Author: Jack Marshall

Monday Morning Ethics Warmup, 8/3/26

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

It seems like a good time for one of these. I was working throughout the weekend and couldn’t take the time to ponder several interesting and important ethics developments. I’m also thinking a lot about the future of EA. Both my accountant and my gratis office consultant excoriated me last month for spending the two to three hours I devote every day to researching and writing posts as well as replying to comments (19, 722 posts since late 2009 and 69, 698 personal responses) and demanded that I figure out a way to monetize my work, especially since I have rather serious financial problems that have only become worse since my wife dropped dead in early 2024 (ProEthics is at least a two professional job, and my cloning experiments have failed). Neither understands that Ethics Alarms exists to fulfill the mission of both my business and me personally, which is to inspire, educate, and engage willing people regarding the important role societal ethics must have in the United States, and to do so in a style that isn’t pedantic, academic, or flaccid.

If I could find a way to monetize the website without significantly reducing its readership (“Surely nobody’s going to quit if you had a $50 a year subscription!,” my accountant said. Really? I only have five commenters now when the blog is free…**) My office consultant quit over the matter (and some other things), and hasn’t spoken to me since the discussion about EA.

Well, I’m not going to solve that conundrum today: I have promises to keep, and before I sleep I’m going to see “The Odyssey” tonight, primarily to assess the validity of the political complaints, and I had to wrestle my fingers to the floor to stop a post about people who condemn the film based on hearsay (you know, like I did).

OK, enough about me. Here are my briefer thoughts about…

1. Trans activist insanity. “Jeopardy!” nerd-turned-host Ken Jennings is being attacked on BlueSky for being “transphobic.” Why? Apparently the New York Times is unpopular with the radical pro-trans mob because the paper hasn’t been as aggressive in its pro-woke propaganda efforts on their behalf as with other issues. Jennings had written on the censorious, intolerant, left-wing alternative to Twitter/”X” that he plays the online Times game “Wordle” with his wife every day. This was typical of the BlueSky outrage: “I wish people who care about trans people could understand that playing NYT games is still an insult to trans people.”

To his credit, Jennings has so far refused to dignify the insanity with a serious response. “This may be true of others but I actually got express permission from the trans community to keep NYT games and recipes,” he replied to the lunatic. “I also have a news subscription, which is arguably worse, so I had to specifically send in a written request. Took 30 days but I got it approved. They were like ‘trans people are not a monolith’ and ‘like-minded allies may disagree on specific media boycotts’ and stuff like that. It was a huge load off my mind!” Naturally, this just triggered the crazies more, and Jennings is now under daily attack, with calls for boycotts of the iconic quiz show he hosts and for him to be fired.

As of today, Jennings has refused to grovel an apology (or to stop playing Wordle). But why would he have an account on BlueSky if he weren’t hostage to The Great Stupid’s bubble?

2. Speaking of fearless truth-tellers who refuse to be intimidated…J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author who has been vilified world-wide for simply expressing common sense and logic regarding trans insanity, posted a masterpiece on “X” along with a frighting video of a rant by a self-declared woman who not only looks and sounds male, “she” looks and sounds like a male maniac. This is not going to get Rowling off the LGBTQ+ hate list:

If you don’t think he’s a woman, you’re transphobic. When he claimed to be a woman, he became a woman. He now belongs in women’s changing rooms, bathrooms, hospital wards, prison cells and rape support centres.

If you try and differentiate between him and a trans woman who looks more convincing as a woman, you are promoting patriarchal beauty norms. If you admit to seeing an aggressive and possibly unbalanced man in this video, you’re saying all trans people are mentally ill predators. If you refuse to let him into female-only spaces, you’re removing his right to exist. If you suggest he could comfortably use male facilities, you secretly want him assaulted. If you refuse to call him ‘she’, you are guilty of unpardonable cruelty. If you’re a woman who wouldn’t want to share a locker room with him, or a man who wouldn’t want your daughter, sister or mother to get undressed in close proximity to him, you belong to the far-right. If you point out that there is no objective difference between his claim to be a woman and that of any other biological male claiming a trans identity, you are too stupid to understand the circular arguments explaining why he’s not really trans whereas other men who say they’re women are really trans.

