On Biden’s Speech….

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’m not even sure the partisan campaign speech President Joe Biden delivered last night from Union Station [text here] in Washington, DC even rises to the level of grasping at straws. It was certainly desperate and pathetic in its desperation and hypocrisy: Ethics Alarms has been predicting that as the reality of public lashback against the spectacularly failed Democratic Party rule since 2020 (and in many places, before) became undeniable, the lies, tantrums and other excesses of those accountable would escalate. I’m sure even worse is on the horizon, but the most charitable thing one could say about Biden’s speech last night is that it wasn’t a terrible as his earlier one calling Republicans fascists. Nonetheless, in my preliminary research, no President has ever given two such divisive and intellectually indefensible speeches in their entire time in office, and Joe Biden gave them within 60 days of each other.

The speech comes as the various polls are finally showing what anyone paying attention knew was the case long before: Democrats are losing support even from their base, and face an epic shellacking. The slashing conservative blogger Ace of Spades, I think, has this scam figured out. He writes that the polling organizations, most of them allied with with progressive universities and biased news organizations, deliberately slanted their polling groups towards Democrats in order to please their clients. (Another analyst adds that such fake news gives Democrats sufficient hope to peddle in fundraising appeals, knowing well that the real numbers would be far more discouraging.) Now, however, because their future credibility depends on not looking like idiots when the votes are tallied, the pollsters are finally playing it straight.

Still, even as all around Biden are losing their heads and blaming it on him, I cannot fathom the epic gall required for this President of all Presidents to base a last ditch appeal for his party on the argument that “we the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic where reality is accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred.”

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Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid: The “Ghost Horses”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

We haven’t had Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid as guests here for a while, and this story seems like an appropriate one for their illumination. I know I keep saying that The Great Stupid has reached Peak Stupid only to find something worse, but I don’t know how one gets dumber than this. The tale out of Lake County, Ohio is even more ridiculous than Biden’s speech last night.

For some reason known only to the rogue neurons involved, the Lake County mounted police decided that it would be a grand Halloween gesture to costume their horses as “ghost horses.” Never mind that nobody knows what a ghost horse looks like. My only clue is the various versions of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in which the ghostly Headless Horseman rides a black steed with red glowing eyes. Then there were the ghost horses in Disney’s “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” which were just horses you could see through. It would never occur to me, if I were asked to imagine a ghost horse, that one would look like a normal horse under a sheet with little eye holes cut in it. Nonetheless, that’s what those whimsical cops came up with, as you can see:

Now, since the ghostly steeds made their appearance on Halloween, I admit that was a big clue to the cognitively engaged regarding what the cops were going for.  Nonetheless, many residents, we are credibly informed, were alarmed because they thought these were Ku Klux Klan horses.

“That was poor execution for a ghost,” said one offended resident. “You go back and look at pictures of the Ku Klux Klan, it’s like the exact replica of what the horses looked like.”

Well, now, that’s not exactly accurate. It is true that the Klansmen sometimes had their horses in white sheets… Continue reading →

Paging Mel Brooks! Madison, Wisconsin’s Halloween Hitler Costume Freak-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I don’t understand this story at all. It represents a complete loss of perspective, human, societal and ethical. I do not know how we got to this place, but we need to get out of it, and the faster the better.

On Halloween, a man was seen in Madison, Wisconsin walking down state street dressed as Adolf Hitler. We are told that horrified onlookers called the police. Oh, fine. In a college town, more than one person, who would normally be the village idiot, thinks it is illegal to dress as a historical character. The police department felt it had to issue a statement explaining that wearing the costume did not “rise to the level of a prosecutable crime” and that the faux Nazi leader “engaged in protected freedoms of speech and expression.” The statement, however, also said that the act of such costuming  justified “fear and disgust” and was “troubling.”

Well, after Ethics Breach #1 in the episode, the ignorant fools calling the police, this was Ethics Breach #2. It is not the police department’s job or function to critique Halloween costumes, especially in Halloween. “Fear’??? This was too scary a costume for Halloween? Or does “fear” mean that the alarmists legitimately felt that they would be harmed by…what, looking at the guy? Were they afraid he would invade Poland? As an ethicist, I’m disgusted that the Madison police would validate hysterical feelings of disgust. The guy was wearing a costume on Halloween! It is not the police department’s business to announce how anyone else should feel about it. Continue reading →

Hello November Ethics Greetings, 11/1 &2/2022: Not Sorry

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh, gee, I guess by using the old folk song “If I had a hammer” to suggest that the Democrats are wildly and absurdly exploiting a lunatic’s one-off hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband as a life-preserver while a metaphoric drowning in a red sea next week looms, I have joined a “brutal mob.”

