Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Quiz: Ethics Hero Or Insecure Spoilsport?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Former MLB player David Freese was voted by St. Louis Cardinals fans into the team’s Hall of Fame. To everyone’s surprise, he declined the honor.

“This is something that I have given an extreme amount of thought to, humbly, even before the voting process began,” Freese said in a statement. “I am aware of the impact I had helping the team bring great memories to the city I grew up in, including the 11th championship. I feel strongly about my decision and understand how people might feel about this. I get it. I’ll wear it. Thank you for always being there for me, and I am excited to be around the Cardinals as we move forward.”

He also said that he did not feel “deserving” of the honor. “I look at who I was during my tenure, and that weighs heavily on me,” said Freese, who recived the most votes of any former Cardinals player for induction in online balloting. “The Cardinals and the entire city have always had my back in every way. I’m forever grateful to be part of such an amazing organization and fan base then, now and in the future,” he said. “I’m especially sorry to the fans that took the time to cast their votes. Cardinal Nation is basically the reason why I’ve unfortunately waited so long for this decision and made it more of a headache for so many people.”

Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that Freese has battled clinical depression his entire life, and is a recovering alcoholic.

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Does Westchester County’s D.A. Think The Public Is That Gullible? Is Donald Trump?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah announced on June 15 that her office had closed the pending criminal case against Donald Trump after an investigation she claimed was conducted “objectively, and independent of politics, party affiliation and personal or political beliefs.”

Right. Who believes that? Rocah, a Democrat, decided that the “Get Trump” effort being simultaneously carried out for years by Democrats (like her) in multiple jurisdictions as well as in the U.S. Congress, the Justice Department and the FBI (in redundancy there is security) had finally succeeded with special prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment. Why waste public funds on one more politically-motivate prosecution when the goal had been achieved?

Then Trump brayed on Truth Social,

“WAS THE HONORABLE THING TO DO IN THAT I DID NOTHING WRONG.”

“BUT WHERE AND WHEN DO I GET MY REPUTATION BACK? WHEN WILL THE OTHER FAKE CASES AGAINST ME BE DROPPED? ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!”

Does he really believe the case was dropped for honorable reasons? Whatever the decision was, it wasn’t “honorable.” If Trump actually misled authorities about the value of the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to pay less on property taxes, then the honorable thing would be to prosecute him. If he didn’t, then the investigation was probably politically motivated. If Rocah really was honorable, she would exonerate Trump and announce that a full investigation found that the allegations against him were false.

(Isn’t there some DA somewhere who will prosecute Trump for writing social media messages in all caps?)

Ethics Hero: Non-Weenie Chard Scharf

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Pronouns again.

A reader flagged this story and it almost got lost in the swirl of ethics chaos this month, so I want to get it up quickly today. Chad Scharf was the vice president of software engineering at the Jacksonville, Florida, location of Bitwarden, which is a cybersecurity firm based in California. I suspect that headquarters locale is at fault for the fact that Bitwarden decided that all employees should include “their “preferred pronouns” in their personal profiles on Slack, an online messaging platform. This was, of course, part of its diversity/equity/inclusion embrace.

DEI is a cover for government, corporate and other sinister educational efforts to engage in discrimination, progressive virtue signalling and indoctrination, and the only way to slow it down until the courts step in is to show some backbone and say, “No.” That’s what Scharf did. He declined to list any preferred pronouns, and that should have been the end of the issue. There is a clear and reasonable presumption that an employee with a male name who doesn’t specify pronouns is content with being identified by male pronouns.

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Very Interesting Points On The Trump Indictment From Will Sharf

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Will Scharf is a former federal prosecutor a Republican candidate for Missouri Attorney General; take that last part as you will. In a piec for The Federalist, he ticks off six problems for prosecutors trying to prove the alleged crimes in the Justice Department’s case against Donald Trump. Few of them have been explained thoroughly in the mainstrem media by an analyst not obviously inclined to declare Trump guilty, at least none that I have found.

