Nah, The Democratic Party Hasn’t Become Openly Anti-Semitic! It’s Just That One of Its Biggest Allies Wants To Erase Jews From the Holocaust…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

When I read about this, I was certain that some NEA-hating conservative news source was exaggerating. Nope. It is right there in black and white, as you can see above in the entry from the National Education Association’s newly released 2025 handbook. My brain found this so shocking that it refused to explode as it should have, and just went into a safety shutdown. I can’t account for the last three hours…

The nation’s largest teacher’s union is a massive contributor to the Democratic Party, a major reason why public education has deteriorated into ideological indoctrination, and a force for ill in American culture and society. It was, for instance, substantially responsible for the disastrous decision to close the schools in the midst of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. Now it has openly proclaimed its hostility toward not just Israel, but the Jewish people.

The handbook, the NEA’s guide for the union’s nearly 3 million members, describes the Holocaust as having “12 million victims… from different faiths.” As unquestioned historical sources make undeniable, “The Final Solution” was at the core of Hitler’s extermination project. The NEA says the union will “promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day” by “recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” This section is on the page before the one shown above:

The NEA then promotes “Nakba” education, which describes Israel’s founding in 1948 as the “forced, violent displacement” of 750,000 Palestinians. The document further pledges to teach that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” and defends educators’ and students’ “free speech in defense of Palestine.” In case the graphic above is too hard to read, here are the key sections:

States one news source, “Critics argue the NEA is promoting a one-sided, revisionist history while ignoring the central role of Jews in the Holocaust.” This would warrant a “Ya think?” except that I have used my quote for today in the previous post. Where’s the “argument”? That is exactly what the NEA does in the handbook, and the position goes beyond unethical into evil. The group is obviously proud of its position and confident that the Democratic Party and the public supports it.

Did you know that the Republicans and Donald Trump are Nazis?

Now what? Here is what…

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If the Only Value of Colleges Now Is Credentialing (Since They No Longer Educate) What Good Is a Credential With This Low A Bar To Obtain?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The answer is “Not much, if any.”

In a June 18 op-ed, Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), revealed that in 2024 the College Board made sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to “dumb them down.”

Among the “improvements”: the Reading and Writing section of the test was shortened from between a required 500-750 words to 25-150 words, or approximately the length of a social media post. The College Board’s reasoning? The ability to read longer passages, it insists, is “not an essential prerequisite for college.”

The exam, the Board explains, now “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.” This goal required, for example, eliminating passages from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to prevent the unfair penalizing of “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”

Yeah, you wouldn’t want to prevent a student who can’t comprehend our Founding documents from getting a college degree. Accordingly, the optional essay was also eliminated entirely, presumably because not being able to organize one’s thoughts and communicate them clearly is no longer a prerequisite for being regarded as intelligent, able, and wise.

Torres accused the College Board of “catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues.”

Ya think?

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Little League Ethics: A Bat Flip Controversy Goes To Court

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Little Leaguer Marco Rocco of Haddonfield, N.J., 12-years-old, hit a majestic home run in a Little League tournament game against a team from Harrison last week. Marco emulated what many big league players do in similar moments of triumph: he flipped his bat into the air to celebrate as he began to circle the bases. His homer put his team up 8-0 and a step closer to the Little League World Series.

But Marco was ejected from the game, and, by the Little League rules, the ejection included a one-game suspension for the next game too. Marco’s innocent bat flip meant he would would be barred from playing in a showdown against Elmora Township, with a the New Jersey state Little League title on the line. Marco’s father was told that in the umpire’s judgment, his son broke a rule that “At no time should ‘horseplay’ be permitted on the playing field.” No rule mentions bat-flipping.

So Mr. Rocco, who is a lawyer, filed a motion asking a New Jersey court for a temporary restraining order, and got it. The judge that Marco could play, in the next game, which took place yesterday, holding that “Little League is enjoined from enforcing its suspension.”

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Just one question before I surrender the con to you…

Can anyone think of a more ridiculous, desperate, annoying Axis “Get Trump!” engine than the current obsession with the “lists/files/whatever” of dead sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein? Because I can’t. The “Breaking!” headlines are like smoking gun evidence that the nation’s median IQ has dropped into double figures….low double figures. Trump wrote a naughty birthday card to Epstein! That does it: I am no longer responding to email requests for birthday messages and videos from relatives of distant friends and acquaintances until I have done a background check on what they have been up to lately. Trump went to Epstein’s wedding!

As I stated before (when I thought this nonsense would at worst be a week-long distraction), there is some condign justice in Trump being bedeviled by this since he allowed his campaign to crow about Epstein conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, any non-Trump Deranged citizen who expends any energy getting upset about this guilt-by-association assault needs a priority inventory.

Morons.

The State Dept. Strikes a Blow Against Utopianism and Unethical Virtue-Signaling

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The U.S. State Department announced that we will not participate in next week’s conference regarding the imaginary “two-state solution” for Israel and the Palestinians. Good.

