Author: Jack Marshall

In San Francisco, the Dumb Rise and Almost Immediate Fall of “Grading for Equity”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments


When I am forced to consider what is considered “right” and “wrong” in California in general and San Francisco particularly, I feel like I have stumbled into a real life Bizarro World. That is the cube-shaped planet in “Superman” comics where brain-damaged mutations of Superman and Lois Lane pursue a topsy-turvy existence constrained by practices and values that are the reverse of what normal Earthlings regard as self-evident.

The latest manifestation of this West Coast insanity is, or was, “Grading for Equity“, a woke education scheme that was scheduled to be imposed this fall at 14 high schools and over 10,000 students. “Grading for Equity” forbids homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that counts are student grades on a final examination, which can be taken as many times as it takes to pass. “Grading for Equity” also de-emphasizes the importance of timely performance, completion of assignments, and consistent attendance, so students turning in assignments late will not be penalized. Not showing up at class will not affect grades either.Students with scores as low as 80 (out of 100) will get an A; a score as low as 21 will be considered sufficient to pass, with a D.

Continue reading →

In a Competitive Commencement Season, Evelyn Harris Makes a Strong Bid For Most Unethical Speech of 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Favorites Tim Walz, Scott Pelley and Kermit the Frog may have fallen to an underdog: “musician and activist” Evelyn Harris (whoever she is) may have succeeded in embarrassing her host school the most of all with her 2025 commencement speech.

For some reason, Smith College, which has apparently become too woke to function, included Harris, a relatively obscure singer (but more importantly, an activist) among its all female honorees this year. The most prominent one of these would probably be far-left historian Danielle Allen, who has several items in her Ethics Alarms dossier. Or maybe it would be the (historic!) highest ranking trans official in US history, former assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Rachel Levine, one of Biden’s DEI appointments. Then there was new age-y guru Preeti Simran Sethi, the only one of the four who is a Smith grad. All of these, however, whatever their issues, at least managed to compose their own speech to give to the graduates.

Harris didn’t. Smith officials learned that her entire speech had been cribbed from other sources without attribution (you know, like Joe Biden once did), and had to inform the Smith community that it had been deceived. “It has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients — musician Evelyn M. Harris — borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity,” the letter read in part.

Continue reading →

“Mostly Peaceful” Bullshit

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest Post by Mrs. Q

From your host: Ok, this is technically a Comment of the Day on the post, “Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was.” I decided that it warrants guest post status for several good reasons. 1) We haven’t had a guest post for a while, and I am still seeking submissions. 2) The George Floyd aftermath disaster is one of the signature ethics outrages of my life, and is certainly worthy of more than one post saying so on its 5th anniversary. 3) I’m slyly trying to entice Mrs. Q to revive her featured column on Ethics Alarms, and 4) not for the first time, I like her take on a current ethics topic better than my own.—JM.

If anyone hasn’t had a chance to see this documentary, I’ll link it here: The Fall of Minneapolis | A Crowdfunded Documentary.

As some longtime readers here may remember, I am from Minneapolis and grew up literally at ground zero, where the Third Precinct, Auto Zone, and Minnehaha Lake Wine and Spirits were burned to a crisp. For three days and nights I watched others livestream on multiple cameras everything I knew from 4-14 years old go from vandalized to looted to burned from May 25th-28th. The first building they burned, was ironically, the last place I ever saw my black father work (it was a Snyders Drug Store then). I’d wait for him on the sidewalk in front of our four-plex, watching as he would step out the door of the building and head a half block home. Now that memory is infused with flames.

Then the riots went global.

What so many forget is that it was quite literally a war zone in Minneapolis. The documentary linked above illustrates what I witnessed. Areas were under siege and neighbors were trapped in their homes for days. It wasn’t just that crime increased, it was that the police could not help anyone. There were neighbor reports of rioters putting accelerants around neighborhoods, so people had to patrol their areas while putting themselves at risk for being attacked physically. I spoke with friends who had to flee in the early morning to get their families safe. And those who thought their BLM or Biden yard signs would save them were met with the same violence as everyone else.