If you’re righteous, you must argue that this man’s self-declared identity overrides any consideration of the safety and rights of females. To be godly, you must agree he’s as ‘valid’ as every other trans woman, because people are who they say they are. No matter what your eyes, ears and common sense are telling you, if you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of history, you must pretend to believe that this angry, intimidating man is actually a vulnerable, oppressed woman.

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Baseball Ethics: The Evil, and All-American, LA Dodgers

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I know, 50% of you will skip this one…and I pity you.

Today is a big crazy day for baseball fans: it is the MLB trade deadline, when those teams that feel they have a chance at post-season glory and World Series immortality will try to acquire significant reinforcements from the teams that have given up hope. The latter teams will dump contracts while trying to acquire younger, cheaper players, many still confined to the minor leagues, so “Wait until next year!” has a chance of coming true for their disappointed fans.

The event has become important since baseball emulated the other professional sports by diluting the importance of the regular season by increasing the number of teams that can qualify for the play-offs. As I have written in the past, I detest this development, which is a deformed offspring on the free agent system. After today, the 30 teams will have split into mostly non-competitive pushovers playing out the last two months without hope and much superior teams “going for the gold.”

The biggest star and the most valuable player in these annual sweepstakes is Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, the consensus choice as the Best Starting Pitcher in Captivity. Skubal has won the AL Cy Young Award two straight years. It is his free agent year, and the Tigers know his asking price to re-sign in beyond their resources. The team had to trade him now, and almost every team with a ghost of a chance to get to the World Series would love to have him. Who traded for him yesterday? Shockingly the one team that didn’t need him: the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers have won the World Series two years in a row, they are locks to win their division again, they have the most money and the largest payroll in the game, and basically have a team of All-Stars without Skubal. The trade reignited a protest in the sports media and on barstools that the Dodgers were unethically greedy and “ruining baseball” by monopolizing talent, emulating the New York Yankees dominance during baseball’s first century. (The classic 1950s musical “Damn Yankees” was adapted from the novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost The Pennant.”) My view: Nonsense. AOC, Bernie and Mayor Mamdani like that argument, because they are communists. The Dodgers have succeeded because they are well-run and make smart decisions, including making many that benefit fans at the sacrifice of the bottom line. Baseball, alone among team sports, promotes individualism, exceptionalism, and capitalist values. Teams are not are not limited regarding their payrolls, and players are not limited regarding how much money they demand to play. Furthermore, baseball has traditionally benefited by having teams playing the role of The Evil Empire. It’s like the villains in professional wrestling.

[Full disclosure: My feelings on the matter might be influenced a tiny bit by the fact that the Boston Red Sox, currently on a historic winning streak that pulled them out of today’s class of pathetic white flag-waivers into the mob of hopeful “buyers” (23 wins in the last 26 games) swept the Evil Dodgers in a three game series in LA, winning last night 8-4.]

Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Indiana Fever Coach Stephanie White

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“I don’t know that I would say that I’m educated enough from a scientific standpoint.I don’t ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don’t. I do think when we think about various levels of sport, various governing bodies of sport and things that go into that, like I said, I’m not, I’m not educated enough at the different levels. I know growing up, I played with the boys all the time.”

—–WNBA’s Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White, asked to expound on the controversy around her star guard, Sophie Cunningham, who has aroused the ire of transgender activists by stating her opinion that young girls in sports should not be made to compete against biological men.

What a pusillanimous, ignorant, disingenuous statement. White would have been better of to simply state that her policy is not to comment on matters that do not concern the WNBA or her job as coach. Her statement is on the same offensive level as woke Justice Jackson saying that she can’t define what a woman is.

