Tales Of The Great Stupid: Wow…Who Could Have Seen THIS Coming?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Children are being bombarded by media and social media propaganda asserting that a vast number of people are trapped in bodies having the “wrong” sex organs, and celebrating the “T’s in the LGBTQ+ interest-group-of-convenience as the cool new martyrs. Thus an increasing number of these children convince their woke and irresponsible parents, and doctors who would rather be politically correct than “do no harm,” to divert their fates from the natural biological path to something else, because everybody is doing it, or everybody is saying it’s the right thing to do. It shouldn’t take much to figure out this is a terrible trend based on terrible reasoning, but there are so many such trends and ideas flourishing now that it’s hard to bat them all away.

And so we have the case of 23-year-old Keira Bell in Great Britain, who is suing a National Health Service gender clinic that she says should have challenged her decision to transition to male as a teenager. A tomboy as a child, Keira says her determination to switch gender gradually built up as she found out more about transitioning online, and “one step led to another.”

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Ethics Warm-Up, 1/3/21: What A Ridiculous Collection Of Junk THIS Is…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Junk

I’m still so happy about the mysterious return of my old “Ethics Scoreboard” that I could plotz.

1. Nothing to see here, move along! Brian Flood posted his list of the major news media scandals of 2020, conveniently leaving out the various transgressions of Fox News, since he works for Fox NewsAlso inexcusably missing: the various unprofessional episodes involving CNN’s Don Lemon and Brian Stelter, among others. Still, it’s a damning list:

…and some more. Among other stories missing: the taped Times meeting in which its editor, Dean Baquet, revealed the paper’s strategy of undermining President Trump, the Times interview with Baquet regarding the paper’s failure to report the rape allegations of his former employee, Chuck Todd’s moment of truth, and many other stories Ethics Alarms discussed under this tag.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

2. From the Ethics Alarms life competence files: British TV personality Eamon Holmes told reporters recently that he always wears loafers because he never learned to tie his shoes. Holmes is 61.

He’s an idiot.

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The Surprise Return Of The Ethics Scoreboard, And “The Bank of America Teller and the Thumbless Customer”

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Ethics Scoreboard

The Ethics Scoreboard was my first ethics website. It began operation in February of 2004, and became an archive on November 1, 2009, when Ethics Alarms took its place. For many years now—frankly, I’ve lost count—it has been unavailable on the Web because of an incompetent hosting service that took my money, took it down, and doesn’t permit any direct customer service contact. Last time I checked, the domain was unclaimed. I stopped looking for the Scoreboard because it depressed me, and I had hit a dead end in my efforts to get it back up.

Well, it’s back up, and I have no idea why or how. What a happy 2021 surprise! I suspect the original webmaster, my old friend Lauren Larson, is responsible, but if so, she never told me: I don’t even know how long the site has been live again. I learned about the resurrection from a wonderful man whom I met through the Scoreboard, Alek O. Komarnitsky, who sends out a holiday letter. This year, he wrote, “I am still on the Ethics Scoreboard!” and sure enough, there at the link was the last article I wrote about Alek.

There is a lot of material on the Scoreboard, some of which I am very proud of, and I thought it was all lost in cyberspace. For me, this is like finding a treasure trove of old family photographs in the attic. Thank you Lauren, thank you Alek, thank you incompetent hosting service, thank you whoever it was that did this! I will eventually get to the bottom of the mystery, but for now, I’m afraid to pinch myself to see if it’s a dream.

In celebration of the Return of the Prodigal Website, I now present one of the Scoreboard’s last posts, “The Bank of America Teller and the Thumbless Customer.”

Welcome back, Ethics Scoreboard! I really missed you.

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Saturday Evening Ethics Post, 1/2/2021

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

10-saturday-evening-post-magazines

State of the Blog: Yesterday marked the 365 day low point in Ethics Alarms traffic after what was otherwise a lively year. Coincidentally, it also marked the all-time high point in Ethics Alarms followers, if you don’t count Twitter, which I do not.

I’ve got a lot of housekeeping to do on the blog, and I’m hoping the annual dead spot after New Years gives me time to do i. This includes fixing some broken links, continuing to fix typos both old and new (Pennagain and Other Bill provide a marvelous service by flagging them, and I am behind right now), taking down some pages and categories that are or will soon be out-dated in the wake of President Trump’s defeat, taking the time to see if I can master the WordPress “block” system which right now robs me of an extra 30 to 40 minutes every day, and finishing and posting several articles that have been hanging around my neck in various states of incompletion. There are a couple of rationalizations that need posting, too, and some Comments of the Day that fell through the cracks.

