celebrities

Why Bob Laterza, It Profits A Man Nothing To Reveal Himself As An Ethics Dunce To The Whole World, But For A Lousy 15 Minutes Of Fame?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Congratulations are due to South Shore Little League manager Bob Laterza. He got his name prominently mentioned in the sports media by verbally attacking baseball mega-star Aaron Judge, immediately setting off a controversy.

Judge’s Yankees played the Detroit Tigers in the MLB Little League Classic at Williamsport, Pa. The Staten Island Little League coach slammed the Shrek-like slugger afterwards, telling the media,“How about turning around or wave to New York and the kids that think you’re a hero? They are the ones who pay your salary.” Laterza alleged that Judge ignored his young players as they shouted his name from 10 feet away.

That’s Judge in the photo above, wearing the 99 jersey in the middle of a mob of admirers at the event.

The only reason the coach’s grandstanding was considered news is that his target was Judge, not only the best player alive this season but also renowned as a model baseball citizen and one of the nicest people ever to play the game, even if he does play for the Yankees. Judge signed autographs and posed for pictures with many Little Leaguers from the various teams attending the game. Laterza criticism was the ultimate cheap shot, acquiring some pitiful publicity for himself by assailing a major celebrity.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Judge refused to respond to Laterza’s accusations. It is that kind of abuse from entitled fans and others who believe that baseball stars owe them every second of their time that has prompted many players to announce that they won’t engage with anyone, sign autographs or anything else.

Never mind though. Bob got his name in the sports section.

Comment of the Day: “Hello. This Is Mira!….Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

AM Golden has delivered a fascinating Comment of the Day describing a phenomenon I was barely aware of: the practice of paying celebrities to attend conventions that have little of nothing to do with what the celebrity does or is famous for.

The COTD was inspired by my commentary on the brain-meltingly stupid anti-Trump “X” screed by one-time Academy Award winning actress Mira Sorvino, now on the shady side of what turned into a disappointing career. (To be fair, she was black-balled in her prime by Harvey Weinstein for not accommodating his sexual demands when he was one of biggest power-brokers in Hollywood.)

Incidentally, appropo of subsequent events, Mira’s polemic proclaimed Trump as the second coming of Hitler and said that if he was elected, it would mean the end of America as we know it. And as it is beginning to look like he will be elected…what is the patriotic thing to do to save the nation, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

But I digress…

The convention practice is clearly a cognitive dissonance scale stunt in part: an organization that sponsors a generally admired and beloved public figure as a “guest” gets a boost up the positive end of the scale. Or the celebrity is more like a freak show attraction: Come meet Joey Buttafuoco! Kato Kaelin! And a convention that features a professional leach like Mary Trump (above)? Don’t expect me to register.

AM’s Comment of the Day is also something of an ethics quiz. Don’t jump to the end: that’s cheating.

Here is AM Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Hello. This Is Mira! She Used To Be A Successful Hollywood Actress Until Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductible Donation To Defeat This Terrible Disease?”

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“Platforming Ignorance!” What a Useful and Descriptive Term….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The term, which I had never heard before or at least had never focused on, is featured in an essay by Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) titled, “Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance.” Indeed she is: I had written about how Owens has embarrassed conservatives by, as I put it last November, “being revealed as an ignoramus” by her embrace of Palestinina propganda after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. More recently I listed her as one of the political performance artists (Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, James Carville, Ann Coulter, yada yada) who cannot be trusted to provide genuine opinions because they calibrate what they say and write according to what they think will get them the most clicks, eyeballs, gigs, and cash. Clearly, I was giving Candace far too much credit.

She is a genuine, bona fide idiot, whose recent self-outing as a virulent anti-Semite ( the inspiration for the JNS piece) is just the tip of a really stupid iceberg. As conservative collective AG noted on “X,” Owens has recently declared that…

  • Israel was involved with 9/11
  • The earth may be flat
  • It’s absurd to believe dinosaurs roamed the earth and were killed by an asteroid
  • Macron’s wife is secretly a man
  • Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution and it was secretly a genocide targeting Christians that was worse than the Holocaust
  • The Holocaust is either fake or severely exaggerated
  • The crimes of the allies in WWII and post-WWII were worse than anything the Nazis did
  • The deportation of ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe post-WWII was worse than The Holocaust
  • US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki to target Christians
  • Israel/AIPAC/Jews were secretly behind the JFK assassination
  • A secret cabal of Hollywood Jews were behind the death of Michael Jackson and people around him.

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Performers Making Random People Happy: This Is a Good Thing

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“In these troubled times,” as a weenie college president would put it today, we need to acknowledge the random acts that make life a little bit brighter for people, especially those acts that might file themselves permanently in an individual’s “thrills and fond memories” collection.

In the video above, the singer/songwriter known as Jewel (her real name is Jewel Kilcher) provided one of those random acts. At 49, she’s past her pop culture stardom prime by about two decades, transitioning into the “Masked Singer” contestant and “Star-Spangled Banner” stage. But she’s sold 30 million albums, and qualifies as a major singing star, if one whose fan base now mostly qualifies as middle-aged.

