body before he was cremated. The photos were of him at home, peaceful in bed; my mother wanted to tenderly remember him both in life and in his death. My partner at the time uploaded these photos to their computer, storing these and other images in their cloud server as we archived memories from the trip home to say goodbye to my father.

One evening later that year, my then-partner pulled up the photos and did a slide show of our trip for their family. When my partner got to the images of my father’s dead body, they went through every image instead of skipping over them. It was immensely painful, compounded by the fact that my father is a Black man and these images were being shown to an affluent white family. The race and class dynamics here were staggering — it felt as if this white family was viewing these images as entertainment. This was among the incidents that triggered my ending the relationship; my ex didn’t quite understand why this was inappropriate or painful.

As we were breaking up, I asked that they erase the images from their drive. Since that time, they’ve made a million excuses as to why they can’t erase the images — the drive is in storage, they’ve moved, etc. It’s now been nearly six years. Still, I am deeply disturbed by the lack of control I have over these images. Currently my ex lives in the U.K., and I live in the U.S. What is the correct course of action here? Do I let it go? Seek legal action? My great fear is that these images will circulate into the future without my or my family’s consent. — Name Withheld

Language is supposed to communicate, not be distorted to satisfy narcissistic eccentricities and grandstanding. Who or what “moved,” the ex-, her family, or the photos? The account is absurdly ambiguous, although if you pause long enough along the way and think hard, you probably can figure it out—except that human communication is not supposed to be like Rubik’s Cube.

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Weather Lady’s Collapse”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Curmie’s typically erudite and perceptive Comment of the Day below made me happy and sad at the same time. Happy, because it is the kind of superb commentary Ethics Alarms readers excel at producing, making the site unique in the blogosphere whether a significant numbers of people take advantage of the resource. Sad, because I should have authored its equivalent in the first place, and might have come closer if I were not forced daily into squeezing posts into randomly distributed periods during the day that I don’t have to devote to earning enough money to keep the Marshalls from a future living in a cardboard box in the woods.

Curmie’s analysis also alerted me to something I had missed in the video, the mysterious statement “Not again!” from one of the anchors. This reminded me of the just-created whale in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” hurtling to Earth through space (along with a pot of petunias) that similarly thinks, also inexplicably, “Oh no, not again!”

Here is Curmie’s Comment of the Day, a deft examination of humor, ethics and human nature, regarding the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Weather Lady’s Collapse”:

***

I find this one fascinating for a variety of reasons. One of those is that I no doubt had a different reaction to seeing the event under the headline “BREAKING: CBS LA Weather Forecaster collapses live on air.” So I can’t say how I would have responded had I simply been watching that news show.

Part of my response is also based on the initial movement, the slow bend forward toward the desk. That seemed almost choreographed, as if she was going to pound her head on the desk as some sort of statement on the imminent forecast, described by the co-anchor as “the calm before the storm.” It’s the slide out of the chair that changes the dynamic. That’s definitely unstaged.

More importantly, I’d read your statement that she’s recovering at home before I viewed the video. This takes us very close to the notion of aesthetic distance, that unspoken understanding that what we are watching isn’t actually happening. Hence, we don’t run for cover when the bad guy in a play or a movie appears with a gun and looks threatening, and we’re not confused when the actor who played Hamlet is miraculously alive to take a curtain call even though the character is dead. Or, in this case, that she suffered an episode, but is on her way to recovery.

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Great Moments In Totalitarian Hypocrisy: Stanford Law Students Who Proudly Shouted Down A Federal Judge Want Their Names And Images Removed From News Reports

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Of course they do!

This reminds me that one of the epiphanal moments in my philosophical development was when the fellow students at my college who took over a building, rifled though records, precipitated a riot and the shutting down of classes that I had every right to attend, included among their demands to allow the school to re-open their immunity from any discipline or adverse consequences whatsoever. At that moment I learned what kind of ethical principles revolutionaries respected: none. I never forgot that lesson, and nothing has occurred in the intervening years to alter my assessment.

Hilariously, the same students who posted the names and faces of the Stanford Federalist Society all over the school prior to disrupting its program featuring a conservative Federal judge’s remarks are now demanding anonymity from the Washington Free Beacon, the conservative news source that has thoroughly covered the law school’s disgrace. “They say we’ve violated their right to privacy by identifying them. You can’t make it up,” tweeted Aaron Sibarium, a Free Beacon reporter.

Well, you don’t have to make it up; the demand was completely predictable and in character with today’s mutant breed of progressive totalitarians.

The school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the far-left force behind the exercise in the Heckler’s Veto handled so atrociously by the Stanford staff papered the school’s hallways prior to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan’s scheduled speech with the names and photographs of the Federalist Society’s board members. Nevertheless, when Sibarium quoted the group’s board members describing the censorship exercise as “Stanford Law School at its best” and named those board members, the board’s demanded that that the Beacon redact her name and those of her classmates. “You do not have our permission to reference or quote any portion of this email in a future piece,” she wrote.

Translation: “You do not have our permission to reveal that we behaved like bullies and assholes even though we have said that we are proud of behaving like bullies and assholes.”

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Comment Of The Day: “On The Looming Indictment Of Donald Trump”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Jim Hodgson takes on, in his Comment of the Day, the unpleasant topic of where the current escalating divisiveness may take us. It immediately reminded me of this New York Times fantasy feature from 2021, where several artists—and you know the ideological orientation of artists—were asked to “redesign the American flag.” One artist wrote,

The colors of our flag are intended to stand for unity, valor and justice. The gray, monochrome flag represents America surrendering to its fall from power and loss of the ideals it once stood for….

He produced this design:

No, that’s not a mistake, that’s it. Another flag was this:

Here is Jim Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “On The Looming Indictment Of Donald Trump”…

***

“What exactly makes us a country?”

