Friday Open Forum: It’s a Marshmallow World!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ironically, the very song that triggered my blue Christmas reflexes as described in last night’s post (I heard it on Sirius-XM’s Christmas Traditions channel, where 99.6% of the artists featured are dead and most of them are dearly missed) became relevant this morning, as we Northern Virginians woke up to a snow-covered landscape and big, fluffy flakes falling. (Climate change, you know!) The song was written in 1949 by Carl Sigman (lyrics) and Peter DeRose (music), and Bing Crosby—of course!—introduced it. Bing’s recording was a hit, but over time it is Dino’s version that has become iconic, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s a frivolous song about enjoying snow, and Martin’s inimitable slurry, cheery rendition is perfect for the mood. Another Christmas song in the canon is all Dean’s: he aced “Let it Snow!” as well.

So many of the modern seasonal songs have truly terrible lyrics (and some traditional carols too), but “Marshmallow World” has a lyric for the bridge I regard as excellent, and also ethically inspiring:

Oh, the world is your snowball, see how it grows
That’s how it goes whenever it snows
The world is your snowball just for a song
Get up and roll it along!

Today let the open forum be your snowball, and see how it grows…

The Most Ethical Christmas Carol

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well, unfortunately I started thinking that it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas this week, so I’m depressed and miserable.

It’s my favorite time of the year because its the most ethical time of the year, but my wife, who was a Christmas fanatic, is dead; my son, who now insists that she’s my daughter, barely speaks to me though I have been nothing but supportive (because that’s my job); my sister is going to be across country for the holiday; and my mom, who was the center of every Christmas in my life as long as she was breathing, breathes no more. I have neither the time to decorate a tree properly (like I used to) nor the resources to  purchase one, and half-hearted decorations will only remind me of 2702 Westminster Place glories past. But I can’t avoid Christmas, just as I can’t avoid ““It’s a Wonderful Life”” as you know.  So I’ll be celebrating my favorite holiday here, on Ethics Alarms, with my five loyal readers and the other visitors who drop in, and pretty much nowhere else. That means, among other gifts, I will be bestowing various Christmas-related post from the Ethics Alarms Christmas attic. Like this one…

*** Continue reading →

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

How does anyone avoid hiding their heads under a bag when they insist that our U.S. media is anything but an ethics-free partisan propaganda machine that validates Trump’s “enemy of the people” analysis every day, and often every hour of the day?

For weeks leading up to Monday’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District pitting Trump-backed Republican Matt Van Epps against Democrat State Rep. Aftyn Behn. to replace GOP Rep. Mark Green who resigned in July, the Axis media was sounding gleeful alarms that Republicans were facing another upset, that the House of Trump was doomed, that the metaphorical wheels were falling off because the President is a senile, blundering Nazi who is mean to all those virtuous and industrious illegal aliens, and everyone regrets not electing the babbling, cackling, incompetent the Democrats tried to inflict on the country after installing a demented puppet in the White House for four catastrophic years.

Sidney Wang had the perfect analysis of the legitimacy of that “narrative” decades before it began:

The media plot, and it was and is a plot, was a replay of what we have observed for a very long time now: journalists seeing their job as demoralizing Republicans and energizing Democrats with pipe dreams, lies, rigged polls, spin and calculated deception, all aimed at the majority of Americans who lack the political literacy and critical thinking skills to know shit from shinola, pardon my French.

Continue reading →

Another Christmas, Another False “Mary and Joseph Were Illegal Immigrants” Analogy…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“Holy morons, Batman!”

The Lake Street Church of Evanston has erected a Christmas manger scene on its lawn that “reimagines the nativity as a scene of forced family separation, drawing direct parallels between the Holy Family’s refugee experience and contemporary immigration detention practices.”

Other than the reality that Jesus’s mother and her husband were not in any sense of the word refugees, as they were traveling from one part of the Roman Empire to another, and the even more relevant reality that this was over 2,000 years ago in a different culture and time that make attempted comparisons with modern immigration policies, problems and legal enforcement ludicrous, it’s a great point!

