Author: Jack Marshall

Unethical Quote of the Week: Nick Saban

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“One thing that would change all of our spirit and all of our society is if we would just change one thing. Instead of coming up to somebody and saying, ‘How are you today?’ Why don’t you say, ‘Who did you help today?'”

—Former NFL and college coach Nick Saban, now ESPN broadcaster, in his speech after receiving the “Icon” award at the ESPY’s the sports networks annual awards show.

Ugh. Maybe ethics instruction should never be left to amateurs.

No, Coach, that’s a terrible idea. It’s not friendly or uplifting to challenge everyone you meet to prove how kind and virtuous they are to your specifications. I don’t want to live in a society where every encounter is going to require me to validate my existence by proving that I have met some kindness quota.

The appropriate response to that gratuitous and obnoxious challenge is “None of your damn business!” or better still “Bite me.” Similarly, I don’t care to have a stranger, associate or friend begin a conversation with “Have you given to the homeless today?,” “Have you smiled at a stranger?,” Have you hugged your child?,” or “Have you thanked the Lord for His bounty?”

Sure, I know what Nick was trying to say, but if you can’t say what you mean to say more effectively than that, then don’t say anything. His heart may have been in the right place, but his brain and his tongue weren’t.

A “The Fish Rots From The Head Down Cultural Note”: Now You Can’t Even Trust Hot Dog Eating Contests

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The President of the United States cheated in several ways last night, and we have been watching cheating become an accepted norm in the worlds of government, politics, law, academia, and sports. And so it has come to this: there was either cheating or an “appearance of impropriety” at Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest over the Fourth of July.

When competitor Nick Wehry finished the 10 minute contest, judges ruled that he had eaten 46.75 hot dogs and buns, placing him 4th. But Wehry asked to have the officials check his results and they determined that there was an additional empty plate in his “finished” stack, which is how judges determine how many wieners an individual has eaten. The recount gave him a new score of 51.75.

Then the New York Post published “Buns of Steal”, reporting that witnesses accused Wehry of tampering with the empty plate total to add to his score. On EatFeats, an anonymous commenter posted links to videos with timestamps seeming to show that Wehry illicitly added to his empty plate count.

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An “Enemy of the People” Indictment

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Over at PJ Media, conservative writer David Strom provides a vivid overview of just how complicit the mainstream media has been in assisting Democrats and the White House as they deceived the public, both to elect Joe Biden President and protect him from suspicions that he was not able to do his job. “A Short History of the Coverup” should have been published in the New York Times; if that paper were a serious pursuer of ethical journalism and “all the news that’s fit to print,” it would make a thorough investigation of this scandal its top priority. It didn’t and it won’t, however, because that would involve implicating itself.

Strom writes at one point, “We can’t let them off the hook. We need America to face the fact that the media really IS the ‘enemy of the people.’ I hated that phrase in 2020; I think it is 100% true now. I was wrong.” Good for him; at least he admits it. This comment of Trump’s, one of his most important, is regularly used by the “Trump is Hitler” chorus to show that he’s an enemy of democracy. To the contrary: the enemy of democracy’s enemy is democracy’s friend. Ethics Alarms flagged Trump’s undiplomatic remark as spot on immediately, I will point out, patting myself heartily on the back.

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Friday Open Forum: OK, Write All You Want About the Worst Government Cover-Up Since Watergate

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

…or anything else, of course.

Today’s relevant story: a Milwaukee radio station admitted late yesterday that it edited a taped interview with President Biden when his campaign asked them to, because two of Biden’s responses were, in turn, embarrassing and incoherent. The station apologized and came clean, because now the mainstream media allies of the progressive and Democratic Party are dedicated to dumping Biden rather than pretending he’s a great President.

How many media outlets were working with the White House to deceive the public about Biden’s cognitive problems before his debate disaster? How much smoking gun evidence has been “scrubbed” over the past four years, including during the 2020 campaign?

It’s all truly disgusting, and Biden has the gall to claim that Trump is the threat to democracy.

Don’t get me started. Write about whatever ethics issues intrigues you.

7/11 Convenient Ethics Notes…[Updated As The Evening Unfolds]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

1. It is now 7:15 pm, E.S.T. as I write this. The “big boy” news conference , we were told, would begin at 6:30. Wouldn’t you think the President, or whoever pulls his strings, would make sure he was ready to go on time? I have images of make-up artists, doctors with needles and last minute electronic devices being planted. Doesn’t everybody?

2. Oh yeah, this is a good sign: Speaking at the NATO summit in Washington, D.C. today, President Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by saying, “And now, I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”

3. Landing very briefly on Fox News during “The Five,” I heard a black reporter I’ve never see before express annoyance that Kamala Harris is being called a “DEI Vice-President.” When a member of the panel asked, “Why was she chosen then?” He answered immediately,”Because she was qualified!” Shameless. Biden made it clear from the beginning that he was going to nominate an African-American woman. There were even three widely publicized finalists: the indefensible Stacy Abrams, the ridiculously unqualified Cory Bush, and Harris, who might have been the best of the three, which is like saying Moe was the smartest Stooge. How do members of the Axis media get away with lying like that, openly, in defiance of known facts, on national TV? Are they depending on public amnesia? Stupidity? The fact that Democrats will accept outright dishonesty if that’s what it takes to win?