That’s the sentiment of The Atlantic, which bloviates, “Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.” Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, mockery of the Democrats’ obsession with the attack as if it has any larger significance at all (the party hacks surely aren’t interested in the crime-ridden cesspool their policies have created in San Francisco, where mentally ill vagrants like Pelosi’s attacker roam and play like the deer and the antelope), means I am simpatico with Republicans “who conclude that, like Mr. Trump, they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.”

Wow. That accusation takes a lot of chutzpah after six years of daily “meanspirited, inflammatory or false” attacks on Donald Trump, his wife, his children, his staff and his supporters, culminating in a “democratic norm” shattering prime-time TV speech by a Democratic President labeling Trump’s supporters as clear and present dangers to democracy,

“Inflammatory attack? What inflammatory attack?”

They can all bite me. I’m not accepting any part of such criticism from Democrats and their mainstream media mouthpieces for calling their framing of the weird Pelosi episode exactly what it is: cynical, dishonest, and frantic. That was the point, a fair and valid one, of my use of the song. (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was runner-up), The Left’s silly game is to force everyone to express horror and condemnation over this episode, while thousands of attacks on Americans take place every day. They think such compelled groveling will symbolize acceptance of their ludicrous theory that harsh (but deserved) criticism of Pelosi’s wife caused the attack, so such criticism itself must cease. I see that my friend U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger felt he had to issue a statement toeing that line. Well, Tom works for Pelosi, I don’t, and I also don’t tolerate double standards and narratives that require me to hammer my own brain into submission. I’m on to this desperation ruse—not that it’s hard to figure out—and I refuse to treat it with respect when ridicule is what it warrants.

1. When in doubt, lie, I guess. I don’t get to vote in the newly drawn 7th Congressional District in Virginia, but if I were voting in the close race between incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger and her Republican challenger Yesli Vega, the most recent Spanberger attack ad would settle the issue. A spokesperson for Spanberger who says he is a veteran cop says he is disgusted that Vega has “defended criminals,” meaning the January 6 rioters, and goes on to say that 140 officers were injured in the riot—he gets a point or two for not saying “insurrection”—and “five died.” That statement is an outright lie, and one that has been debunked over and over again. No officers died during the riot. Five died in the days and months after the riot, but none of the deaths were connected with injuries sustained on January 6. This is a particularly egregious Big Lie, one that has been advanced in part by President Biden among others. The Democratic Party’s super-PAC, House Majority Pac, is responsible for the ad.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month AND Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This hyper-partisan boob has been in the US Senate for 39 years and is Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet he still doesn’t comprehend the First Amendment. (To be fair, his party has been trying to marginalize the First Amendment for years now).

To be fair again, he could be a victim of the “Twitter makes you stupid” problem that I warn my legal ethics classes about.

Twitchy has an amusing compilation of some of the Twitter users from both side of the political spectrum who quickly pointed out to Durbin that his own tweet was misinformation.

I thought it was horrifying when CNN’s then-rock star Chris Cuomo, allegedly a lawyer, made a similar statement on Twitter, but Chris is, as we know, a dolt, and he also was just a broadcast journalist, or pretending to be one. Durbin, also a lawyer, is a U.S. Senator.

Wow.

Unethical Pro-Abortion Quote Of The Year: Actress Ann Hathaway

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“…Abortion can be another word for mercy.”

—Actress Anne Hathaway, revealing her ethical deficits and intellectual limitations while appearing on “The View”

Oh, hell. I’ve always liked Ann Hathaway. Now I have to continue liking her despite knowing she’s a brain-dead, self-awareness-lacking, ethics dummy.

Just so I’m not accused of misrepresenting Hathaway’s moronic and offensive claim, here is her full sentence:

“[In] my own personal experience with abortion and I don’t think we talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy. We don’t know. We don’t know. We know that no two pregnancies are alike, and it follows that no two lives are alike, it follows that no two conceptions are alike. So how can we have a law, how can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?”

Someone can only make such an absurd statement by refusing to acknowledge what an abortion is, and that two lives are involved, not just one. If she were arguing for abortion when a fetus is hopelessly deformed or certain to have devastating maladies, that’s a legitimate ethical debate to have. Abortion then might be described as merciful. (But some advocate aborting Down Syndrome babies as similarly “merciful.”) Hathaway wasn’t considering the unborn at all, however. In her warped (but too common) view, it is mercy for the mother to allow her kill the child for her own benefit.

