2022 Worst of Ethics Awards: Most Unethical Mayor And Unethical Rationalization Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

That video that I saw today on the Federalist site clinched two 2022 Worst of Ethics Awards for me, not that either was a tough call.

Unethical Rationalization of the Year: #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is”

Frankly,Rationalization #64 would won this award in each of the past three years, which is pretty amazing for such a late addition to the list.

The reason, I think, is that the American public either has behaved so gullible and stpudly, or the political class and journalists have concluded that it is so gullible and stupid that the strategy of calling night day, day  night,good bad, bad good and failure success has become too attractive to resist. 2022 was the zenith of this revolting development so far, but there is no reason to think 2023 won’t be worse. We’re hardly started, and there is Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters that the White House is being transparent about Joe’s confidential documents stash while she refuses to answer questions about it. Last year, the administration line about the chaos at the border was that the border was secure. LGBTQ+ activists looked us right in our eyes and told us that a man became a woman simply by deciding he was, and sports leaders announced that biological men who were now trans women had no advantage over natural-born women in athletic competitions while it was obvious that they did. Meanwhile runaway inflation wasn’t runaway inflation, Twitter’s partisan censorship wasn’t partisan censorship. John Fetterman was not cognitively impaired by his stroke. The January 6 House inquiry was unbiased and fair, with no partisan objectives. And when Joe Biden gave his Reichstag, he sounded and looked like a Nazi while accusing Republicans of being Nazis. There’s lots more. I’ve never seen anything like it. Continue reading →

In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

My mother stole a piece of the Parthenon. She was Greek, my father and she were visiting Athens, and when no one was looking (including my father) she scooped up a 1 x 8 inch chuck of white marble by the ruins and smuggled it home, where she displayed it on her fireplace mantle. My sister and I were horrified when we learned what the piece was, and plotted various ways to have it returned without getting our aged mother prosecuted. When they moved from Arlington, Mass. to Arlington, Va, the item just vanished, or so Mom said. (We didn’t believe her.) It was never seen again.

I think about this family scandal whenever I think of the seemingly endless dispute over the Elgin Marbles.

In the early 1800s, Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, shipped to England treasures of Greek antiquity that he had strip-mined from Greece, including the carved frieze panels that had decorated the Parthenon. Supposedly this was done with the permission of Turkey, which was then ruling Greece, which is like your home invaders giving neighbors permission to take the art off your walls. The “Elgin Marbles” were sold to the British government and became among the most valued artifacts in the collection of the British Museum in London. As my mother’s son, I know they were among my top three favorite exhibits when I first visited, along with the Rosetta Stone and Paul McCartney’s handwritten draft of the lyrics for “Yesterday.”

Well, Greece has been asking for the Elgin Marbles back for over two centuries now, and if the museum has a leg to stand on in keeping them, it pretty much comes down to that hoary (and not exactly true) line, “possession is 9/10s of the law.” However, recent decades have seen a cultural shift as Western colonization and imperialism have acquired a bad reputation. Many museums are returning such looted treasures to where they were created and, I believe, belong. Why, then, haven’t the Elgin Marbles been sent back to Greece as its government demands, urges, and begs?

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John Kerry’s Comments At The World Economic Forum Show How Irresponsible And Incompetent US Climate Change Policy Is

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

To be clear, the fact that John Kerry, a proven dim bulb, is allowed to address any group at all as the representative of the U.S. government (he’s the U.S. special presidential “envoy for climate”) also shows how irresponsible and incompetent the Biden administration is. Kerry, a college grad of even less distinction than Al Gore and with no science training, is as qualified to speak about the complex details of climate change as Greta Thunberg. Nonetheless, his fatuous presentation this week in Davos, Switzerland is revealing for anyone not blinded by climate change propaganda, talking points and doomsday scenarios.

Here are some of the fake Irish politician’s astute observations:

  • “I’m convinced we will get to a low-carbon, no-carbon economy — we’re going to get there because we have to.

We can do it because we have to. Now there’s persuasive logic, at least to someone like Kerry. This would be talking down to an audience and patronizing them, if Kerry himself wasn’t likely to believe such rubbish. We’ll reduce the National Debt—because we have to! We’ll eliminate gun violence—because we have to!  We’ll end war and racism—because we have to!

  • “I am not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis.”

