Month: February 2024

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce: The National MS Society”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One would have a difficult time finding a more measured, considerate, honest and probing analysis of the preferred pronouns controversy than Ryan Harkins offers here. You certainly won’t get it from me: I drew a line in the sand (Remember the Alamo!) on this long ago, when I concluded that such rhetorical demands from various minority groups were cynical power plays designed to make everyone bend to their will or be branded one kind of bigot or another. Ryan’s reflections didn’t change my mind, but they did make me consider changing my mind.

Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Dunce: The National MS Society”…

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I have struggled with finding suitable reason to cave and use “preferred” pronouns. I can conceive of numerous reasons to reject them: using such pronouns is manipulative; using them is forcing division; using them is an effort to force the world to conform to an individual, rather than the individual accepting reality; or if none of those, using them is an effort to band-aid over and thus ignore serious issues.

I’ve been considering that maybe being willing to use someone’s preferred pronouns could be a measure of meeting them where they are. In Catholic apologetics and evangelization, that is one of the best tactics in seeking conversion. Walk with someone. Get to know him. Understand his problems. Genuinely care about him, because conversion is not a game where one keeps track of points, but where one is selflessly concerned about this person’s salvation. Furthermore, St. Paul tells us in 1 Cor 9: “To the Jew, I become a Jew, to win over the Jew. To the Greek, I become a Greek, to win over the Greek. To the weak, I become weak, to win over the weak. I become all things to all people so that by all means I might save some.”

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The Game Is Afoot in Missouri, and Boy, Is It Ever Stupid…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out this mystery.

The Springfield News-Leader reported on the most ridiculous example of attempted insurance fraud I’ve ever read or heard about. In addition to being spectacularly dishonest, it was also incompetent. Hold on to your heads for this one, and tell anyone in the room to move away to avoid flying pieces of skull…

The Howell County (Missouri) Sheriff’s last November sent out a release about a case of insurance fraud involving a man falsely claiming that an accident involving “a brush hog” had robbed him of both feet. A brush hog is a rotary mower often attached to a tractor; I never heard the term before. See? There are side benefits to even the most ridiculous ethics tales!

The perpetrator of the fraud was a 60-year-old paraplegic who had the brilliant idea of paying someone to cut off his feet so he could claim the insurance money. After all, he couldn’t walk anyway, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. The first problem with the plan was that the responding medics and law enforcement officers couldn’t find his severed feet anywhere. (Usually when someone says they have lost limbs, the limbs aren’t literally lost.) Authorities’ suspicions were also aroused by the tourniquets on the supposed brush hog victim’s legs. Who put them there? Then there were the wounds where the feet used to be. They were far too clean for foot manglings that result from farm equipment mishaps. “If it was done by a brush hog, it would have been a bloody, gory mess,” Torey Thompson, a lieutenant with the Howell County Sheriff’s Office, told the Springfield News Leader. “It was a poorly executed plan.”

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And Speaking of Unethical Lawyers: It Sure Looks Like Fulton County’s Favorite Lawyer Love Birds Are Going Down…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Good.

So many of my legal ethics colleagues have been bending over backwards to deny that the blatant conflict of interest persisted in by Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis (being sexually involved with one of the prosecutors she hired to try to stop Donald Trump from being her party in November) implicates her trustworthiness and honesty as a prosecutor. Maybe this will teach them something. The lesson: bias makes you stupid, and it applies to Willis, main squeeze David Wade, and them. Most of my colleagues hate Donald Trump as much as she does, and thus despite every indication that the woman is a legal hack, a liar, and dumb as they get in the elected DA category, almost all of these supposedly objective lawyers and scholars have insisted that she should not be, and would not be, thrown off the contrived Georgia racketeering case.

Right now it looks like she will be lucky not to be thrown out of the law and into a jail cell.