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Amnesty For the Unethical Pandemic Policymakers, Fearmongers And Health Experts?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was thinking about making the latest Atlantic essay “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID” an Ethics Quiz. Wouldn’t that be the civilized, forgiving, soothing, fair thing to do? After all, as author, a Brown professor named Emily Oster, argues, weren’t “most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society”? They meant well! (Rationalization #3A  The Road To Hell) Anyone can make a mistake! (#19. The Perfection Diversion) OK, we could have done better! (#19B The Insidious Confession) That’s in the past! (#52. The Underwood Maneuver). There are so, so many more rationalizations, all employed here to avoid accountability by those who richly deserve it. And I realized that this was coming from The Atlantic, one of the leaders of the Trump-hating media, and a herald of the Progressive New Order. Of course they want an amnesty.

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Mark Your Calendars: The Next Anti-Supreme Court Freak-Out Is Scheduled For June

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In 1978’s Bakke decision, a fractured majority of the Supreme Court found that universities could consider race to build a diverse student body, agreeing that educational benefits could flow from diversity. At the same time, the opinion prohibited quotas, requiring universities to undertake a “holistic” review of each applicant in which race could be a factor. The Supreme Court affirmed this foggy principle in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and again in 2016’s Fisher v. Texas. Schools, meanwhile, became adept at making sure that holistic approach resulted in the desired racial proportions.

Now the Supreme Court appears ready to rule that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unlawful. Five hours of arguments and questioning in the two cases’ oral presentations before the justices made that abundantly clear, but it was already clear long before. The cases’ decisions won’t be handed down until June 2023 (unless that majority opinion gets leaked too), but the Left is already laying the groundwork for a Dobbs-like freak-out.

The clear media talking point memo apparently requires all stories to call such a decision ” a move that would overrule decades of precedents.” But this is deliberately disingenuous. From the beginning, the Supreme Court allowed colleges and diversities to use race in their admission procedures while acknowledging that it was a special exception to the equal protection requirement of the 14th Amendment that was necessitated by the unusual circumstances of slavery and Jim Crow. (It was, in fact, a perfect example of the Ethics Incompleteness Principle, where a valid rule did not work well in a unique situation, and thus s special, unique solution had to be crafted that does NOT serve as a precedent.) Justice Sandra Day O’Connor admitted as much in her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), concluding that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not forever: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”

It was a bad and confusing opinion: if the law and the Constitution is the same, why would it be acceptable to violate it then but not 25 years later? It is now 19 years later; 25 years was not a scientific estimate, but just wait: one of the arguments that will be aimed at the SCOTUS opinion in June will be that it’s “too soon.”

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Yet Another Pre-Election Story That Should Be Getting Major News Coverage As Relevant To Which Party Is Threatening Democracy

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Come to think of it, the Democrats are wielding hammers, though metaphorical ones. More evidence has arrived on how the social media platforms work to serve the current government’s power objectives by suppressing dissent. This has been called a “right wing conspiracy theory” even though the immediate response by Facebook and Twitter to the Hunter Biden laptop report would have been enough to get to a jury if the platforms could be prosecuted for “trying to fix a Presidential election,” and that was two years ago. But every bit of new proof is helpful to convince those apathetic and gullible Americans who need to be hit over the heads with a hammer—I have hammers on the brain today for some reason—before they’ll pay attention.

Twitter: In a final show of defiance that also proved Elon Musk right, Twitter suspended several conservative accounts just as Musk began cleaning house, and only one week before the midterm elections.

Jake Denton, a research associate at Heritage’s Tech Policy Center, found himself suspended on Twitter at 11:10 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 29. Vince Dao, editor-in-chief at the conservative organization American Virtue, had his account suspended a day earlier. Neither had any hint about what led to their suspensions.

Denton said yesterday,

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Ethics Alarm! The Public School Political Indoctrination In Fairfax, Virginia Rates Two “Geenas”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I know Geena has already appeared here recently, but Americans really should be afraid of this story out of Fairfax, Virginia, and be especially afraid as they consider how long such sinister brain-washing of our young has been going on. The incident has a lot more relevance to the elections next week than an isolated attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which has none. If we had a responsible journalistic establishment in the country any more, there would be an uproar over such strategies aimed at public school students. As it is, only Fox News has bothered to cover the story at all, and not very well at that.

Fifth graders were assigned the task of critiquing an anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment, anti-NRA essay as part of a persuasive writing fifth-grade unit from the teachers’ aide, “Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing.” The screed is a fake child’s essay, obviously written by an adult. The clear purpose of the exercise is not to develop critical thinking skills but rather to embed anti-gun beliefs in children too young to evaluate and resist them. Here is the essay:

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