Defaulting to the Bible and religion as the cheapest “appeal to authority” imaginable is persuasive evidence of a lack of genuine arguments and an IQ deficit, or perhaps a cynical desire to confuse the intellectually deprived. In either case, its an abuse of Christmas. Indeed, the defenders of illegal immigration literally have no valid justification for their beliefs at all. A church that would engage in this cynical, ahistorical deception can’t be trusted.

And now…a song!

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Diego Garcia entered an instructive description of an interaction with a bank on credit card matters that nicely illustrates a theme Ethics Alarms has been commenting on for quite a while. It is not exaggerated, because I have been enmeshed in dozens of these maddening experiences almost every month since my wife died last year. The practices are cruel, frustrating, time-consuming and hostile, and, I am convinced, often intentional. They are the product of multiple unethical conditions and practices, including incompetent management, needless technology complexity, sloth, poor hiring criteria, poor training, the public school system, lack of sufficient emphasis on English proficiency, corporate arrogance, outsourcing of jobs, inadequate staffing, and more. I also believe these systems and the factors creating them cause serious stress-related health problems among the public and even domestic and urban violence as well as mass shootings.

People have been conditioned to just shrug it all off as “how we live now.” We shouldn’t do that.

Here is Diego Garcia’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”:

…I do have a recent BoA experience regarding account setups.

My sister has had a BoA credit card for something like 50 (!) years. She is very much not tech savvy, and is someone who always wants paper statements mailed to her.

On this card, she had made arrangements for her payment to be automatically drafted each month — the payment would be $150 or the statement balance, whichever was smaller. She had made this arrangement by phone as she never had set up an online account for this card. Well, a couple months ago they wrote her to say that they were cancelling this automatic payment and she would have to go online to set it back up.

Continue reading →

Why Are People Like This Teaching In Colleges…or Anyplace?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Like all holiday movies, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” has ethics at the core of its metaphorical heart, though not to the extent of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” the objects of the three Ethics Alarms holiday ethics companions. (Is there another film I should add to the series?) But it really takes effort—and pernicious bias—to claim that the John Hughes classic contains a “dangerous” pro-capitalist message, as SUNY Purchase College Professor Mtume Gant claimed on the insane leftist podcast “Millennials are Killing Capitalism” with host Jared Ware. 

The podcast describes itself as a “platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world.” Great. And it has to dig so deep for topics that it stoops to searching for sinister messages in a formulaic holiday movie?

Steve Martin plays an up-tight ad exec whose asshole tendencies emerge regularly when he gets involved in holiday travel hell as most of us have. He is desperately trying to get home to spend Thanksgiving with his family because it’s what you do, that’s all: he’s also especially sentimental about it. But circumstances conspire to force him to battle his way from Manhattan to Chicago with a gregarious shower-ring salesman (John Candy) who is his emotional and intellectual opposite.

It’s “The Odd Couple” crossed with “A Christmas Carol,” as Martin learns the values of empathy, kindness and good will by the end of the movie, while Candy, who has no family, is embraced by Martin’s in the misty-eyed finale.

Continue reading →

The Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck Picks Up Steam! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I am officially designating the improvidently admitted legal immigrant ethics train wreck as merely an extension of the Illegal Immigrant Ethics Train Wreck, particularly since so many progressives refuse to acknowledge the distinction between legal and illegal in this matter. They also refuse to acknowledge that time marches on, and that policies that made sense in the past often do not make sense, or are not even responsible, today.

Item: One of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends whom have mentioned here several times, as part of one of his daily attacks on the President, cited as authority this section of a speech given by Ronald Reagan shortly before leaving office…

My friend was responding to the Trump Administration’s decision to pause immigration from 19 nations whose culture may not be wise to introduce into American society. The speech, however, cuts against the argument—pro-Somali as well as other immigrant groups uninterested in assimilation—he thinks he is making. Rep. Omar (D-Minn), quite properly excoriated by President Trump (though not in the measured terms he should have used), has said repeatedly that she regards herself as representing “her people,” Somalis first. Omar’s people, like the Congresswoman herself, generally have no intention of becoming Americans in the sense that President Reagan meant. They want to continue to embrace the toxic culture of their failed state but in a more prosperous and accommodating environment among, to be blunt, “suckers.”