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Now THIS Is an Unethical Lawyer!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Tennessee Supreme Court this month disbarred a Nashville lawyer, Brian Philip Manookian, for habitual unethical conduct that I have a hard time believing that any lawyer would dare to engage in even once. Manookian, wrote the Court, “engaged in this long pattern of intimidating and degrading conduct” to succeed in a medical liability case, the Tennessee Supreme Court said. His goal was to coerce opposing lawyers “into standing down to avoid personal humiliation and emotional distress for them or their families. A business model of sorts, based on fear….To say that Mr. Manookian engaged in multiple offenses is to understate,” the state supreme court continued. “Despite lectures, fines, sanctions and suspensions from judge after judge, Mr. Manookian did not choose merely to continue engaging in misconduct—each time he received the expected negative reaction to his behavior, he responded by escalating it.”

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Alan Page, Esq.: Role Model

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

After being so critical of the NFL’s ethics and business practices, I feel obligated to highlight the impressive example of Alan Page, a Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee (in 1988) who does not suffer from CTE and who exemplifies the kind of role model American youth should know about and emulate. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had no idea that Page had gone on from his NFL exploits with the Minnesota Vikings to, among other things,

  • Establish and oversee the Page Education Foundation, which award Page Scholarships to black students who are then obligated  to mentor younger children. The foundation has awarded nearly 9,000 scholarships and taken in approximately $16 million in grants.
  • Earn a law degree from the University of Minnesota in 1978, while he was still playing football.
  • Practice employment law in a law firm,  join the Attorney General’s office, and eventually became assistant attorney general.
  • Get elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court four times,  sitting for 22 years on the court before  hitting the mandatory retirement age of 70.
  • Write inspirational children’s books with his daughter, Kamie Page.

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Public Education Indoctrination Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

1. On Legal Insurrection, Ramona Bessinger blows the whistle on a program she participated in, a Department of Homeland Security funded training program for teachers to combat “disinformation” as part of a “media literacy” effort called Courageous RI. offered through the University of Rhode Island. “The idea of Media Literacy made its way into K-12 schools as a solution to combat perceived “disinformation” and “violent extremism,” she writes. “Both terms are defined as a result of children being exposed to ‘disinformation’ while at school….But who should judge what is mere opinion vs “disinformation”? This sort of subjective judgment is exactly what public school teachers should never do.”

“[W]hat happens once a child is identified as “extremist”?  Well,” she explains, “naturally, any child identified as an extremist would want to please their teachers, therefore abandoning their pattern of “disinformation” and “violent extremist” views for the accepted viewpoint.   The student then becomes a member of the accepted in-group and may in fact help in identifying other children and teachers that are seen as extremist.”

“In fact, we are seeing this play out in K-12 schools across the nation,” the teacher writes. “Students are encouraged to identify peers or, worse, their teachers who they feel represent extremist views, then report that individual to other adults…In some cases, teachers are protested, harassed and bullied, while in other cases, peers may be  singled out and bullied.”

She relates her experience of seeing “the Courageous RI facilitators [pointing] to Trump as the root cause of all social media and media disinformation. They blamed  Trump for influencing “MAGA Republicans” to commit violence and more. During the weekly online training sessions, I asked for evidence to support their claims that violent extremism and disinformation existed in K-12 schools.  I was quickly dismissed or directed to chat conversations where conservative voices were singled out and suppressed.”

“Any student or faculty member with opposing political view-points on controversial topics like climate change, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) agendas, race-based narratives, and more could be identified by a media literacy teacher or student, then referred to thought partners who would set out to correct said student’s line of thinking or to persuade the child to abandon their point-of-view.”  Worse case, peers and friends would report on each other and in some cases teachers like me would be protested and singled out for conservative view-points.”

In addition to the troubling tale she tells, I was bothered by the poor grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation in her post. She is a high school teacher, after all. I had to make several edits to make her post comprehensible.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Microsoft Openly Celebrates Its Illegal and Unconstitutional Policies

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Now what?