How “educated” does one have to be to look at this…

or this..

….and conclude, “You know, that doesn’t look fair to me” ? How hard is that?

It’s hard for Wilson because, unlike Cunningham, she’s afraid of the vengeance of the radical left and its woke enforcers. Cunningham is a role model for young women who take seriously the feminist credo of not behaving passively, fearfully and compliantly or avoiding the role of a leader because that’s how ladies are expected to behave. She said regarding her trans-females in sports opinion when recently interviewed about the attacks on her for standing up for women and reality, “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”

Ah, but do you have the scientific training to have common sense?

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Another Nauseating Chapter From The Presumed-Racism-and-Police- Brutality Playbook

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This kind of confirmation bias-driven sliming of law enforcement has become the norm since the Obama Administration and its leader’s unforgivable sanctification of Trayvon Martin as his crypto-offspring because Martin was black and got himself shot. The news media loves it, however, and you know, Freedom of the Press.

Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez (above) died in February after starting a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana. His last stand lasted only a few second, because two police officers who were crack shots put him down quickly and safely despite others being close to the exchange.  Yet that rather straightforward cause-and-effect result generated this headline from WNDU-TV, the NBC-owned affiliate in South Bend, about 20 miles from Elkhart, two days after the shooting:

Family of teen killed by Elkhart police seeks state investigation amid wave of violence

The deliberately anti-law enforcement and pro-deadly punk story continued,

“The family of a 17-year-old killed by Elkhart police is calling for state investigators to take over the case as the community grapples with three separate shootings and a stabbing in a 48-hour span. Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez died Sunday around 2 a.m. in an officer-involved shooting. A memorial now sits at High Dive Park where he was killed. Alfredo Ramirez-Gomez, the teen’s brother, spoke at a vigil for Bryan on Tuesday afternoon and demanded the release of police footage: “Bryan was a bright kid, he was a member of this community, this is where he grew up,” Ramirez-Gomez said. “As for his cause of death, we can’t really point fingers yet. We just ask and demand that the footage comes out from the car and from the vest.”

Right. “We can’t point fingers yet” but Ben Crump is on our auto-dial. The response is reflex: the family is angling for a big settlement from the city. Blogger Robert Stacy McCain points out:

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As If The Fauci Scandal Wasn’t Enough “Republicans Pounce!” Fodder For The Dishonest Axis News Media…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is axiomatic that whenever a news event casts legitimate shadows on Democrats, progressives or their allies, the story is framed by the Axis media as a partisan attack by the political Right (Republicans, conservatives, President Trump) with the event itself de-emphasized. “Republicans pounce!” is the short-hand name for the phenomenon.

Of course the practice is unethical and deliberately misleading. The news media’s coverage of the Fauci hearings was a classic of the genre. For example, ABC’s  correspondent Jay O’Brien said on Wednesday’s Good Morning America that the retired scientist would, at “85 years old,” have to face “a fiery hearing” because he “has long been a target of” Rand Paul, who obtained his “private diary.” Later, on World News Tonight O’Brien described Fauci as “the man millions of Americans turned to for answers during the COVID pandemic” now being “needled” by Republicans even though he “served in government for 54 years and has testified in more than 200 hearings.”

That commentary is revolting in its mendacity. People who do bad things need to be held responsible, and how old they happen to be when the piper must be paid is irrelevant. Citing Fauci’s age was a pure appeal to emotion: “Aw, poor old guy, can’t they just leave him alone?” The diary, legally and factually, was not private because it was created on a government platform. Yeah, sure, millions of Americans turned to Fauci for answers, including the President, and he lied to them all, repeatedly, or gave wrong answers.

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Observations on the Post Fauci Reveal [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

You know…when Dr. Fauci revealed himself to be a narcissist, a coward, a fick, and an all-time American villain.

