Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Netflix’s “The Lincoln Lawyer” series has dropped its fourth season. This gave me an excuse to revisit the first three seasons of the legal show, based on the Matthew McConaughey film, itself based on Michael Connelly novels, about sketchy a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney whose office usthe backseat of a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Towncar. The series—it’s Netflix after all—has DEI’ed the story, with Micky Haller, the central character, being transformed into a Mexican-American who speaks Spanish frequently (though not as often as Bad Bunny) and is played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, a Mexican actor who only plays Hispanic roles when he appears in U.S. movies and TV shows. He was, for example, the gratuitous Hispanic father in the ostentatiously “diverse” “Jurassic World” franchise addition last year (the worst of them all, in my opinion). That is not to say he isn’t an appealing, intelligent, entertaining leading man in “The Lincoln Lawyer.”

The show makes a point of highlighting legal ethics dilemmas, as Mickey habitually tightropes along ethical lines to zealously represent his clients. A fellow legal ethicist thinks the show is unusually good in this realm. I’m not quite so enthusiastic. I will examine some of the legal ethics dilemmas that surfaced in the first two seasons over the next couple days.

Today’s featured problem:

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The N.F.L. Is Helping Chuck Klosterman’s Prediction Come True

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I was going to get this up before the Super Bowl, but it turns out that the issue was further crystalized by the game itself. As happens approximately 50% of the time with this annual spectacle, the game was a yawn, and much of the news coming out of the contest involved the NFL’s deliberate transformation of what was once considered a unifying family cultural event, like Fourth of July fireworks, into a partisan, progressive statement about how America sucks, with expensive TV ads extolling capitalism and patriotism at the same time. That’s message whiplash, and ethically irresponsible.

As the New York Times explained, without criticism, the NFL took a hard turn Left when it put Barack Obama pal Jay-Z, the rap star and impresario, in charge of the Super Bowl halftime show after the 2018 Super Bowl had triggered anger from fans over players “taking a knee” during the National Anthem. The Times, spinning as usual, says that the kneeling was intended to “draw attention to police brutality and social justice issues.”

As Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time, none of the kneelers, including its cynical originator, over-the-hill quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ever explained coherently what they were kneeling about. What “police brutality”? Oh, you know, Mike Brown, whom Black Lives Matters still says was “murdered” on its website. What social justice issues? Oh, you know: it’s time for white people to be discriminated against to make up for slavery. The left-turn was a greed-induced mass virtue signal to blacks, clueless young fans, and Democrats. (It helped that President Trump vociferously attacked Kaepernick and Co., so the kneeling appealed to the Trump Deranged too. (See Dissonance Scale, Cognitive)

The Times:

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Ethics Observations on the President’s Response to His Obamas-As-Apes Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 REPORTER: “Mr. President, you frequently criticize Joe Biden for not knowing what is going on in his name. This racist video that was posted is on your social media.”

 PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I know what’s going on a hell of a lot better than you do! You don’t know what’s going on! I know what’s going on.  No, Joe Biden didn’t have a clue, but we know everything. And when you look at what’s happening with our economy, think of it, we’re way years ahead of schedule. We have thousands and thousands of businesses being built right now, so Joe Biden had no clue. If Joe Biden were elected or if Kamala were elected, we wouldn’t have country right now. We won the election because of minority voters.”

 REPORTER: “Does this post maybe hurt Republicans with, you know, Black voters after the…”

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: “You know, I was, look, we did criminal justice reform. I did the historically Black colleges and universities. I got them funded. Nobody has been, and that’s why I got a tremendous, the highest vote with male Black voters that they’ve seen in many, many decades. I’ve done great with them. Black voters have been great to me. I’ve been great them. Black voters has been great me. I’ve been great to them.  And I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time, as far as I’m concerned. We have — I’ve had a great relationship. Think of what I’ve done. Criminal justice reform. Nobody else could do it. Obama couldn’t do it, nobody could do. Clinton couldn’t. They actually went the other way. They went into a very bad thing for African American people, Black people. They went to a — they did very bad things. I did very good things. But criminal justice reform, and then I funded the universities, which nobody else was willing to do. They were going every year, they’d come back to Washington and they’d be begging for money, begging. I got to be friendly with some of the heads of the schools and they would come back and they would literally tell me they’re forcing us to beg. I’m the one that got them long-term financing and more than they were looking for.  So there’s nobody that’s done more. And I think maybe more than anything else was criminal justice reform. They’ve been trying to get it for years. And I’m the one that got it done, so nobody can tell me about that.”