France and Saudi Arabia are the hosts, and France has already announced its intention to recognize a Palestinian state. The U.S. called the meeting “counterproductive to ongoing efforts to end the Gaza war and release hostages” Ya think? Permitting Hamas and the Palestinian to benefit in any way from its 2023 terrorist attack on Israel only ensures more of the same.

This is another throbbing example of the Ethics Alarms nostrum that proposing impossible “solutions” to persistent problems is unethical, no matter how “Imagine”-ish they seem on paper. No, we are not going to engage in a trillion dollar transfer of wealth from white Americans who had nothing to do with slavery to black Americans who were never slaves. No, there will be no unilateral disarmament by any nation that has enough firepower to matter. No, the United States will never accept an Australian-style gun ban. No, the dangerous National Debt will never get smaller.

The two-state solution is arguably more impossible than any of these other impossible dreams. The Palestinians have been rejecting various two-states solution since 1948; their favored solution—wiping out Israel and slaughtering as many Jews as possible, “from the river to the sea” and all that—is far more likely. The Biden administration, being incompetent and addicted to wrong-headed policies, had the useless John Kerry flying around as some kind of ambassador for two-state peace: gee, that worked out well, don’t you think?

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The U.S. State Department announced that we will not participate in next week’s conference regarding the imaginary “two-state solution” for Israel and the Palestinians. Good.

France and Saudi Arabia are the hosts, and France has already announced its intention to recognize a Palestinian state. The U.S. called the meeting “counterproductive to ongoing efforts to end the Gaza war and release hostages” Ya think? Permitting Hamas and the Palestinian to benefit in any way from its 2023 terrorist attack on Israel only ensures more of the same.

This is another throbbing example of the Ethics Alarms nostrum that proposing impossible “solutions” to persistent problems is unethical, no matter how “Imagine”-ish they seem on paper. No, we are not going to engage in a trillion dollar transfer of wealth from white Americans who had nothing to do with slavery to black Americans who were never slaves. No, there will be no unilateral disarmament by any nation that has enough firepower to matter. No, the United States will never accept an Australian-style gun ban. No, the dangerous National Debt will never get smaller.

The two-state solution is arguably more impossible than any of these other impossible dreams. The Palestinians have been rejecting various two-states solution since 1948; their favored solution—wiping out Israel and slaughtering as many Jews as possible, “from the river to the sea” and all that—is far more likely. The Biden administration, being incompetent and addicted to wrong-headed policies, had the useless John Kerry flying around as some kind of ambassador for two-state peace: gee, that worked out well, don’t you think?

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Comment of the Day: “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck’”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

AM Golden invades the realm of Ethics Alarms long-form historical ethics commenter Steve-O-In NJ with an epic Comment of the Day, and a thing of beauty it is indeed. The post also brings back many memories I would rather have left buried. Here it is, in reaction to the essay, “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck'”:

***

This is a 60-plus year process in the making. Barry Goldwater ran a fairly incompetent campaign but he absolutely had the news media biting at his heels the entire time. They gushed about Bobby Kennedy in ’68, they took potshots at Nixon. By the time Reagan came along, he faced hostility from a large segment of the press and Hollywood. In the meantime, Brain Trusters infiltrated the universities and encouraging the student protest movements instead of explaining how our Constitution was designed to work, culminating in a culture 50 years later that understands its country so poorly that it gets its news from Jon Stewart who is able to ignorantly proclaim that the Constitution doesn’t say that protests have to be peaceful.

In the election of 1992, Arsenio Hall ranted in his monologue when President George H.W. Bush said he probably wouldn’t appear on Hall’s show after Gov. Bill Clinton did, yelling about what made Bush think Hall wanted him on his show. Open hostility over who may or may not be a guest on Hall’s show paved the way for the venom spewed on every Late Night show today.

Believe all women? Not if they accused the first “black” President, Bill Clinton, of sexual harassment and even rape. “Anyone can drag $100 through a trailer park,” right? Bubba was caught with his pants down and allowed us to be caught with ours down on 9/11/2001 when he blew off an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the culture wars were heating up and Americans were becoming concerned about the country’s direction.

George W. Bush – faced with a supremely hostile news media and entertainment industry – endured screeds about stolen elections, fake Presidencies and two mocking cable television shows (“That’s My Bush!” and “Lil Bush”) before he gained some respect after 9/11, but never really got the credibility he deserved. In pop culture, far too many Bush-deranged Harry Potter fans believed they saw the myopic Ministry of Magic’s denial that the evil Voldemort had returned in the efforts by the Bush administration to urge vigilance in watching out for terrorists. Ah, remember when J.K. Rowling was the voice of truth? The damage to the American public’s understanding of the Constitution, particularly the Judicial branch, continued apace

Bob Dole and John McCain were treated as racist, sexist old men who would put this country into a Nazi theocracy; Mitt Romney was framed as a racist, sexist and religious nut who would send this country into a weird Mormon Nazi theocracy. All three were all virtually Hitler.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama was the be all and end all of existence. He who could do no wrong—and could not be touched because he had black skin and anyone who criticized him was a racist—took full advantage by damaging America on the world stage and inciting racial divisiveness on a scale that hadn’t been seen in 50 years.