4. Biden finally arrived and immediately launched into a Trump bashing campaign speech. Has a President ever begun a press conference that way before? It’s cheating, a bait-and-switch. Biden is exploiting the network coverage to get a purely partisan speech broadcast, one that he is reading off a teleprompter. Republicans should demand equal time.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Mark Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.”

—–Mark Judge, reflecting on the current Joe Biden cover-up disaster that has implicated the mainstream news media and lowered its already abysmal level of public trust even further

Judge makes a profound point. If reporters, journalists, publishers and editors acknowledged their mistakes, ethical lapses and instances of incompetence, bias, dishonesty or worse, there would be at least some sense that they recognize their deficiencies and are committed to correcting them. Judge writes,

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Stop Making Me Defend George Clooney!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

In a typical ad hominem rant on Truth Social, Donald Trump attacked George Clooney, who recently joined the “Dump Biden” team with an op-ed in the New York Times calling on the President to step aside.

“So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act,” Trump wrote. “He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?….Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television…Movies never really worked for him!!!”

As is so often the case, the former President doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Clooney can legitimately be criticized for his part in deceiving the public about Biden’s disabilities; as Christian Toto recently pointed out, Hollywood power-players—like Clooney—were despicably complicit in hiding Biden’s real condition from the public. However, claiming the Clooney “never came close to making a great movie” is unfair, uninformed and ignorant, and saying that “movies never worked for him” is just silly.

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Proof Positive That Not Only Is the President Incompetent, Everyone Around Him Is Too

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

My poor, MSNBC-addled sister, who is thoroughly Trump-Deranged (and I resent the mainstream media for doing this to her), keeps saying that though it isn’t ideal, of course, having a puppet President managed by competent professionals and handlers who are the ones really running the country is still preferable to having an evil President like You Know Who.

I have pointed out that this seems like an odd stance from a supporter of the party that purports to be defending democracy, since figurehead leaders are a traditional feature of non-democratic governments (much as, you know, trying to throw the political opposition in prison is). Aren’t The People supposed to know who is running their nation and aren’t they supposed to be the onesThe People voted for on the ballot?

“Humminahumina,” she replies. Besides, all those shadow managers and handlers know what they are doing, unlike the Evil Orange Man.

Suuuure. Ann Althouse just focused on a perfect example of just how inept these mysterious rulers are: they have dubbed today’s Make or Break Post Debate Test II the President’s “big boy press conference.”

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Medical Ethics Dunce: Dr. Peter McCollough

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Bandy Lee wasn’t the only alleged medical expert to pronounce then-President Donald Trump mentally disabled (so that one of the Axis plots to remove him from office without having to go through that annoying democratic election thingy could be activated) without actually examining him, but she was the one who exploited her unethical conduct the most effectively to get repeated gigs on MSNBC.

Finally Yale fired her, as she was habitually and noisily breaching basic professional ethics including the so-called “Goldwater Rule,” installed by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to prohibit members from offering psychological opinions about individuals they had not personally examined.

Please note that the rule didn’t make what Lee and others did unethical: it was unethical with or without the rule. It is unfair, presumptuous and an abuse of position and authority to diagnose non-patients from afar, particularly in a political context where such fake medical verdicts can be used as partisan weapons.

Yet there was cardiologist Dr. Peter McCollough yesterday, giving an interview on the web’s “Breanna Morello Show” and diagnosing Joe Biden with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s while opining that both may be the result of a bad reaction to the Covid vaccines. Before diagnosing the President, he explained that he wouldn’t give a diagnosis because doing so would be unethical, and then immediately diagnosed him.

Nice.

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Here’s An Unethical Practice That Had Escaped My Notice: Sloth Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Apparently touching, holding and cuddling sloths has become a thing, along with, of course, posing with them for selfies, the refuge of the incurably narcissistic. The New York Times has a long, exhaustive feature on the problem, which is a problem because such close contact with the cute beasts is not healthy for the sloths and occasionally dangerous for the sloth-cuddler. From the article:

But lately sloths have been proliferating….far outside their arboreal habitats. They can be fed, cuddled and photographed at animal parks and pet shops, often despite unclear provenance and lax adherence to safety and health rules….star attractions in the growing range of venues where interactions with animals — the more exotic and up-close the better — underpin the business model. The number of those U.S.D.A.-licensed exhibitors almost doubled from 2019 to 2021, with over 1,000 sloths inspected annually in the last two years. According to federal data, the risk of animal deaths and disease outbreaks has increased. So have human injuries — and the concerns of experts and state agencies…

One company that has attracted outsize attention from regulators and animal advocates is SeaQuest, a national chain of interactive aquariums. It has seven locations, from Folsom, Calif., to Woodbridge, N.J., most of which exhibit sloths. And for an extra fee, visitors can handle flying squirrels, snorkel with stingrays or cavort with otters and wallabies. Whether the animals want that kind of communion is another question….Last year, the U.S.D.A. sought to strengthen regulations around the display and care of wild animals, and the Humane Society of the United States has advocated that encounters be curtailed altogether because they “subject wild animals to a lifetime of trauma, fear and chronic stress,” said Laura Hagen, its director of captive wildlife.

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