The Fauci Ethics Train Wreck is yet another integrity test for the American Left and the Axis of Unethical Conduct. It has flunked the others, so it is not surprising that it is flunking this one. The ethical course would be to admit the truth:

“Yes, they were thrilled with the pandemic lockdown, because it wrecked the Trump economy and gave them a chance to install a puppet President who could be manipulated by extreme left unelected functionaries. Yes, that made us especially willing to accept Dr. Fauci and Co.’s draconian measures, especially since it gave Democratic elected officials an opportunity to play dictator and constrain Americans’ civil rights in the name of “safety.” Yes, we sanctified Dr. Fauci beyond all reason to enhance our irresponsible “follow the science” grift, which has been so successful in the climate change policy debate. Yes, we were complicit in installing ruinous and unnecessary policies, based on panic that our media sowed, that retarded a generation’s education and social development, ruined businesses, permanently damaged whole industries, and killed people.”

Nah! That’s not how the American Left rolls in 2026. How much better it is to deflect, lie, ignore multiple metaphorical elephants, and maintain a position that has become completely untenable.

The op-ed titled “What We Really Learned From the Fauci Hearing” (gift link, but this is no present) from the New York Times could have been designed by an AI bot with the instruction, “write an op-ed denying that the Fauci hearing was what it was, using the topic to blame Republicans while avoiding inconvenient facts.”

This paragraph, near the end, is a masterpiece of dishonesty and sophistry:

“Dr. Fauci is a complicated man who has been both elevated and reduced to a symbol. His legacy after a decades-long career at the intersection of science and politics is now defined by incompatible, contested accounts of his pandemic-era impact. There is little hope of resolving that contest any time soon.”

“Complicated”! The smoking gun of brazen sophistry, prevarication and equivocation. There’s noting complicated about Fauci. He’s a lifetime bureaucrat who became intoxicated with power when the opportunity arrived, and abused that power for the benefit his own ego, his political party, and the detriment of millions. It is an old story. Faucis have been analyzed by historians, playwrights and novelists for centuries. “Complicated” is an anodyne, toothless word used to excuse wrong-doers.

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Time For My Cultural Literacy Check…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I believe, and have believed for as long as I can remember—Shut up, I remember more than most people—that everyone in our society has an ethical obligation to know as much as possible about the society and culture we live in. This takes time and effort, as well as humility. For the young, it means showing an interest in what had transpired before they were born, if it had a significant effect on history and culture.

I have related here my interaction with a professional woman, ten years my junior, who revealed that she didn’t know who Jackie Robinson was. I told her that was inexcusable, and sent her to some sources. A lawyer I worked with at one point, even younger, couldn’t come within 70 years of the dates of the Civil War, despite graduating with honors from Cornell and being an associate at Skadden Arps.

The case was made powerfully in the Eighties by J.D. Hirsch in his best-seller “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” and he updated his book several times. His main declaration was that without a shared cultural knowledge, communication and understanding between generations becomes impossible, and society’s connective tissue is eventually degraded and destroyed. Analogies and metaphors no longer work; patterns are no longer detected; “presentism” becomes epidemic. Jackie Robinson was on Hirsch’s list; so were John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Sen. Joe McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, James Watson, Will Rogers, Elvis Presley and Fred Astaire.

Older generations have obligations too. As a child who watched more television than anyone I know (or knew), I became convinced that TV was an essential cultural literacy tool. My parents, one a lawyer and Harvard College grad and the other a career Harvard administrator, had many friends who boasted of either never watching TV or only deigning to watch PBS. Even when I was ten, I regarded them as arrogant and foolish, which they were. They didn’t see the Sixties coming, or comprehend the culture that was its catalyst when it fell on then like a rock squishing Wile E. Coyote.