Continue reading →

One For the Unethical Quote of the Month Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”

—–Liliya A. Medvedeva, Russian pensioner, quoted by the New York Times in “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History” about how many Russians regard the brutal dictator as a hero for his role in defeating Germany in World War II.

But Lily, everybody doesn’t make “mistakes” that result in the deaths or executions of between six and nine million people.

You idiot.

For the record, Lily’s rationalization is one of the most obnoxious on the list, #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!”

Our Toothbrushes Can Spy On Us, As the Ghost of the Unabomber Smiles

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A British private detective told the British tabloids about how an electric toothbrush revealed a cheating hubby’s extramarital affair. One of his clients was a married mother-of-two who was checking on her children’s dental hygiene habits. She installed a smartphone app that tracked the use of the family’s electric toothbrush.

The woman noticed that the brush was being used at times when the kids were at school and her husband was supposedly at work. Was there a mad tooth-brusher on the loose, breaking into homes to clean his teeth? Had her children become toothbrushing fanatics, skipping classes to use the Crest? Was the toothbrush moonlighting with another family?

No, but the truth was worse. Her husband was having sexual liaisons with his lover on mornings when his wife thought he was at work. She saw a routine: the electric toothbrush was being used on Friday mornings, and upon checking, she discovered that her louse of a spouse hadn’t arrived at his office in the city on a Friday morning in months. Instead, he had been “makin’ whoopee,” as the song goes, with a colleague right in the family home, until the electric toothbrush ratted him out.

I don’t see any unethical conduct here except for that of the illicit lovers, but I do detect a pre-unethical condition when one can’t even secretly brush one’s own teeth.

Re Abortion: Another “Bias Makes You Stupid” Op-Ed in the NYT

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s kind of funny when headline writers are so clueless and biased that what they think is a “res ipsa loquitur” story proving one thing actually reveals something completely different.

The headline on a Times op-ed ed last week was “A Brain-Dead Woman Is Being Kept on Machines to Gestate a Fetus. It Was Inevitable.” (I’m using my last gift link of the month on this one, so you’d better read it!) The writer was Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School.

The entire piece radiates contempt for the concept of treating the unborn as human lives, which, you know, they are and rather undeniably so. Readers are informed that Adriana Smith is brain dead, and has been connected to life support machines for more than 90 days to save the life of her baby. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she died from multiple blood clots in her brain.

“Her fetus’s heart continued to beat,” writes the professor, as if it was an abandoned car with a functioning carburetor. Georgia, she explains, is one of those crazy, fetus-worshiping states where a nascent human being is deemed a human life that can’t be snuffed out on a whim if it has a heartbeat. This, to the op-ed’s author, the headline writer and the New York Times is completely unfathomable.

Continue reading →

Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

…a cynical, dishonest, politically-motivated exploitation of an otherwise meaningless arrest gone wrong, fueled by a Machiavellian party, irresponsible journalism, and a biased justice system. The ethics train wreck was a disaster for race relations, law enforcement, and the nation as a whole.

I would typically say “Good job, everybody!” at this juncture, except I refuse to take any blame for this one. I saw Black Lives Matter for what it was from the beginning, and identified the phoniness of the George Floyd riots immediately. Too bad so few people read Ethics Alarms.

There should be accountability, but there won’t be.

Continue reading →

Hey Look! Harvard Did the Right Thing For Once….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Of course, they didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.

Francesca Gino is one of Harvard Business School’s best known professors. The behavioral scientist authored “Rebel Talent,” a 2018 book with the subtitle “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life.” Well, the expert on lying, cheating and dishonesty lied and cheated. She took administrative leave from the “B-School” after evidence surfaced that she had falsified her data…on cheating. Ironic, no? And stupid.

Gino, whose work has been widely cited, has been a professor of business administration at Harvard since 2014. She was first accused of fabricating data by the blog Data Colada in July of 2021 when the bloggers approached Harvard Business School with their allegations. The Dean negotiated a secret agreement with Data Colada to delay posting about their allegations until the Business School thoroughly investigated their claims.