According to the past predictions of those same scientists, we should have already seen coastal cities under water, snow a  distant memory, and the polar bears keeping company with passenger pigeons….not that John Kerry being “convinced” of anything related to science should carry any weight whatsoever. He’s just mouthing what cherry-picked “experts” say in highly simplified, politically slanted summaries.

  • “And those worst consequences are going to affect millions of people all around the world, [in] Africa and other places. Of the 20 most affected countries in the world from [the] climate crisis, 17 are in Africa.”

Ironically, it is exactly those same developing countries that most need to employ fossil fuels to advance economically—you know, like the United States did.

  • “So, how do we get there? Well, the lesson I’ve learned in the last years and I learned it as secretary [of State] and I’ve learned it since, reinforced in spades, is: money, money, money, money, money, money, money.”

That’s the Democratic way, all right: throw money at any problem whether you know what you’re doing or not. And if there’s one thing the United States has, with its National Debt of 31 trillion dollars, it’s money. The federal government  borrowed $4 billion a day in 2022.

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A Black Columnist Employed By The Washington Post Just Revealed Herself As Not Only A Racist, But An Especially Incompetent One….Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is seldom that a writer for a prestigious publication spontaneously performs the equivalent of placing a neon “I am a racist moron who should never be taken seriously again!” sign on her head, but that’s what Karen Attiah has done. She’s a columnist for The Washington Post “on issues relating to race, gender and international politics, with a special interest in Africa”—naturally, she minored in Black Studies at Columbia, giving her anti-white racist urges just the boost they needed. One benefit of the disastrous Martin Luther King memorial unveiled this week in Boston is that it has caused lots of pundits, critics and others to reveal things about themselves (hypocrisy, bad taste) that the public needs to know—in Attiah’s case, that she is afflicted by the worst kind of racist hate and paranoia.

Attiah launched into a Twitter rant this week about how the “Embrace” sculpture (above) is a perfect example of how evil whites still distort the legacy of Dr. King as part of the structural racism and vile white supremacy America thrives on…

Boston’s Embrace statue perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK. Cherry-picking quotes about love and non-violence. While ignoring his radicalism, anti-capitalism, his fierce critiques of white moderates. MLK- in his fullness– is still too much for them...And yes, I’ll say it. From another angle, the statue for real looks like one person is performing disembodied oral sex. No matter how much I try, I can’t unsee it. I don’t think MLK would have wanted us to be thinking about cunnilingus on his birthday. Thanks, Boston.…There is nothing radical about the disembodied, de-racialized Embrace statue. It is sending a whitewashed, multi-million dollar message — that MLK and Coretta overcame structural racism and systematic injustice with love– interpersonal, colorblind love….Anyway, since the statue has been revealed, have we been talking about it, or MLK? No. We’ve been talking all weekend about horribly racist/ anti-Black Boston has been– and continues to be. Mission accomplished…? This is what happens when white America tries to grossly distort what MLK really stood for… and ultimately.. what they murdered him for. In making MLK a whitewashed symbol of love, the Embrace statue is both safe AND grotesque. Says little about the man, a lot about America….To have a dismembered statue of a Black man and woman, in a country that killed and destroyed so many Black people, will never sit right with me. MLK Jr. was also murdered by white America. It’s giving -“We are so grateful for Black people’s noble sacrifice” – energy.

Oops! Here’s that virulent white supremacist artist who created “Embrace”:

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Wait—Facts Are “Dangerous” Now? I Thought They Just Didn’t Matter…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

What possible justification could there be for Democrats to oppose releasing all of the footage of the January 6 riot for public viewing?

Last week, Speaker McCarthy said he will make public the thousands of hours of footage from January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol as the “public should see what happened” that day, rather than rely on the report from the rigged and partisan House Select Committee that (sort of )investigated the event. Democrats don’t want the stuff released. Why?

Appearing o MSNBC, where outageous statements are treated as pearls, former Democrat rep Elaine Luria, now just another MSNBC Democratic Party mouthpiece, argued,

If you release all of the security tapes at the Capitol… every bit of information that would lay out a road map for someone who wants to come try to do something like this again, that is really dangerous for the future security of the Capitol… A large portion of the tapes have been released in different contexts.

Oh, well then..wait, what? A complete failure of a mob action might provide guidance to “someone ” who wants to do the same thing because it was such a roaring triumph? 