I always have hope that I will get up the Ethics Alarms Awards for the year, which I have failed to do now for several cycles. They are fun, but they take a lot of time, and the stats say few read them. I may try a less ambitious version

Facebook finally allows me to link to articles, though it won’t post the graphics like it will for other websites, but after two years of being blocked for violating Facebook community standards, I consider that progress.

To be honest, I’m tired, and right now I’m sick and tired. The core group of commenters here keeps me focused on the mission, and for that I am grateful beyond words.

1. I was going to devote a whole post in rant form to this, but I calmed down. In August of last year, The Robert H. Jackson Center hosted a discussion on comedian George Carlin’s “7 Dirty Words” and the 5-4 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation SCOTUS decision in 1978 upholding the broadcast restrictions on George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” routine as well as the words he discussed. Emmy-nominated producer Stephen J. Morrison, serving as moderator, was joined by comedian Lewis Black, Carlin’s daughter Kelly Carlin and Cornell Law professor Howard Leib. I stumbled upon a recording of the discussion on the Sirius-XM “Classic Comics” station, and my head exploded so many times that I had to clean up the car like John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction.”

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Ethics Perspective: When The Weavers Had To Sign A Loyalty Oath To Appear On The Jack Paar Show

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Weavers

It has become a fad to bid goodbye to 2020 while proclaiming it “the worst year ever.” Of course, and I say of course realizing that most people have no idea why I would say “of course,” one only thinks it was the worst year ever if one doesn’t know much about all the other terrible years, thanks in part to our atrocious education system’s inability to teach either the substance of history or its importance to new generations.

The delusion fits nicely into the Left’s Big Lie that everything was terrible because Donald Trump was President. But as bad as the year behind us was, and there is no question about that, liberty and the identity of America were facing equally dire threats when the nation had been terrified out of its metaphorical gourd by Communist propaganda and Right Wing doomsayers. Luckily for us, “cooler heads prevailed,” but that was just luck. Let’s look back on a largely forgotten incident that occurred on this date in 1962, one of the really bad years.

On January 2, 1962, the reunited folk group the Weavers (Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Pete Seeger) was scheduled to appear on The Jack Paar Show. Paar, if his name doesn’t ring a bell for you, was the most quirky and intellectually complex of the “Tonight Show” hosts, and in 1962 had a quirky, intellectually complex hour-long prim -time show on NBC following Johnny Carson’s taking over the late night franchise.

Before taping, the Weavers were told by NBC officials that their appearance was contingent upon their signing a statement disavowing the Communist party. Every member of the Weavers refused to sign, and the appearance was cancelled.

Some perspective is necessary. The Weavers were one of the most popular performing and recording groups of the 1950s, but they were undoubtedly radically Left by the standards of the time. Founder Pete Seeger wasn’t just pro-union; it would be fair to say he was pro-Stalin, in the dreamy-eyed, naive way that other American liberals were (Bernie Sanders comes to mind). But he was a brilliant performer and song-writer, and his group sensibly confined its material to non-political topics: the Weavers’ big hits were “Goodnight Irene,” a #1 record for 13 weeks in the summer and fall of 1950, “Midnight Special” and “On Top of Old Smoky.” But the Red Scare of the early 1950s still hit them hard. During the 1930s when Communism was “in,” the members of the group were all enthusiasts. When news of the pre-Weavers Weavers’ political past got out, they were, in modern terms, canceled. A planned television show was killed. The group’s four members were placed under FBI surveillance. Seeger was grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Decca cancelled their recording contract in 1951; concert venues refused to book them, and their records were pulled from the radio. Two years later, virtually blocked from performing, The Weavers broke up.

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Conclusion: The President Will Pardon Himself, And Should

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

POTUS pardon

For a party that has throttled down on the Big Lie that President Trump has been unusually disrespectful of crucial democratic norms, Democrats are remarkably fond of obliterating some of the most crucial norms established since 1792, norms that have served us well. They began by defying the norm of an opposing party accepting the election of a President and beginning his term with a demonstration of good will, loyalty and cooperation. They continued with the abuse of impeachment, dispensing with the requirement of a high crime or “misdemeanor,” seeking President Trump’s removal for conduct indistinguishable from that of his predecessors. Now it is clear as crystal that the party intends to prosecute Trump after he leaves office, criminalizing politics and following the practice of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union, which often imprisoned—or killed— political opponents as soon as they lost power.

Democrats have come close to doing this before. They would have prosecuted Nixon, whom they hated almost as much as they hate Trump, had Gerald Ford not courageously taken that opportunity away. Many in the party wanted to prosecute President Bush for “war crimes.” Now there is little question that, driven by a Trump-deranged base and supported by a legal establishment that has abandoned any semblance of objectivity or restraint, as well as a poisonous news media lacking prudence or perspective, Democrats will seek the imprisonment of Donald Trump as a matter of pure revenge. Whether they can prove his guilt of actual crimes is a secondary matter. They want to destroy him as a warning to any other outsider who dares to challenge what they believe is the inevitable progressive ascendancy.