This really is a res ipsa loquitur classic. Microsoft is literally saying, “We don’t have to obey the law, and besides, this is good discrimination.” Why isn’t the Justice Department bearing down on the company already? You know why.

Here is how the company introduces its great success at paying white men less than women and minorities…

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Open Forum: What Shall We Argue About Today?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Today marks the anniversary of Marines raising the flag Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima to declare the U.S. victory over Japan in that bloody battle. Let’s if any media outlets mark the day, or if doing so would be considered “racist”….

Meanwhile, here are some notable items you might want to peruse, or that I might choose to post about if and when I wake up…

  • This poll, among several out today, suggests that the third party candidates announced so far all help Trump in a general election Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein all take at least a percentage point away from Biden. That makes sense: the idea that anyone inclined to vote for Trump would vote for a Kennedy instead never made sense to me.
  • The mainstream media is taking a ridiculous victory lap, of which this is typical, over the likely collapse of the GOP House’s stupid Biden impeachment efforts. Since there was zero chance that the Senate would vote to convict Biden anyway, it’s a non story.
  • A new essay by Victor Davis Hanson nicely summarizes the full extent of the cynical and partisan cases pending against Donald Trump.
  • It’s fun to read how weaselly Niki Haley is furiously spinning to try to decide what she thinks about the recent Alabama court ruling that frozen embryos are human beings with a right to live.

Now it’s all up to you…

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Eastpointe, Michigan Mayor Monique Owens

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The whole story is here, courtesy of FIRE:

As I have to admit too often, I missed this debacle. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression got a court order against this ridiculous mayor (Guess what party!) in 2022 to force her not to interfere with her city’s citizens’ right to give their statements in a public forum. FIRE is now justly using the episode to raise funds for its excellent work, taking over for the ACLU, which has decided that it would rather be a tool of abusive government power (as long as their favorite party is in charge) than opposing it.

You’ll be pleased to learn that the mayor is no longer in office. The rest of the story: Owens, who had barely been elected mayor with just 32.5% of the vote in a five-way contest, was a human train wreck, with the lawsuit resulting from this meeting, a criminal conviction for making false statements on a grant application for her business, irregularities in her financial disclosure submissions, and other controversies.

My question above is a trick (sorry): Owens has claimed to be both a Democrat and a Republican depending on the situation and her mood: she’s a bi-partisan jerk. As with most of the horrifying individuals who end up in this Ethics Alarms category, the issue highlighted is irresponsible voters.

Ethics Dunce: The National MS Society

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Here comes “The Saint’s Excuse”! The non-profit is furiously back-peddling after behaving cruelly, intolerantly, ungratefully and unforgivably toward the 90-year-old volunteer above. It will, of course, insist that it should be forgiven and trusted despite its smoking gun unethical conduct, and just watch: it will be, because of “all the good work it has done for a good cause.”

What prompted the kiss-off letter above was that 90-year-old Fran Itkoff, who had been an active volunteer for the the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for six decades (her husband perished of MS), had naively asked why names on documents she had received from the organization were accompanied by parenthetical pronouns. This, the Woke Nazis in command of the non-profit determined, marked her as hostile to its new “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion guidelines” and thus unfit to work for the care and cure of the dread disease (which runs in my family, incidentally).

The episode was flagged on social media by the indispensable Libs of TikTok, and an interview exposing the debacle hit YouTube. The National NS Society’s immediate instinct was to circle the metaphorical wagons, denying that it treated the volunteer the way it had, and implying that a 90-year-old woman made others feel “unsafe” because she dared to ask why stupid and presumptuous pronoun preferences were suddenly “a thing.” The organization also cautioned staff and volunteers to keep mum about the incident.

It didn’t work. The MS Society was bombarded with declarations from donors that they would cut off the charity. News organizations were closing in, with a Fox News senior meteorologist who suffers from MS, Janice Dean, threatening to give the story nationwide exposure. Yesterday, the MS Society issued an annoying apology:

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