Jewel was recruited by the website “Funny or Die” for a stunt reminiscent of the old “Candid Camera” show. She agreed to submit to extensive make-up and wardrobe subterfuge to disguise herself, and to visit a Karaoke bar as a mousy, reluctant recruit to go on stage and sing some of her own songs. The results can be seen in the video. First the crowd is thrilled at the spectacle of an unlikely candidate revealing herself as a genuine talent, and later, when she revealed her true identity, joyful in the realization that a celebrity singer had given them an unexpected fun experience they could tell their friends and family about.

I love this kind of thing. Back in 2013, Ethics Alarms saluted Neil Diamond for spontaneously and for no compensation leading Red Sox fans in their nightly “Sweet Caroline” serenade. I have been consistently critical of Mandy Potenkin, but he has revealed in interviews that when a child recognizes him in public as “Inigo Montoya” from “The Princess Bride,” he leans down and whispers in the kid’s ear, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Celebrities can abuse their unique status in our society, or they can employ it to bring a little joy into our hum drum lives, as Lena Lamont so memorably said…

Good for Jewel.

On Quitting as an Unethical Grandstanding Tactic

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week Lizzo, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter currently battling accusations of sexual harassment and mistreatment by former back-up singers, announced on social media that she was quitting her epic career. Fans expressed the appropriate level of horror, so five days later she was back, saying that she was not quitting after all, and denying that was what she meant to convey.

This stunt has become a standard PR tool in the music industry particularly. Singers Nicki Minag, Justin Bieber, Doja Cat (don’t ask me who she is) and others have used fake exits to get headlines, publicity and “Please come back!” messages from panicked fans. One of the most celebrated —in all aspects of the word—examples was Richard Nixon’s bitter public farewell after losing the election for governor of California in 1962. “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more!” he said. Sure, Dick.

My position on fake quitting, or quitting in anger and then regretting it after the fever passes, has always been “If you quit, you’re done, at least as far as I’m concerned, and there are no do-overs.” The same principle applies to threatened resignations. I had many opportunities to exercise this personal policy as a manager or leader of various organizations and staffs. My response to “Do X or I’ll quit!” is an automatic, “Bye! Good luck in your future pursuits!” When I ran a non-profit health promotion organization, two of the original staffers didn’t approve of my polices (I had taken over from the deceased founder and their friend) and gave me letters of resignation. Later, they came to the office like nothing had happened, and were shocked when I informed them that they didn’t have jobs anymore. Apparently fake quitting had been a tradition under the founder. The indignant resignees even complained to the board. Bye!

Regular readers here know that I apply the same principle to commenters on Ethics Alarms. If I ban you, you can apply for reinstatement, but if you quit, or threaten to quit, you’re out, and permanently.

I’d like to see that attitude toward strategic quitting become a cultural norm.

Obama’s Favorite Songs: An Often Ignored Insidious Form of “Fake News”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Among the Ethics Alarms long-promised essays that have yet to be posted (you never know when one will finally pop up!) is the Ethics Alarms Fake News Directory. A story that has ended up on many MSM news sources reminded me of why what I thought it would be an easy list to compile turned into a chore. It has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Variety, CNN, the Hill, the Chicago Sun -Times, Yahoo!, AOL and dozens—yes dozens— more. The breathlessly urgent story: Barack Obama shared his list of favorite songs for 2023, or, as the Post put it, “Obama’s 2023 bangers include Beyoncé, Burna Boy and Blondshell.”

There was real news about Obama recently: several conservative-leaning news sources like the New York Post and Fox News reported that the ex-President had lobbied Harvard’s governing body to keep unqualified serial plagiarist Claudine Gay as president of Obama’s alma mater. Of course, the “good” media didn’t see that as newsworthy, or felt that the public didn’t need to know about it. Instead, many of them chose to treat Obama’s annual favorite music list as worthy of breaking news treatment.

This is favoritism and propaganda by innuendo. Only a celebrity presumed to be deserving of top of the cognitive dissonance scale status can get such treatment. The publications that printed this non-news as news are pushing readers to adopt their position: this is an inarguably good and great man of iconic stature, and so attention should be paid to his every thought, statement and opinion. It is a familiar media propaganda tactic and was one of the ways the news media propped up Obama during his mediocre terms as President (and I’m being kind) when they treated his college basketball tournament bracket choices as worthy of attention. These same news sources didn’t think the Hunter Biden laptop discovery was news in the middle of a hotly-contested election, nor did it rush to cover an accusation by a former Biden Senate staffer that he had raped her, but the music playlist of a politician with no special expertise in music at all—at least Bill Clinton played the saxophone—warranted coverage.

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Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Barbra Streisand

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I thought Barbra was smarter than Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner and Joy Behar.

I’m sure she is, or once was; dementia creeps up on you. I really don’t know how to explain this.

Is she being cleverly deceitful? Yes, some prices are falling, like gas, but prices as a whole are not. They are still rising, the effects of Biden’s inflationary policies are still hurting the middle class and the poor, and the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction” Act: has had slightly more salutary effects than Gerald Ford’s W.I.N. button, but nothing to boast about. Inflation “coming down” means that the rate of prices going up is lessening, not that prices are actually less than they were. Does Streisand really not know that?