I thought public information and transparency were always  good things in a democracy. Why wouldn’t Democrats want the public to see all the horrors of what they have compared to the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9-11? Most of the approximately 14,000 hours of footage from that day has never been reviewed by the public or the media. Full transparency doesn’t cause conspiracy theories; it defeats them. It’s like the JFK assassination files and UFOs.

Release it all.

Tuesday Evening Ethics Effulgence, 1/17/23: Art, Rights And Privileges

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I wonder: which is more significant in U.S. ethics history? On this date in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sounded his famous warning about the malign influence of the growing perpetual military bureaucracy and the industrial interests dependent upon it, a “military-industrial complex” that benefited from war and was vulnerable to an abuse of power.. Eisenhower warned, “[while] we recognize the imperative need for this development…We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Largely forgotten now was Ike’s other admonition: “As we peer into society’s future, we–you and I, and our government–must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow,” he said. “We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”

Then there was 1994, when on this date Paula Jones accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, leading to Clinton’s in-court perjury and, indirectly, his impeachment via the Monica Lewinsky mess. Clinton, I believe, corrupted the entire Democratic Party, made George W. Bush’s election possible, and began the decline of the respect and credibility the U.S. Presidency must have to be effective.

Or maybe, in some sense, this date in 1964 planted a truly insidious seed of ethics rot in our culture. On this date, NBC gave the go-ahead for the production of “The Monkeys,” a TV sitcom about a fake pop band modeled on the Beatles as they were portrayed in “A Hard Days Night.” Eventually assembled from struggling musicians and two has-been former child stars, the briefly successful development began the toxic trend of ersatz celebrity, even though, as it turned out, the fake band wasn’t much worse than a lot of the real bands the Sixties inflicted on us.

1. MLK pornographic sculpture update: In an op-ed in the Boston Herald, Rasheed Walters wrote in part of the fiasco,

The Boston Common’s illustrious history and Boston’s popularity as a tourist destination made this opportunity to honor the Kings that much more fitting. Furthermore, this statue will represent how far Boston has evolved in the last 50 years from a racist city to a world-class city inclusive of all people, reflecting Dr. King’s dream [but] the statue that was supposed to symbolize an embrace between Dr. King and Mrs. King was nothing more than two arms detached from a body. Depending on the angle, the statue appeared to be feces, sexual innuendo, or a “woke penis,” as described by the New York Post. The “Embrace Statue” is an utter insult to the honor and legacy of the Kings, an embarrassment to the city of Boston, and an aesthetically unpleasant addition to the country’s oldest park….This spectacular failure has been the subject of countless jokes around the country. However, Black Bostonians are not laughing; we are outraged, dissatisfied, and upset that this opportunity was squandered. We don’t see any statues depicting the severed arm of General George Washington brandishing a sword. So, why should we see statues of our African American heroes mutilated?

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Facebook Censors Me (Again): My Response

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I posted that idiotic thing above on Mark Zuckerberg’s Monster after reading that the Fake Australia conspiracy was a “thing” among flat-earth types—you know, morons. Although I yield to no one in the strength of my conviction that stupidity lies wide, long and deep upon this nation (see today’s earlier post), there must be limits, so I shared it with my alleged Facebook friends with the question, “Is it possible that some people really believe this?” while adding that my sister honeymooned in Australia, or at least I thought she did. Facebook promptly slapped this on my post and took it down.

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Bitter Harry: Famous Grandchildren Ethics #2

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Part I is here.

A London pub has announced that it will be selling a ‘Harry’s Bitter’ beer in response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s tell-all Netflix documentary, “Harry and Meghan” as well as Prince Harry’s family dirty laundry opus, “Spare.” Well-played. For Diana and Charles’ youngest offspring is indeed Bitter Harry, and a weak and rotten Royal to boot.

Because the U.S. is in the throes of The Great Stupid, in part a hangover from the George Floyd Freakout, Harry and his gold-digger spouse Meghan are more popular here than in the UK. Some Americans just enjot seeing the Royal Family shat-upon; some are suckers for those who play the racism victim card, Meghan’s specialty (with Harry’s dog-like assistance), and some were so absurdly smitten with the late Princess Diana, herself often an unseemly publicity addict, that her sons can do no wrong in their eyes. Nonetheless, Harry’s exploitation of his family’s misplaced trust for cash and cheap celebrity is the mark of a royal asshole as well as one whose bitterness has rendered his ethics alarms useless.