From the perspective of our federal overlords, this country is approaching the big government perfection that has been the objective of politicians since Hamilton first moved us toward empire, and Lincoln and the Radical Republicans advanced the federal hegemony against the interests of the states.

State governments have been largely complicit as well. The South, of course, was forced to remain in the Union by force of arms, and only allowed to “return” to the Union (the one they supposedly could not leave) after they wrote new constitutions acceptable to the US government. The increasing centralization of power in Washington brought the states to line up like hogs at the federal money trough. Acceding to the popular election of US senators and not moving to counter the myriad instances of federal overreach decade after decade, has led us, like the proverbial frog in slowly warming water, to the boiling point we now face. The desired outcome is for us to capitulate our freedom for the “security” of a totalitarian socialist state.

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Ethics Quiz: The Weather Lady’s Collapse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Let me begin by announcing that she seems to be Ok, and is recuperating at home.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is laughing the first time you see that video (as I did)  unethical, as in unkind, uncaring, and disrespectful, a violation of the Golden Rule?

Related questions:

  • Is slapstick comedy corrupting?
  • Is this a guy thing?
  • I am a physical comedy aficionado; I’ve staged it, written it, and performed it. Does that excuse me, or damn me?
  • I laughed before I knew what happened to the poor woman. Would it change your answer if she had died? (It shouldn’t, you know. Moral luck again.)

So John Connolly Secretly Undermined U.S. Efforts To Get Iran To Return Its American Hostages In 1980…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

As we continue to debate what constitutes stealing a Presidency, Ben Barnes, a former close associate of the late John Connolly—Texas Governor, Democrat-turned-Republican, the man wounded during the assassination of President Kennedy and Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan—revealed this week that he believes he took part in a secret mission by Connolly to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s re-election. Barnes says that Connolly went to “one Middle Eastern capital after another” in the summer of 1980, telling regional leaders to get a crucial message to Iran’s leader that the nation should not release the 52 U.S. citizens taken hostage from the American embassy until after the election, which Reagan would win and proceed to give Iran “a better deal.”

The New York Times has the details here in (for a change) straightforward reporting. As we all know, Reagan won, and won handily. Nobody can know if the hostage crisis was the reason for Carter’s defeat; after all, Jimmy was not having a very successful term in any respect. Nor, apparently, does anyone know if Connolly’s alleged message ever was relayed to Iran, or if it was, whether it had any influence on Iran’s actions.

The Times makes a strong case that Barnes is telling the truth, though Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. For one thing, there is no reason for him to make the story up. For another, the Times spoke with four living individuals who confirmed that Barnes, who is now 85, shared the story with them years ago. Another part of the account that tends to make his tale credible is that William J. Casey, the chairman of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was involved. Casey was a shady figure, and his participation in a scheme like this would be in character. Still, there is no evidence besides Barnes’ word.

Ethics Observations:

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Ethics Hero And “Bite Me!” Déjà Vu: San Jose Sharks Goalie James Reimer [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

You may not believe this, given how often it is I have to do it, but I hate repeating myself. This post is essentially identical to this one, from January: same issue, same pandering, power-abusing sports league (the NHL), same awards (Ethics Hero and A “Bite Me!”), same despicable news media coverage; different team (the Sharks in place of the Flyers) and different player (Sharks goalie James Reimer replacing the Philadelphia Flyers’ Ivan Provorov…during the game against the Islanders,).

As in the case of the Flyers two months ago, the Sharks hosted a Pride Night (what someone’s sexual activities have to do with hockey and why they are something to be proud of remains a mystery to me), and announced that, in addition to offering silly LGTBQ+ themed, “Great Stupid”classic items like these…

…during the game against the Islanders,and promoting it with pandering blather like this…

…the team also committed its players to wearing special pride-themed jerseys during pre-game warm-ups. Well, you can’t do that, not ethically. It’s compelled speech by an employer with a threat of negative consequences for any employee who doesn’t comply. I would (and have) refused to go along with such edicts as an employee in the past even when I happened to agree with the sentiments I was ordered to endorse.

Like Provorov, the Sharks goalie declined to be pushed into endorsing something he chose not to, stating,

“For all 13 years of my NHL career, I have been a Christian — not just in title, but in how I choose to live my life daily. I have a personal faith in Jesus Christ who died on the cross for my sins and, in response, asks me to love everyone and follow him. I have no hate in my heart for anyone, and I have always strived to treat everyone that I encounter with respect and kindness. In this specific instance, I am choosing not to endorse something that is counter to my personal convictions which are based on the Bible, the highest authority in my life,”

He should not have been placed in a position where he had to make such a statement. (I would have preferred to see a shorts statement about compelled speech and political endorsements in general, but that’s just me.)

Predictably, and just as in the case of Reimer, the Woke Borg, Mainstream Media Division, attacked. One hockey writer described Reimer as “absolutely a homophobe” and beclowned himself by writing, “Here’s also what I believe, Jesus would unequivocally love and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. He’d be the first to wear a rainbow.” Another sports writer wrote that Reimer is “hiding behind the Bible to refuse to endorse gay people having rights and existing.” A bit less mainstream, a newsletter about sexism in sports spat out, “Under the umbrella of disingenuous bullshit, you can fuck right off with this statement. If you truly believed the queer community is welcome in hockey, you’d wear the shirt. You do not get to have it both ways. Jesus is not impressed.” More assumptions about that well-known hockey fan, Jesus of Nazareth!

The NHL and the Sharks are the ethics villains here for putting their players in this position.

The NHL and the Sharks are the ethics villains here for putting their players in this position. The Sharks tried to both double down and weasel out, issuing this:

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