I acknowledge that keeping up with current culture, while in some respects easier than it used to be due to technology, is overwhelming, and to some extent even impossible. We have many parallel cultures trying to coexist today, and some are antithetical to each other. At very least, I believe, all of us have to try to keep abreast of popular culture, which includes important societal developments that drive that relentless engine.

Last week EA expressed disgust that Sen. Jim Clyburn had revealed that he only recently became aware of ChatGPT. He’s 80: it’s no excuse. It would be almost as inexcusable if Clyburn announced that he didn’t know who Taylor Swift is. President Trump was recently dragged in social media for apparently conflating a kids’ TV host from the Fifties with Eighties star Paul Reubens, aka. Peewee Herman. At least Trump is aware of Peewee’s existence; that fulfills his cultural literacy obligation.

Five years ago, I wrote a discouraged post about how my cultural literacy commitment was failing, Confession Of A Life Competence Failure. I am obviously over-due for an audit, so I went to the same source for a pop quiz: WeSmirch, a web aggregator of celebrity news. In 2021, I regarded my performance as a failure, writing in part,

“It was horrifying. I never heard of most of these people. Those I have heard of seem completely irrelevant to me. Almost all of the important people in these stories seem to be morons, famous for being famous, illiterate, notable mostly for being rich. The so-called “news,” breathlessly shouted from various headlines, seemed less than inconsequential. And yet this is what a rising generation cares about. Here is a typical headline from this morning: “Vanessa Morgan’s son is called River.” Who is Vanessa Morgan? Who cares what her son is named? It turns out that she is an actress on “Riverdale,” a TV show based on the comic book whose appeal I never understood (but I read the damn thing so I knew what my friends were reading). My score was 15 celebrity names recognized, with 17 complete mysteries. My conclusion: “When all the celebrities are strangers, I will have reached the dreaded stage of my uncle, who got the Beatles mixed up with the Rolling Stones, and the codgers today who talk about the internet like it’s some new-fangled fad. And at that point, I will be useless.”

Let’s see what my score is today. The “celebrities”…

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Seattle’s Self-Inflicted Police Chief Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t understand this at all. Even for Seattle, the current controversy over the ex-chief of police is nuts.

The city’s far left Mayor Katie Wilson is under fire for the city’s botched handling of the Bite of Seattle mass shooting, which saw seven people shot with three dying. A toddler was among those wounded. Seattle Police issued a brief report to the public shortly after the shooting, urging everyone to stay away from the area, but nothing more for five hours, when a press conference was called. The city’s emergency alert system wasn’t activated, though this is exactly the kind of situation it was designed for.

Meanwhile, Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town, as he is remarkably frequently. He was at a police convention in Dallas; since March, he’s also attended police gatherings in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. Barnes doesn’t reside in Seattle full time, you see. He lives part-time in Chicago, where his family is. Over the last six months, Barnes has been out of town for about seven weeks, including four trips to Chicago.

When he got back to his place of employment, Barnes got in the face of a reporter who dared to ask him whether reports were accurate that Barnes planned to be away from Seattle until mid-August, and whether his travel schedule might be a bit problematic. Barnes stepped into his questioner and said, “I don’t have to tell you where I go…,” before a city employee pulled the chief away from the reporter and out of the room. At another news conference, Barnes denied that he frequently travels or is routinely absent from the city, and said that he doesn’t travel as much as he would like to. He really said that.

Subsequently Mayor Wilson announced that Barnes had “resigned.” Incredibly, the Seattle City Council was troubled by that. City Councilman Bob Kettle said working with Barnes was going well—yeah, it all seemed to be going swimmingly!—and that firing him would just increase the city’s feeling of insecurity. Barnes lasted a year, and the city has had four police chiefs in just two and a half years.