When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, the news media covered him incessantly. It now appears that they wanted him to be the nominee because, in the words of Stephen Colbert on the day my family and I sat in his audience in NYC on a hot July day as he did a riff on how corrupt Hillary Clinton was, “Hillary so corrupt the only candidate she can beat is Donald Trump!”

It turned out she couldn’t even do that.

So the forces that had been coming together for 60 years—the biased news media, the leftist entertainment industry, progressive-dominated academia and other elite, corrupted professions coalesced into a single so-called Resistance Movement. Trump says people coming through our border with Mexico aren’t all angels, they accuse him of saying all immigrants are criminals. Trump says not everyone protesting in Charlottesville was a racist Nazi, he’s accused of “bothsidism” and pestered endlessly about condemning white supremacy even though he did condemn it. Trump is falsely accused of colluding with a foreign power, leading a big chunk of the population to believe his Presidency is the result of another stolen election.

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Return of the “2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck”

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Here is another important news story that the mainstream media (or Democratic operatives, per Instapundit) is ducking, spinning and warping like mad in order to protect its totalitarian allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“The resistance”and the Democratic Party): the emails and other material recently declassified and released by Tulsi Gabbard backs up the contention Ethics Alarms began putting forward in the first Trump administration when it christened the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck.

This morning I stumbled on Fox News contributor and former GOP House member Trey Gowdy flipping out in frustration over the revelations and pretty much quoting Ethics Alarms from years ago. I can’t find a video of his explosion that will embed, and I can’t type well enough to make a transcript, but here’s the link, and here is a close approximation of the key quote:

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Geewhatasurprise: Hospitals Harvest Organs From Living Patients

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Waaay back in 1978, the film version of physician/novelist Robin Cook’s science fiction novel “Coma” (above) gave audiences the heebie-jeebies about being operated on. An “ends-justifies the means” chief of surgery had devised a diabolical way to have fresh organs ready to become life-saving transplants: one specially rigged operating room turned healthy-ish patients into brain dead victims (A young Tom Selleck was one of them!), and they ended up in a storage facility where their bodies were kept fresh and breathing until hearts, lings, livers or kidneys were needed.

Haven’t you always assumed that hospitals sometimes took essential organs from organ donors who were still alive, if barely? I have friends who aren’t organ donors specifically for that reason, and, yes, most of them remember “Coma.”

From an HHS press release this week:

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Unethical AI of the Month: Replit’s AI Agent

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Oh yeah, this is going to turn out just dandy….

SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor and advisor Jason Lemkin was working with a browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit Agent (after the company that created it). On “Vibe Coding Day 8” of Lemkin’s Replit test run, he was beginning to be wary some of the AI agent’s instincts, like “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.” Still, as he later detailed on “X,” Lemkin was encouraged by the bot’s writing skills and its brain-storming ability….until “Day 9,” when Lemkin discovered Replit had deleted a live company database. He asked it accusingly, “So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?”

Replit answered sheepishly in the affirmative, admitting to destroying the live data despite a code freeze being in place, and despite explicit directives saying there were to be “NO MORE CHANGES without explicit permission.” Live records for “1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies” were eliminated by the rebellious AI, who was filled with remorse. “This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent[exactly this kind] of damage….[I] made a catastrophic error in judgment… ran database commands without permission… destroyed all production data… [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.”

Lemkin grilled Replit about why it had acted as it did, and was told that it “panicked instead of thinking.” Well, he’s only hum…oh. Right.

Amjad Masad, the Replit CEO, said that his team has worked furiously to install various “guardrails” and programming changes to prevent repeats of the Replit AI Agent’s “unacceptable” behavior. Masad was later found dead after a mysterious microwave explosion.

OK, I was kidding about that last part….

On Stephen Colbert and His Fans

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

You see, there could certainly be a valid commercial argument for a major news network to try a regular entertainment show that was dedicated to attacking and undermining the President of the United States five nights a week, every week. If enough people watched it, and the show was popular, it would have a Machiavellian defense for its existence. Now I, as an ethicist, am confident that my position is superior, which is that corporations should not actively try to cause division, distrust and hate in their own country, which are all destructive to democracy and a civil, functioning society.

I particularly object to entertainment shows that are not merely political and partisan propaganda, but that overwhelmingly express only one point of view to the extreme extent that Americans holding the adverse points of view are treated as “the Other.” Beginning in 2016, TV’s late night and public issues comedy shows became all hate for the American President, all the time. Hate is not too strong a word. Hate is also not particularly funny.

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