The claim about Trump is definitely deceit. The mainstream media helped with that one,using the pandemic lockdown results that savaged the American economy to conclude that, as CNN, that scrupulously unbiased news source, wrote in September 2020 as part of the media’s push to elect a mentally-declining President because the public thinks he’s a nice guy, “Trump’s job losses are the worst of any American president on record.”

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Ethics Quiz: Personal Assistant Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I almost called this, “Stop Making Me Defend Robert De Niro!’

De Niro proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s a toxic, narcissistic asshole when he was going around the country shouting “Fuck Trump” at various Trump Derangement gatherings. He’s a great actor, but at 80 he’s now in that difficult period of decline when he should be retired but can’t resist the paychecks or the sudden lack of public attention.

De Niro’s ex-personal assistant Graham Chase Robinson is suing him for discrimination, and the trial is not showing the actor in a very favorable light. As her various allegations were presented to him on the stand—-asking her to scratch his back, giving her degrading tasks, making unreasonable demands (like asking Robinson to “Uber him” a martini from a favorite bar at 11 p.m.), not respecting her personal time (he called her twice while she was at her grandmother’s funeral telling her to buy a bus ticket for his son), and being abusive (he called her a “fucking spoiled brat”), De Niro’s response was always some version of, “Big deal. So what?”

De Niro paid his personal assistant $300,000 a year.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it unethical for someone to pay an assistant to accept abuse and disrespectful treatment?

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“Do You Know Who I Am?” Yes. You’re Under-Educated Knee-jerk Progressive Celebrities Under The Delusion That Your Opinion Is Special

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

What makes a washed-up child star like Alyssa Milano think that her analysis of the Hamas-Israel war should carry any special weight with the President of the United States? What makes any of the other acting Leftists who signed the statement—this predictable crew—

—think their letter should be taken any more seriously than, say, one signed by 60 or so dog-walkers or 7-11 clerks? It shouldn’t, you know. I know lots of actors; some of my best friends are actors, really and truly. But with notable exceptions, their political views are the product of working and socializing in a bubble where there are virtually mandatory political beliefs. Most of my acting friends–“artists”–would watch an hour of MSNBC and say, “Sounds good to me!” because they lack the historical perspective or depth of understanding to challenge the woke orthodoxy of their peers and employers.

Alyssa’s screed goes off the rails immediately. There is no “Palestine.” People who elect a terrorist group to represent them are responsible for the predictable consequences. As one wag neatly put it, Hamas “pearl-harbored” Israel: that’s a brutal act of war, and demands a response that will teach the lesson forever that you can’t do that, and if you do, the results will be dire. Hamas uses Gaza’s children as human shields, and that tactic must never be allowed to work. Calling for a cease fire when the piper is about to be paid makes Hamas’s intolerable conduct practical. Calling for Palestinians to benefit in any way as a result of the terror attack validates terrorism.

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Comment Of The Day: “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am proud to present an epic Comment of he Day by A M Golden on the post, “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President? Because He Can’t…Ever.” It is wise, wide-raanging and nuanced, so I’m not going to waste your time with an introduction. Just read, think, and enjoy.

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As the saying goes, “When someone tells you who they really are, believe them.” We have enough evidence to see with our own eyes and ears who Trump is and who he is not and that should not be relevant to who Joe Biden is and who he is not.

This entry, the previous one in the latest installment of the “Nation of Assholes” series and the one before that about Rudy Giuliani’s untrustworthy secret recorder have all coalesced in my mind this weekend as I have spent several days wearing myself out over planning for a pop-culture convention next week by following other conventions in other cities on social media to determine how the shows are accommodating the guests’ requirements under SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules and what that means for how I should approach any celebrity guest I wish to meet.

I get tired of holding the hands of new convention-goers who don’t understand the rules, ask for clarification and end up not following my advice. I get tired of veteran convention-goers who think they have the right to get around the rules. For entitled people who cut lines, who try to sweet-talk the guest into extra perks and who make little to no effort to ask polite, intelligent questions. They make everything harder on everyone else. Celebrities won’t want to attend these things if people don’t understand or respect boundaries. I have too many stories to recount of fans acting like inconsiderate asses and those stories are from before the pandemic.

We are already an entitled enough culture that treats celebrities like commodities, as if buying a movie ticket or following a TV program requires that anyone who appeared in the same owes us unlimited time, an autograph, a selfie, a kidney… One of the best things about the strike is that it’s finally becoming somewhat public knowledge that most actors aren’t millionaires.

We treat others like us even worse. Not only do we not put most of our fellow citizens on pedestals, but we don’t even afford them the basic respect of treating them the way we would want to be treated. As long as there’s something in it for us, I guess…

Somehow, qualities of character, such as honesty, integrity, patience, kindness, self-control (sorry, I think I wandered into the Fruits of the Spirit from the Bible) seem to have been lost very quickly. We are a mess as a culture and there’s a lot of blame to go around, not least because we have forgotten the Golden Rule.

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