What kind of person deliberately reveals—often with dark shading borne of dark agendas—private conversations and family secrets in a manner guaranteed to embarrass, insult and infuriate named relatives and stain the reputation of those who have expired? The answer is… a petty, untrustworthy person. Harry doesn’t need the money, but apparently he needs something else: revenge, probably. He evidently has adopted his late mother’s attitude toward the Royal Family, blames them for her demise, and is doing everything he and his wife can think of to cause them pain.

This is ironic, because the only reason anyone cares a twig for either Harry or his C-list actress wife is his membership in that family. Harry is the epitome of a celebrity who is famous without having done anything constructive, admirable, or praiseworthy. He doesn’t have to work; he was born with the metaphorical silver spoon, and nothing short of treason or murder could remove it—indeed, if British history is any guide, not even those things.

However, he has been relatively cut off, and his wife, at least, wants to make sure they have a bright future ahead of interviews with Jimmy Kimmel, guest spots on sitcoms and starring roles as infomercial pitch-nobles. Thus the plan is to tar King Charles, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Prince William and the rest as racists and creeps, even if it makes Harry and Meghan look creepy too. Creepy celebrities do quite well here.

Maureen Dowd, amusingly snarky with a drop of illumination as usual, writes,

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Ha! And You Thought The Left In New York, Chicago And Portland Had Gone Completely Bonkers…The City Across The Bay Says “Hold My Beer”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The official proposal from San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, the existence of which itself is evidence of psychosis, is finally out, and The Great Stupid has reached a new benchmark.

In December, Ethics Alarms reported that California’s Task Force to Study and Recommend Reparations Proposals for African Americans was about to submit a recommendation that the state hand over $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California as a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers will be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget. I concluded that “it was just one more indicator of how the entire state had lost its collective mind, that The Great Stupid knows no bounds.” Well, I was right about that, and San Francisco’s panel apparently decided to show the USA that its home state was relatively reasonable.

The committee, after much thought, study and debate, has proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to each black resident of the city deemed eligible as recompense for the “decades of harm they have experienced.” And that’s not all! The committee also proposes cancelling all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households, and supplementing lower-income recipients’ income for the next 250 years. After all, the report points out, “Reparation​ ​must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.​”​

They do not, apparently, have to be feasible, responsible, reasonable or constitutional, but then, the city has been working up to clinical insanity for quite some time. We shouldn’t be too surprised.

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Ethics Quiz: Seriously, Mona Charen?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Mona Charen is, I think it’s fair to say, a Trump-Deranged conservative pundit. I recall her faintly from the days of CNN’s Capital Gang,which ended its run in 2005. She was one of the designated conservatives on the weekly panel after Pat Buchanan left, back when CNN wasn’t quite so left-biased and at least pretended to care about ideological balance. The election of Donald Trump sent her wandering in the wilderness with the likes of Bill Kristol and George Will, a bitter Never-Trumper, and now she edits that nest of Never-Trumpers, The Bulwark. Charen isn’t an idiot, or at least shouldn’t be: she’s an honors graduate of Columbia back when that meant something and a lawyer. And yet she wrote this for Time: “We Elected Biden to Be Better Than This,” which begins with the head-exploding assertions….

In 2020, America elected Joe Biden to be not-Trump—a role for which he seemed well-suited. In 2016, the country voted for burn-it-all-down upheaval. Trump was the tribune of those who felt betrayed and misled and mistreated. Four chaotic years later, alarmed voters fled into the arms of an aging former vice-president and senator—a man they had twice rejected as a presidential contender—who seemed the personification of the steady hand.

No one expected Biden to be transformational or extraordinary, but we did need him to be the anti-Trump in the most important ways. We needed him to be sober and responsible, to play by the rules, and to uphold the primacy of law and procedure. And he delivered. President Biden freed the country and the world from the tyranny of tweeted insults, conspiracies, threats, lies, fantasies, and reversals. And while naturally some will criticize his policies, Biden has conducted the presidency with dignity. He has gone some way toward restoring a sense that the system, whatever its flaws, is basically sound.

This Ethics Quiz is a bit different than most. I’m not asking what the ethical course is, or whether particular conduct is ethical.

The Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this…

Is Mona Charen lying, or is she a ‘useful idiot’?

It is flat out impossible that any astute, long-time observer of Washington could believe that statement absent some kind of cognitive impairment.

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