An 18-month-long investigation by a three-person committee of former and current professors eventually concluded that the professor had indeed engaged in research misconduct. Gino insists that she is innocent and is suing for $25 million: she might as well, since an ethics professor and author of books about cheating caught cheating doesn’t exactly have a promising future. Of course, the ethical thing for an ethics expert to do in such a dilemma is to confess and apologize. But if she were an ethical ethics expert, she wouldn’t be in this mess.

In an article called “A Weird Research-Misconduct Scandal About Dishonesty Just Got Weirder,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Harvard’s inquiry had found that one of Gino’s studies contained even more fraudulent data than had been alleged. Then Data Colada weighed in with a four-part series examining data in four separate studies co-authored by Gino. The blog authors wrote, “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.”

This week, Harvard University stripped Professor Gino of her tenure at Harvard Business School. Her dismissal seems imminent.

Harvard might have tried to finesse the Gino affair were it not already shaken by the recent Claudine Gay scandal, when the university’s first black president had to resign because of scholarship plagiarism shortly after being appointed. In addition, the school is already on shaky ground in the terrain of public opinion, claiming financial distress as a defense against the Trump Administration’s assault despite Harvard having an endowment some nations would love to have as their their nest egg.

Professor Gino definitely picked the wrong time to embarrass Old Ivy.

Observations On Jake Tapper’s Epiphany and Related Matters…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. Greenwald is right. This sudden “realization” by Tapper is massively dishonest and part of the ridiculous “We were duped!” narrative by the Axis media. I knew that the White House, Karine, and Tapper himself were all lying. For this Ethics Villain to now declare, “Eureka! I’ve got it! We can’t trust Democrats OR Republicans!” is a) pathetic, b) desperate, c) insulting.

2. Rep. Jasmine Crocket—oh please, please PLEASE nominate her to run for President, Democrats!—decided to try the now-familiar Axis device of accusing Trump and the Republicans of what her party is guilty of. She’s saying that Republicans are ignoring Trump’s cognitive decline. My Trump Deranged sister actually believes that, in part because the Left thinks not supporting socialism, open borders, anti-white discrimination in hiring, trans athletes clobbering women in sporting competitions and Politburo-style executive branch government is crazy.

3. In a similar example of pretzel Axis”logic,” now White House aides and others are arguing that the vegetable President cover-up was justified to try to stop Trump from “destroying democracy.” This is akin to the infamous Nixon-era line regarding the Vietnam war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” How dumb does someone have to be to accept this rationalization?

4. This…

Scott Pelley has long been the most openly biased and partisan of the “60 Minutes” team (well, he and Leslie Stahl), and his speech is an instant “It isn’t what it is” classic. His arrogance and fury reveals a destructive, untrustworthy profession beginning to realize that the jig is truly up: they have betrayed their nation and its ideals, and nearly everyone knows it, or as President Trump so wisely observed, our journalists are indeed “enemies of the people.” It is rumored that Pelley is likely to be dumped at CBS: Good.

5. Why does the media keep using “alleged” and “allegedly” to modify descriptions of events that occurred right in front of us? CBS “allegedly” edited the Harris interview so she would seem like less of an idiot to voters? We know they did: the transcript proves it. The White House, Democrats and journalists “allegedly” lied about Biden’s cognitive crash? It is “alleged” that others were making Presidential decisions during Biden’s wreck of a Presidency?

Miss Vito?

- This is your opinion? - It's a fact.

Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s International Students

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

I know I’m revealing my own reaction, contrary to EA quiz protocol, but this story calls for Major Tipton:

Accompanying the hand-wringing and progressive head explosions over the Trump Administration’s various demands on Harvard University and its threatened sanctions (including blocking Harvard’s ability to enroll—and get money from—international students), was the stunning information that 6,800 international students attended Harvard College in the 2024-25 school year, which is about 27% of the student body! This, according to university enrollment data. That figure is an increase from 19.7 percent in 2010-11.

Wait: almost 30% of the slots at the U.S’s most prestigious and (supposedly) best college, with resulting diplomas that are virtual golden tickets to success, riches and happiness (or so the legend goes) don’t go to Americans?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day this Memorial Day is…

How the Hell is this fair, civically responsible, prudent, reasonable or justifiable?

Continue reading →