 “That somebody posts, the staffer posts, you know, posts. And I knew it was all about, if you take a look at that, and see the whole thing, it was a small section at the very end. But that was about fraudulent elections, which we have, a lot of them. We’re gonna get it stopped. And I liked the beginning, I saw it, and just passed it on.”

Observations:

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Chess Ethics, From Ben Franklin

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Today is Super Bowl Sunday, as you know unless you live in a cave. I quit watching all football after the CTE scandal made it clear to me that this is a deadly sport and that the people who make money by paying young men millions to cripple themselves are ethics villains who deserve to spend eternity standing in a boiling lake of guacamole.

I was never that jazzed about football as a game anyway, and knew that the NFL was the most ethics-free sports organization in existence even as the NCAA worked hard to catch up. In addition to being a mob game on the field and off, it requires no intellectual engagement at all and the values it teaches are few. Later today I will post on Chuck Klosterman’s recent claims that the game is doomed, to which I will only note now by writing, “Good!”

I like all games and most sports. I believe that there are seven special games that everyone should learn to play because they all require special skills that are useful in other spheres of life, and teach ethical values as well. Those are, in no special order,

  • Go
  • Poker
  • Bridge
  • Diplomacy
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Scrabble, and 
  • Chess

I will save what each offers us ethically for another essay or six. However the last, which arguably should be first, is the immediate topic here. They used to teach chess in Soviet schools; perhaps they do still. It’s a wise policy. If Americans spent the time they spend watching football playing chess instead, this would be a far healthier country with infinitely stronger critical thinking and life competence skills.

I recently learned that our smartest, quirkiest and most versatile Founder, Benjamin Franklin, was a chess enthusiast. Ben was the ultimate polymath and didn’t have the time or dedication to master a single pursuit that is necessary to become a great chess player. Heck, I don’t understand how he had time and energy to accomplish 25% of what he did in his life. Nevertheless, Ben did take the time to write down his thoughts about the game in the following essay, in which he proposes principles of chess ethics.

I offer it to you now as an alternative to gathering black marks on your soul by supporting the NFL and its sponsors today. Here’s Ben…

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Stanford Student Elsa Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“This should be the real message of the story: Stanford must reform its disability accommodation system so it is fair, helping only those who need it most. At the same time, the university should encourage students to live up to the greatest human attributes: hard work, honesty, perseverance and excellence. As things stand, it’s teaching us the worst lesson of all: cheaters always prosper while the good get punished.”

—Elsa Johnson, the Stanford student who wrote about how students there contrive “disabilities” to gain advantageous accommodations from the school.

This was the conclusion of “I exposed Stanford’s disability racket. I was stunned by the reaction on campus.” Ethics Alarms discussed Johnson’s original essay here. In her follow-up, she claims that the reaction to her “whistle-blowing” article (my term, not hers) were generally positive, that her fellow students were glad she exposed a culture on campus that encouraged students to cheat. She wrote in part,

“I braced for the worst — but when the story broke, I was floored.The piece did go viral, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. I was flooded with messages of support. “Was that your article on disability at Stanford?” a recent grad from Stanford’s Business School texted me. “THANK YOU for writing it and the courage to include your own story among the examples. I came straight from the army to Stanford and was initially deeply uncomfortable with the ‘gaming’ of the system I saw, for disabilities and other issues. And by the time I graduated two years later, I found myself playing some of those games. I didn’t know if I had lost a part of myself and my integrity, or if this was simply the real world I had to navigate.”

I am considerably cheered by that response, if indeed it was the general response and not one cherry-picked to make an interesting follow-up. I confess that I have my doubts.

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“The Ethicist’s” Tender Feelings for Law-Breaking Neighbors and Illegal Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Maybe someone needs to check Prof. Attiah’s citizenship status…

A New York Times reader (and you know what that usually means…) writes to “The Ethicist”…

“About a year ago, a very nice family moved into the rental home next door. We have shared food and invited them to our pool in the summer, and we always exchange greetings from yard to yard. About six months ago, the father’s auto-shop location apparently became unavailable. He and his mechanics now work on cars in their yard and driveway. At times, 15 cars line their driveway and fill the front yard, in obvious states of repair — hoods up, engines removed. This “shade tree” business practice is illegal in our city, and the number of cars and the manner in which they are parked violates city codes. We and our neighbors worry it’s driving down the property value of adjacent homes, and we plan to sell within a few years.

I’m uncomfortable raising this with the family because I doubt they can do much without losing income. Moving to a new garage would obviously be costly. And if I talk to them and the outcome is unsatisfactory, I’d be the obvious culprit for any report to the city. Our friendly terms would disappear.