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New Year’s Ethics Warm-Up, Entertainment Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Thats enter

1. “That’s Entertainment!” Once again, Turner Movie Classics ran all of the “That’s Entertainment!’ series as its New Year’s Eve programming. Last time TCM did this, primary host Ben Mankiewicz won ethics points for having the guts to say, as his fellow hosts were gushing about MGM musicals between “That’s Entertainment!” 1 and 2, that he regarded movie musicals as in the same category as super-hero movies today: diverting fluff, but not cinematic masterpieces. I don’t completely agree with him, but as Mankiewicz has shown before, he has integrity as an expert analyst, and does not hesitate to register opinions that his audience might not like. (Where Ben is wrong in his comparison is that the old movie musicals showcase astonishing talents that we are unlikely to see the like of again—Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye, Julie Andrews and others—while the super-hero movies merely display special effects that we are doomed to see repeated for the rest of our lives. In support of Ben’s point, I have to admit that watching “That’s Entertainment” one is struck by how few truly great movie musicals there were.

Last night, Ben scored again as a truth-teller. After mouthing the conventional wisdom that Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were regarded as the greatest dancers in Hollywood history, he added, “Of course, Eleanor Powell and the Nicholas Brothers might disagree.” As an early clip in “That’s Entertainment!” shows, a dance-off between Astaire and Powell, she could match Fred step for step. The Nicholas Brothers, who only appear briefly in TE1, never had a chance to impress white audiences, but when you watch them, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they could perform feats of feet that neither Kelly nor Astaire could match.

2. “That’s Entertainment!” (cont.) The series is as good an example as one could find of why sequel are cheats most of the time. The first in the series was perfectly conceived: at a time of national cynicism in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, during a period where movies were becoming violent and bloody and MGM, once the “Dream Factory,” was being sold off. Jack Haley, Jr, the son of Judy Garland’s Tim Man and an MGM executive, had the idea of using old clips and old stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age to show a new generation what thrilled their parents and grandparents. In part because of Haley’s clever choices of material and his editing, the movie worked better than anyone could have imagined. I saw it in D.C. grand Uptown theater (it just closed it doors forever, killed by the lockdown) with a packed house of Baby Boomers. During the opening credits, the audience broke into spontaneous applause as each names of the co-hosts, past their primes all (except for Liza Minnelli), appeared on the screen. Donald O’Connor! (Applause)…Mickey Rooney! (Applause). I’ve never witnessed anything like it.

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Oh, Why Not? Let’s Start Off 2021 With “Mostly Peaceful Protests” Over The Police Shooting Of A Black Man In Minnesota! Will BLM And The News Media Use It As More Evidence Of Systemic Racism?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Idd

They’ll sure try!

Here is how the New York Times described the death of Dolal Idd:

“A Minneapolis police officer shot and killed a man during a traffic stop on Wednesday evening, the first killing by a member of the department since George Floyd’s death in May, a police spokesman said.”

Let’s see: subsequent accounts show that it was not, in fact, a “traffic stop”: police had been looking for Idd as part of a firearms investigation. The account was also misleading in that it didn’t mention that Idd fired on police officers first. And, as I guess I will have to keep writing since the news media will not (although I guarantee jurors in the George Floyd trial will hear it many times), it is far from clear that the sainted Floyd was in fact killed by a police officer.

Other than that, the Times reports is pretty accurate for modern journalism; only three major misrepresentations in a single sentence of 35 words.

Since any shooting of a black man by U.S. police is presumed to be based on racism, a mob of demonstrators appeared at the scene, blocking traffic for several blocks and starting a bonfire in the middle of the street. Authorities urged them not to riot or commit arson, and they did not, apparently because the temperature of ten degrees was too cold for them. Certainly the facts of the shooting couldn’t have had anything to do with it: most of the other police-involved deaths over the summer justified riots no more than this one did, but riots we got.

Multiple police vehicles had converged on Idd’s car. He tried to elude the police, and when he realized he couldn’t, started shooting at the officers. They shot back; of course, as I’m sure we will hear from Joe Biden or someone, they should have tried to “wing” him. Sadly, he was killed at the scene.

Such a loss. The Star Tribune reports,

In 2019, Idd was convicted of illegally possessing and firing a gun in Hennepin County. The charges say, in July 2018, Idd fired a gun in the basement shower of his parents’ home around 1 a.m. with two children sleeping nearby.

