Month: January 2023

Apparently Congress Is Stuck With George Santos [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I’m afraid I implied in an earlier post regarding New York’s pants-on-fire Congressman-elect George Santos that the House could refuse to seat him or force him to resign. That was wrong. His conduct, while unethical, did not breach House ethics rules because he wasn’t a member of Congress when he lied his head off gulling voters into electing him based on his complete misrepresentation of his background and qualifications. It’s a matter of jurisdiction. Why, punishing him would be like impeaching a former President who was no longer in office!

Prof. Turley, a Constitutional scholar, clarified the situation in a column for The Hill. He wrote in part,

The problem is that, for the most part, he is accused of something that is no crime in Congress: lying…More practically, Santos has constitutional defenses to any effort to bar him from taking his seat to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District…. [Promised]investigations appear to be premised on the notion that a member of Congress can be denied a seat due to running on false claims….Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly, a Republican, announced an investigation into “the numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos.” She added that “the residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress. No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”

The fact, however, is that no congressional district anywhere in the country is guaranteed “an honest and accountable representative.”…[Santos] must be seated if he is guilty only of lying about his credentials and background…Many Santos critics cite the fact that the Constitution expressly mandates in Section 5, Article I, that “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own Members.” Those decisions on the outcome of elections have been treated as largely final and non-justiciable. However, this case is not a question over the counting or certification of votes but, rather, over the claims used to gain votes.

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2023 Ethics Warm-Up, 1/2/23: Buckle Up!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well, I’m beginning the new year sick, and it hasn’t even done anything really sickening yet…

1. What does a Harvard grad’s high GPA mean? Nothing! A column in the Harvard Crimson revealed that the average GPA at Harvard is now 3.8 out of 4.0. Data analyst Aden Barton points out that this is up from 3.3 in 1991. “Are we supposed to believe that college students are just that much smarter now than decades ago?,” he asks? No. We should believe that college and higher education have become that much of a scam. Harvard had to abolish the “Dean’s List” because not making it proved you were an idiot: 92% of students were receiving the honor.

2. To be fair, Harvard is still serving as a role model...High schools are working hard to make sure that all of its students are also rated as outstanding. Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools paid almost half a million dollars to Oakland, California’s Performance Fact whose “Equity Imperative” is that all students’ academic performance result in “equal outcomes without exception.” Here’s the PowerPoint presentation for a Fall retreat.

3. If only anybody paid attention to boxing… World Boxing Council president Mauricio Sulaiman announced that the WBC is developing a system in which transgender fighters will compete against opponents who share the same biological sex. “In boxing, a man fighting a woman must never be accepted regardless of gender change. There should be no grey area around this, and we want to go into it with transparency and the correct decisions. Woman to man or man to woman transgender change will never be allowed to fight a different gender by birth,” Sulaiman said. “We are creating a set of rules and structures so that transgender boxing can take place, as they fully deserve to if they want to box. We do not yet know the numbers that there are out there, but we’re opening a universal registration in 2023, so that we can understand the boxers that are out there – and we’ll start from there.”

I’m not exactly sure what the system would be: he sounds a little confused, but who can blame him? At least he’s taken the first step toward sanity, ruling out the myth that a male boxer can become a female boxer by saying it’s so.

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More “Do Something!” Climate Change Hysteria!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The New York Times published a serious opinion piece that argues that one good way to save the planet from climate change is to shrink the human race. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Smaller people leave less of a carbon footprint. Brilliant! Thus, Mara Altman writes,

Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash)….Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked)….When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

You can’t mock people like this enough. They don’t have any practical solutions for preventing what they fear, so instead, in a “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!” frenzy, they propose nonsense and people actually take them seriously, because they are also in a state of media propaganda-induced terror. I ultimately decided that now was an ideal time for Sidney Wang to make his first Ethics Alarms appearance of 2023, but I was sorely tempted to use this (From “Dr. Cyclops”)…

or even this, from a comic fantasy about how women could finally take over the world… Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Donald Trump (And An Ethicist’s Zugzwang)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Let’s start with the quote: Donald Trump wrote on his Twitter alternative Truth Social in response to the January 6 kangaroo court’s withdrawal of his subpoena,

“Was just advised that the Unselect Committee of political Thugs has withdrawn the Subpoena of me concerning the January 6th Protest of the CROOKED 2020 Presidential Election. They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court. Perhaps the FBI’s involvement in RIGGING the Election played into their decision. In any event, the Subpoena is DEAD!”