I’m also reluctant to report because the family is from Venezuela. (They mentioned having green cards, though I never asked.) I’m afraid that even a code violation could draw attention from ICE, which has an aggressive, unpleasant presence in my city. Thoughts?”

Yeah, I have some thoughts:

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BREAKING: DEI Bias Eats The A.P.’s Brains

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Why would the Associate Press feel the world needs this “news” when Savannah Guthrie’s mother is still missing?

The Associated Press is troubled that there are so many white athletes at the Winter Olympics. No, it really offered a new story that says this. No I am NOT kidding. The apparently woke-mad Chris Nisi complains in “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role” [Note: “Culture plays a big role”= “Bulletin: Water is Wet.”]…

Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer — Sweden’s men’s national team has several Black players including Liverpool striker Alexander Isak — it hasn’t made a dent in winter sports…At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception. That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB.

The lack of athletes of color at the Winter Olympics — and in winter sports in general — has been a recurring theme in the U.S., which is sending one of its most diverse teams to the Games. It hasn’t gotten the same attention in Europe.

The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams…”

 

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No, Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post Became An Untrustworthy Blight On America Long, Long Ago And I Can Prove It…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I just saw the above and felt it was as good a visual intro to this essay as any. Now keep in mind that here I am not suggesting that the recently gutted Washington Post is necessarily a worse travesty of journalism than the rest of what we laughingly call our news media. I just had Fox News on in the background while I reorganized my sock drawer and heard it breathlessly cover the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother for a full ten minutes. Fox is doing this, I surmise, to avoid discussing President Trump’s latest social media scandal, as I do here. But I digress….what prompted this EA post is this recent bit of nostalgia in the Wall Street Journal from Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter, who wrote in part,

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups. The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself….But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster…I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

First, let me say that I am impressed that Peggy still writes as beautifully as ever, and I forgive her for being married to the guy who fired me at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (and who tried to cheat on her with one of my interns until I intervened). However Noonan is one of the NeverTrump Republicans, and bias has clearly made her stupid regarding the Post’s bias and abandonment of fair, accurate, objective journalism as its mission. Come on, Peggy…

  • “Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was.” Yes, and the Post has been a significant catalyst for this.
  • “The Post was a pillar.” When was the Washington Post last a “pillar”? Watergate?
  • “… a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s.” As I will shortly demonstrate, the Post had become a Democratic Party, progressive mouthpiece long before that.
  •  “Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad.” In fact, that’s exactly what is happening, because conservatives, Republican and ethicists recognized that the Post had become a partisan weapon, and the Mad Left regarded it as its champion of useful disinformation and public deception. 
  • “The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it.” Appears? APPEARS??? That condition has been obvious to anyone with the integrity to admit it since at least 2008, when the Post joined most news organizations in campaigning for Barack Obama. This included blaming the bi-partisan 2008 economic meltdown on only Republicans when Ted Kennedy’s and Barney Frank’s fingerprints were all over the debacle, calling GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin unqualified when she had more relevant experience for the Presidency than the Democrats’ Presidential nominee, and mocked her intellect while ignoring Obama’s running mate’s well established IQ issues.
  • “I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it.” In the immortal words of John McClane, “Welcome to the party, pal!” But the Post wasn’t engaged in journalism, and hadn’t been for many years. Where was Noonan then? Why wasn’t she sounding the alarm?
  • “Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information.”  Something bad? You mean like the nation being locked-down based on the teachers’ unions refusal to do their jobs, Deep State health officials lying about what they knew,  and the Democratic Party’s desire to crash the economy to get rid of Donald Trump? Like an election being held in 2020 with insecure ballots and blue states violating their own election laws? Or a President being demented and his wife and staff running the country while the news media assisted in the cover-up? Like a group of Democratic prosecutors targeting the greatest threat to their continued power and using third world tactics to try to lock him up? Those kinds of “bad things?”
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From The “I Did Not Know That!” Files: The History of Crisco

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

A British personal trainer and fitness coach named Sama Hoole posted this on “X”:

1866: Cotton seeds are agricultural waste. After extracting cotton fiber, farmers are left with millions of tons of seeds containing oil that’s toxic to humans. Gossypol, a natural pesticide in cotton, makes the oil inedible. The seeds are fed to cattle in small amounts or simply discarded.

1900: Procter & Gamble is making candles and soap. They need cheap fats. Animal fats work but they’re expensive. Cotton seed oil is abundant and nearly worthless. If they could somehow make it edible, they’d have unlimited cheap raw material. The process they develop is brutal. Extract the oil using chemical solvents. Heat to extreme temperatures to neutralise gossypol. Hydrogenate with pressurised hydrogen gas to make it solid at room temperature. Deodorise chemically to remove the rancid smell. Bleach to remove the grey color. The result: Crisco. Crystallised cottonseed oil.