Wait, let’s back up a bit. Why would any major city—Seattle is one, or at least used to be until it was engulfed by The Great Stupid—hire a police chief who wasn’t prepared to reside full time in that city, or at least nearby? Unless the individual was some kind of miracle worker, it makes no sense. Based on his biography Barnes is an anti-policing police advocate, a social justice warrior, and, of course, he’s black:

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Open Forum, “The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend Even When The Enemy of My Enemy Is A Proven Liar and Fool” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

How desperate must progressives be to stoop to an appeal to an authority as untrustworthy and ridiculous as Alex Jones? “Headquarters” is a Democrat social media account “followed by” Kamala Harris and others in the Democratic leadership. Alex Jones told the morons who listen to his garbage that he thought the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. Who could be a worse character to use as validation for anti-Trump positions? Tucker Carlson? Daffy Duck? Luigi Mangione? Mr. Ed? Marley’s Ghost?

I have never understood how Jones gained any notoriety at all, except that there are a depressing number of cognitively impaired right-wingers out there. Even in that brief clip he broadcasts his ignorance: Congress doesn’t invoke the 25th Amendment and even raising that (the ever-popular Plan E on the list of Axis “Get Trump!” plots) is signature significance for an idiot.

But I digress. This is your weekly white board for new ethics issues and angle. Fill it up!

Ethics Quiz: Fauci’s Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Francis Turner, a Brit I have never heard of who is currently living in Japan, has a substack up titled “Pleading the Fifth when you have already received a Presidential pardon is like wearing a mask after being fully vaccinated.” It’s a good line, but untrue. There were good reason, in Fauci’s villainous mind, for not testifying honestly in a Congressional hearing. He’s a narcissist and an unapologetic former Deep State operative, and he knows the Axis of Unethical Conduct is invested in defending him forever as long as he never betrays it. To testify honestly, Fauci would have to admit he was wrong, that he lied, and that terrible damage was done to the nation because of his lies and mistakes. It would mean accepting responsibility and being accountable. People like Fauci aren’t capable of doing that.

It was this argument by Turner, however, that fascinated me.

“I’m willing to forgive people but has to be a quid pro quo that is an acknowledgement that there is something to forgive. If you can’t admit you made mistakes and that those mistakes killed people, bankrupted businesses and so on then you don’t get my forgiveness. And as I tweeted1 people who got things wrong up to about June 2020 get a pass because there was a ton of confusion and (especially from the PRC) misleading information so figuring stuff out was hard. But anyone who continued to advocate school closures, isolation of the elderly, mask safety theater and so on after that date needs to apologise. Anyone who insisted on vaccination of everyone, including the young, and wanted passports, mandates or other coercive measures needs to apologise. Anyone who mindlessly mocked recommendations for Hthe world a huge favor by admitting that they made mistakes and apologising for them.CQ, Zinc, Vitamin D, Ivermectin and so on needs to apologise […]. So does anyone who deliberately misinterpreted President Trump’s remarks about disinfectant to imply that he said people should inject bleach. In fact the mainstream media needs to do a general apology for their un-questioning slavish devotion to “the science” even when said “science” changed its mind and their related trashing of anyone who didn’t follow “the science” as it was declared to be at the time….

“In the midst of all the “under the advice of my attorneys I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, to refrain from answering your questions” blather, Herr Doktor Science notably failed to apologise. Not in his opening statement, and not when explicitly asked to by Senator Bernie Moreno. He just repeated his 5th amendment spiel… The world has moved on. But I read some of the Fauci diaries. I’ve read the commentary on it by Alex Berenson and Jeff Childers and many others. And my frustration has come raging back…”I don’t require a jail term, repayment of all the moolah or even an admission of guilt. Just man up (almost everyone concerned is of the male persuasion), put on your big boy trousers and say sorry.It can be just that one word. “Sorry” No need to say why you are apologising. No need to say who to. Just say the word.This particularly applies to Herr Doktor Science because he’s got a presidential pardon so saying sorry won’t land him in jail. Unless of course he shares other people’s skepticism about the validity of the autopen pardon he received…

“Sir Elton John says ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word’ but that’s no excuse to not say it.”

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