Idd’s mother told Eden Prairie police that her son was not permitted in the house because “he scares the children.” Police arrested him later in Bloomington with a 9mm handgun that had been reported stolen in North Dakota, according to charges.

We haven’t heard from Idd’s parents and friends since the shooting, but then Ben Crump hasn’t been hired yet to represent them. I’m sure we will soon be told that Idd was a wonderful human being who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and who was in the process of turning his life around until those racist police snuffed out his beautiful life. Just look at his picture (above)! Now who could believe someone with such a sweet face was trying to kill cops? Here’s another one that is being used by the media and a GoFundMe page:

Idd2

Anyone can see he was harmless! There has already been a vigil, as CAIR sensed an opportunity. Idd was a Muslim, and as we all know, Islam is a non-violent religion.

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Last Gasp Ethics, New Year’s Eve 2020

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Happy New Year, Everybody!

1. A late entry in the “Most Unethical Lawyer of 2020” competition! McGinnis E. Hatfield was stripped of his license to practice law by the West Virginia Supreme Court. What did he do? Well, this section of a transcript of his conversation with a female client explains things pretty well:

Female: “I thought like when we first started out, I was just going to pay you. I didn’t know that you wanted sex out of the whole thing.”

Hatfield: “Well, I’d have to charge you like $1,500 bucks. You don’t have $1,500, do you?”

Female: “No.”

Hatfield “So come on out here. Just come. What time do you want to come?… [I]t’s just not going to work unless you do what I say.”

Female: “What do you want me to do?”

Hatfield: “… “Well, I want you to let me eat your pussy, and then I want you to let – I want you to suck my dick, and then, you know, I just have to – I’m as straightforward as I can be. And if you don’t want to do that, then fine. I don’t have any- I like you. And if you don’t want to do that, then we’ll just have to call it off.”

Female: “Is that not – all right. That’s fine. Whatever.”

Hatfield: “Is that okay?”

Female: “I mean no, not really because I’m not a whore.”

Hatfield: ” … And like I said, if you won’t want to do that, then that’s fine by me. I wish you luck. And if you don’t want to do that, then I’m not going to try to represent you. So that’s a benefit for you. And I’ll give you some money, too[.]”… You know, I’m shooting straight with you. I told you from the beginning that sex was important to me. I want some now. Nobody’s tried to trick you. And it would be safe, too. But anyway, if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine by me, honey, but you’ll have to get somebody to help you with your divorce, too.”

Female: “Okay, That’s fine.

Of course, it’s not fine. Lawyers are prohibited from having sex with clients in most jurisdictions. Lawyers cannot encourage individuals, including clients, to commit a crime. Mr. Hatfield compounded his problems when he flunked the easiest part of a disciplinary inquiry, telling the judge who asked Hatfield whether in retrospect, he found his behavior inappropriate or unethical,

“I think my conduct in this whole situation is human. And that’s the only defense I’m offering. Lord knows, we all need that. So that’s as far as I’ll go with that.”

The judge tried again, asking, “Are you remorseful?” Hatfield replied, “No. I have no remorse. I feel like I’ve been victimized.”

What an idiot.

It put me in mind of the Steven Wright line, “How did the fool and his money get together in the first place?”

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Follow-Up From The Ethics Alarms “I Don’t Understand This At All” And “Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck” Files: Why Are We Allowing This To Continue?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Louise joke

Minnesota state Representative Mary Franson and Senator Scott Jensen (who is a physician) collected 2800 death certificates provided by the Minnesota Department of Health, checking to see if alleged Wuhan virus deaths were being over-counted. (Well, anyone who sees the obituaries of 95-year-olds and 103-year-olds who are called pandemic victims knows they are being over-counted. Ethics Alarms has noted this tool of the hysterics, nascent totalitarians and fearmongers before.) Jensen had earlier pointed out that hospitals had financials incentives to use the pandemic as a default cause of death.

Jensen explains that while one would typically look to the “UCOD” or “Underlying Cause Of Death” for classification purposes rather than the “immediate” cause or the “intermediate” causes. The practice the CDC had always required in classifying deaths was to use the UCOD.

But for the Wuhan virus, the CDC practice of 17 years was changed, and physicians were told, “If someone had the pandemic virus, it doesn’t matter if it was actually the diagnosis that caused death. If someone had the virus, they died of it.” Stroke? Multi-organ failure? If the deceased tested positive for the Wahun virus, that was the cause of death. Franson and Jensen uncovered examples where victims of a fall were called pandemic casualties. Drowning victims. One “Covid 19” victim died after being thrown from a speeding automobile. About 800 of the 2,800 death certificates examined indicated that the virus was not the underlying cause of death. That’s a 40% overstatement.

It isn’t just Minnesota that’s doing this, either. It’s every state, and the whole country.

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