Gee, why don’t you tell us what you really think, Mr. President?

I don’t want Presidents of the U.S. to express themselves like this, essentially in the style and with the cheap-shot rhetorical flourishes of a middle school wise-ass. It harms the office; it degrades the dignity and credibility of the office-holder, it’s a terrible example for the nation’s #1 role model to set for the young, and it undermines public confidence in the judgment and trustworthiness of the individual.

Trump talked and tweeted like this all through his four years in office, as we know, and has ever since. The approximately 30% of the electorate that, in his immortal words, would continue to support Trump if he shot someone in broad daylight in the middle of Times Square love this crap—it’s so, so authentic!–and they are dead, dead, dead wrong. This kind of outburst shows why Trump should never have been elected, and why people like him should not lead the United States —and until a weird confluence of random events and factors intervened, have not. Continue reading →

The Most Incompetent Christmas Greeting Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Askern Medical Practice in Doncaster, England intended to send out a jolly seasonal text to all of its patients wishing them a “very merry Christmas.” Instead, and don’t ask me how this could happen, the mass text told patients they had “aggressive lung cancer” that had metastasized and asked them to fill out form DS1500 for people those have a terminal illness to apply for benefits.

After freaking out many of its patients, the Center texted its “sincere apologies” saying, “This has been sent in error. Our message to you should have read We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” 

I don’t think “Oops! Sorry!” quite makes up for something like this.

The Associated Press’s Stunning Corruption [Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The corruption, bias, and ethical void within the mainstream media is now difficult to overstate. The latest revelation is so damning, 95% of the media isn’t reporting it, since it points to the ethics rot of one of its most esteemed members. This is the news media’s recent tactic to avoid being exposed as the lying, manipulating propaganda agents they and their partisan allies in Big Tech and social media are. Hide the facts

The Associated Press, the august and once respected newswire service, accepts donations to fund its climate coverage. In 2022, the AP received $8 million in donations to fund its climate doom reporting, with money coming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, all climate change alarmists. The AP isn’t alone: what it calls philanthropy-funded news is a trend, with other news sources accepting charitable funds as well. The Salt Lake Tribune, The Seattle Times and the New York Times are also accepting grants from interest groups.

Yes, non-profits are interest groups.

The $8 million over three years allows the AP to hire 20 more “climate journalists.” AP News Vice President Brian Carovillano says without giggling that the money comes “without strings attached” and asserts that funders have “no influence on the stories conducted.” He’s lying. He’s unquestionably lying: if I give a publication 8 million dollars to hire ethics specialists to report on the importance of ethics, those hires are certain to influence the publication’s content. Is there any chance the “climate journalists” will write stories about how so much climate science is speculative, politically-slanted hooey? I think not.

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Trump’s Tax Returns And Trump Derangement

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m using the Fredo clip from the Ethics Alarms clip library because I was right in my assessment of the Trump tax return nonsense when it surfaced in 2016. So were a lot of other commentators. I didn’t write all of the conclusions down on Ethics Alarms, but I had plenty of discussions about it with my Trump Deranged friends and others. A summary:

  • Trump was obviously lying in 2016 when he said that there were legal reasons he couldn’t release his tax returns as had become the norm for Presidential candidates, but that he would release them as soon as the issues were resolved. He’s the first business tycoon to run for President, and he knew that the returns would show exactly the kind of legal tax avoidance that the returns of every other wealthy, risk0taking, entrepreneurial individual shows. This would arm Democrats and others to make the usual “rich people are crooked and evil” attacks, as is their wont, and he judged, probably correctly, that his chances of being elected were better if he kept the returns private, as he had every right to do. He could have and should have done this and been honest about the reason.
  • Everyone should have known not going to be anything illegal in the returns, because the IRS accepted them. Sure enough, when they were released this week, there wasn’t.
  • The Washington Post headline, “House panel releases Trump tax returns in another setback for former president,” is incompetent, biased, and insulting to anyone who isn’t Trump Deranged or ignorant. The returns are a triumph for Trump. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was counting on their being released. Democrats had essentially promised that there would be evidence of dark doings: as with the Mueller Report, it is a dud. Now the question is why Democrats were allowed to breach the guaranteed confidentiality of a citizen’s returns when there was no evidence of a crime.
  • The returns show that Trump lost money while he was President. Of course he did…yet the Big Lie spread by the Axis of Unethical Conduct is that he became President to enrich himself. A Trump-Deranged troll on another thread repeated that talking point yesterday. Becoming President made the Obamas rich; it made the Clintons rich. Trump was rich already: his Presidency made him poorer, and he almost certainly knew it would.
  • Now come the tit-for-tat arguments demanding that members of Congress explain how they have become wealthier during their tenures in office. Well, good. Liz Cheney’s net worth reportedly increased from $6M to to $36 in six years. How did that happen? The House blood-lust just handed Trump a potent weapon to expose his enemies.
  • David Cay Johnston wrote a Trump Derangement classic for the Daily Beast headlined,  “Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison.” It’s a funny headline, because the “best case” is in fact lousy: if the Justice Department is foolish enough to indict Trump based on the weak investigative tea brewed by the January 6 Commission witch hunt, it might be a tie. It reminded me why I no longer waste time with the Daily Beast, which is like an online MSNBC now. Seth Barrett Tillman wrote an easy and unduly respectful rebuttal of Johnston’s desperation post, and concludes,

“At this juncture, can you point to even one specific entry in any of Trump’s tax filings which you know to be fraudulent or, even, merely in error? That being the situation, your article’s title mentioning “prison” seems overly ambitious given what is now known about Trump’s past tax filings.”

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Tardy Ethics Observations On The Netflix Series “Unbelievable” [RE-Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I have at least four posts written already in my head this New Year’s Day morning, but I wanted to begin 2023 with a discussion that is at least a little bit positive, hence this. In truth, the 2019 series “Unbelievable” is the reason the first post of the year is going up so late: disgusted with the vulgar and idiotic New Year’s Eve coverage on the networks (“Do you two have children, are will you be making one tonight?” one of ABC’s celebrity hosts asked a kissing couple.) Grace and I started watching “Unbelievable” on Netflix for the third time. I thought it was better this time than before, and on the earlier viewings I thought it was great. Thoroughly engrossed we couldn’t stop midway, so as a result, the Marshall got to bed after 3 am last night. (And I woke up with a cold.)

Over at “Simple Justice,” lawyer/blogger Scott Greenfield wrote about his regret that so many examples of flaws within the justice system escaped his metaphorical acid pen in 2022. Yeah, welcome to my world, Scott. I write three or hour posts a day to his one, and I still miss more ethics issues, often major ones, than I cover. I do not understand why I didn’t write about “Unbelievable” in 2019, or in 2021, when I watched it again. In such situations, I’m just letting readers down. “Unbelievable” is not only an ethics story, but an important one; it also happens to be true. (It was also partially created by the Marshall Project. I am awash in shame.)

I usually don’t worry much about spoilers, but in this case, I don’t want anyone to enjoy the series less because I’ve given away the plot completely, although, as I said, I enjoyed “Unbelievable” more the third time around, but perhaps for different reasons than I did on first viewing. If you want to experience the story, the performances (which are all excellent), the incrustation and emotional finale cold, then maybe you should stop reading here. But I’m going to try to make some ethics points here without giving too much away: Continue reading →