Industrial textile waste transformed through chemical processing into something white and solid that looks like lard. They patent it in 1907, launch commercially in 1911. Now they have a problem. Nobody wants to eat industrial waste that’s been chemically treated. Your grandmother cooks with lard and butter like humans have for thousands of years. Crisco needs to convince her that her traditional fats are deadly and this hydrogenated cotton-seed paste is better. The marketing campaign is genius. They distribute free cookbooks with recipes specifically designed for Crisco. They sponsor cooking demonstrations. They target Jewish communities advertising Crisco as kosher: neither meat nor dairy. They run magazine adverts suggesting that modern, scientific families use Crisco while backwards rural people use lard.

But the real coup happens in 1948. The American Heart Association has $1,700 in their budget. They’re a tiny organisation. Procter & Gamble donates $1.7 million. Suddenly the AHA has funding, influence, and a major corporate sponsor who manufactures vegetable oil.

1961: The AHA issues their first dietary guidelines. Avoid saturated fat from animals. Replace it with vegetable oils. Recommended oils: Crisco, Wesson, and other seed oils. The conflict is blatant. The organization issuing health advice is funded by the company that profits when people follow that advice. Nobody seems troubled by this. Newspapers report the guidelines as objective science. Doctors repeat them to patients. Government agencies adopt them into policy. Industrial cotton-seed oil, chemically extracted and hydrogenated, becomes “heart-healthy” while butter becomes “artery-clogging poison.”

1980s: Researchers discover that trans fats, created by hydrogenation, directly cause heart disease. They raise LDL, lower HDL, promote inflammation, and increase heart attack risk more than any other dietary fat. Crisco, as originally formulated, is catastrophically unhealthy. This takes 70 years to officially acknowledge. Procter & Gamble’s response: Quietly reformulate without admission of error. Remove hydrogenation, keep selling seed oils, never acknowledge that their “heart-healthy” product spent seven decades actively causing the disease it claimed to prevent. Modern seed oils remain. Soybean, canola, corn, safflower oils everywhere. Same chemical extraction process. Same high-temperature refining. Same oxidation problems. Just without hydrogenation so trans fats stay below regulatory thresholds. These oils oxidise rapidly when heated. They integrate into cell membranes where they create inflammatory signalling for months or years. They’re rich in omega-6 fatty acids that promote inflammation. They’ve never existed in human diets at current consumption levels. But they’re cheap. Profitable. And the food industry has spent a century convincing everyone they’re healthy. The alternative, admitting that industrial textile waste shouldn’t have been turned into food, would require acknowledging the last 110 years of dietary advice was fundamentally corrupted from the start. Your great-grandmother cooked with lard because that’s what humans used for millennia. Then Procter & Gamble needed to sell soap alternatives and accidentally created the largest dietary change in human history.

We traded animal fats that built civilisations for factory waste that causes disease. The soap company won. Your health lost.

I have no idea if this is all true, partially true, a matter of dispute, or complete fantasy. But I bet RFK Jr. likes it. The story, which certainly has the ring of truth, also raises the issue of trusting science and experts, especially when business interests and money are involved.

My personal favorite use of Crisco was when people would mix it with food coloring and sugar and call it “frosting.”

Ethics MEGA-Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

As I noted in the previous post, President Trump had an epically unethical week, even for him. I found out about the latest horror on Facebook and “X”, from the post above by my friend Mary Milben, who proved her integrity and courage. Mary, you see, is MAGA’s official songbird. a brilliant soprano who has performed at many Republican functions from coast to coast. She is also an African-American who has suffered criticism for her support of the President as all high-profile black conservatives do. Despite the fact that her prominence, celebrity and livelihood depends on her relationship with the President and his supporters, she immediately spoke out against Trump’s Truth Social account posting of a 62-second video on conspiracy theories about the “stolen” 2020 Presidential election. At the very end was added a non-sequitur section, set to the Tokens’ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,”showing Trump as the Lion King and various Democrats as jungle animals, including Barack and Michelle Obama as…apes.

I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple “niggers.”

After an uproar that I will bet is not going to subside, perhaps ever, the video was taken down. Karoline Leavitt, presumably following orders, took a defiant (and stupid) stance, saying “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

You know, like the desperate search for Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother. The President of the United States appearing to compare the most popular African-Americans in the nation and the only black First Couple as sub-human primates isn’t news. Seriously, Karoline?

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