Item: I recommend this useful and well-reasoned blog post. Key section:

Continue reading →

Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Not feeling smurfy this morning, but I have to get a few issues covered with dispatch. First up….

The Merrick Bank is incompetent. (Just my informed opinion, now! Don’t sue me!) For reasons irrelevant to this post, I recently acquired a Merrick Bank credit card, and now have my first bill to pay. After an absurdly involved registration process (including a glitch in the programming that I already registered a complaint about—the website registration asks for a first and a last name, but not a middle initial or a suffix. However, the application for the card DOES include spaces for middle initials and suffixes. So to register to use the “convenient website” to manage one’s account, entering what is asked for, first and last names, results in an error message.

After 25 minutes of fighting with the automated Merrick phone zombie, I finally reached a human being who explained that I was supposed to include my middle initial in the “First Name” space and the “Jr” suffix where it asked for my last name. “Oh. And how was I supposed to know that?” I asked. “I can understand your frustration, sir…” Yeah, bite me. FIX IT, assholes.

After deciphering the stupid system (which included deciding on three secret questions) I got to my current charges page. It stated that I owed $645.60 and asked if I wanted to pay “entire amount owed.” However, there seemed to be no way to learn what the charges were that totaled up to that amount. All I could get was the record of $67.00 in charges.

Again I went through automated phone zombie hell and eventually asked of the human representative who appeared after my being on hold for ten minutes the simple question, “I want to pay the entire amount owed. How do I discover on your ‘convenient’ website what those charges are? What’s the secret link?”

First, the guy had a virtually impenetrable accent. He spoke like Balki Bartokomous (Bronson Pinchot) from “Perfect Strangers” trying to do an impression of Bill Dana’s José Jiménez character imitating Curly Howard in the Three Stooges’ Maharaja routine. Repeatedly I asked him to slow down and speak clearly, which he couldn’t do. On top of this, he couldn’t give me a straight answer to my question. Finally I gave up and ask to speak to Balki’s supervisor.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “On the Venezuelan Drug Boat “Double-Tap…”

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As I have stated periodically here, few things make my heart soar like a hawk more than when I awaken feeling punk and have the comforting knowledge that a worthy Comment of the Day awaits to be posted, giving me precious hours to become coherent, if not wise.

Thus I am thrilled to post 77Zoomie‘s invaluable and informed commentary on the controversy surrounding the deaths of two apparent drug smugglers. [I am sorely tempted to note that the Axis of Unethical Conduct is routinely outraged at the well-earned fates of illegal immigrant criminals and drug runners, but have been oddly reluctant to express similar concern for the many citizen victims of illegals who never should have been allowed enter and stay in our country. But I won’t…

Anyway, here is 77Zoomie’s Comment of the Day in response to “On the Venezuelan Drug Boat ‘Double-Tap’ Controversy”…

***

Former JAG here–I’ve taught the Law of Armed Conflict and Operational Law to active duty special operators at one of our special operations schools, as well as advised on use of force to some local commanders. A couple of observations:

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this appears to be some kind of shaping operation directed at not just the President, but members of the armed forces. The original report of this incident was back in September in a publication called “The Intercept.” That report lay dormant until the National Lawyers Guild, a far left legal organization, published an information piece on the military’s obligation to disobey “unlawful” orders, on November 11. The tendentious video by the six congressmen followed shortly thereafter, followed immediately by the posting of billboards outside several major U.S. military installations urging soldiers to question the legality of their orders. This was immediately followed by the pick-up of the Intercept story and its publication by the corporate press.  Draw your own conclusions.

A key point in this discussion that seems to have been omitted by most if not all commentators is that we are engaging our military forces against a state-sponsored narco-terrorism operation. The Maduro government is supporting, sponsoring, and profiting from drug importation into the US, and is working hand in glove with Venezuelan cartels.  In other words, this is not a law enforcement operation but rather a state-versus-state confrontation involving what are effectively unlawful combatants on one side.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: This…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is this an appropriate—responsible, ethical— use of a minister’s position?

As a secondary question, is it ethical for him to announce to the congregation that his parents are not supportive of his son?