Here are Scharf’s six; my few comments are in italics:

1. Interplay Between the Espionage Act and the Presidential Records Act: “…The Presidential Records Act sets up a system where the president designates all records that he creates either as presidential or personal records (44 U.S.C. § 2203(b)). A former president is supposed to turn over his presidential records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and he has the right to keep his personal records.  Based on the documents I’ve read and his actions I’ve read about, I believe Trump viewed his “boxes” as his personal records under the PRA. There are statements he made, quoted in the indictment, that support that view. If Trump considered the contents of these boxes to be of purely personal interest, hence his designation of them as personal records, did he knowingly retain National Defebse Information? Did he really think these documents, like years-old briefing notes and random maps, jumbled together with his letters, news clippings, scribbled notes, and random miscellaneous items, “could be used to the injury of the United States”? Or did he just think of them as mementos of his time in office, his personal records of the four years, akin to a journal or diary?”

2. Classification and National Defense Information: “…Trump’s legal team needs to drive home this point over and over again: Classification is not dispositive in this case. Harm to America or benefit to foreign countries is the standard.  Anyone who has worked around government knows that overclassification is a huge problem. A ton of documents end up being classified because of arcane technical rules that may not reflect the real world. If the president were to ask the Navy what’s for lunch for the next week at Coronado, for example, there is a good chance the answer comes back with a classification marker on it.”

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The White House Breast-Flashing Trans Activist Offers Authentic Frontier Gibberish And A Non-Apology Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Ugh.

I wouldn’t expect the individual who thought this…

…was a reasonable or ethical way to behave at the White House or to thank President Biden for inviting her and other LGBTQ activists to attend a political suck-up event would be revealed as a smart, articulate, ethical force in civic discourse. That three-minute babble-fest above, however, is special. I’m not even certain what the transsexual’s intention was. I can determine what it communicated, however:

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Now THAT’S An Unethical Lawyer! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Every December, when I do an end-of-year legal ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, I discuss the Unethical Lawyer of the Year. It’s only June, but it’s hard to see how anyone, not even Alvin Bragg, can match Jason Kurland this year

Kurland, an attorney who represented lottery winners and was once a partner at the prestigious firm Rivkin Radler, one of the 200 largest firms in the nation, was sentenced last week to 13 years in prison. He had been found guilty of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions and a related conspiracy charge.

Fraudulent representations by Kurland and his co-defendants caused his clients to lose more than $80 million. He also lifted $19.5 million from the account of one lottery winner to make an investment for the benefit of himself and his accessories.

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Playing Bud Light Spin The Bottle

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The facts are pretty straightforward. The parent company of Budweiser hired an ambitious, arrogant, woke woman to take over the marketing of Bud Light, which was the best selling beer in America. Having little understanding of the product’s market, and being so infected with wokism that she couldn’t comprehend the depth of the cultural divide regarding the current pro-transgender fad, she made the bone-headed decision to associate the brand with Dylan Mulvaney, a biological male internet performance artist who poses as female, both satirizing genuine transsexuals and celebrating them. From that moment, Bud Light was in a binary trap of its own making with no way out. The reaction against the botched marketing decision was over-whelming, with calls for a Bud Light boycott and a sudden fall-off ins sales. When the company tried to backtrack, including the sacking of its clueless marketing guru, the LGTBQ market also turned on the brand.

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2023’s Most Insulting Made-Up Excuse For Unethical Conduct So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I had assumed this story from last month had wrapped up the prize: A Colorado man was pulled over by police for speeding and swapped seats with his dog so he could claim, or at least try to claim, that the dog was driving.

“The driver attempted to switch places with his dog who was in the passenger seat, as the SPD officer approached and watched the entire process,” the official statement reads. “The male party then exited the passenger side of the vehicle and claimed he was not driving.” The suspect showed “clear signs of intoxication,” and when the officer asked about his alcohol consumption, he tried to run away but was quickly caught.

The dog told the officers that he was grateful for their intervention because he “thought that idiot was going to kill us both.”

OK, I’m kidding about that last part. There have been some really weird ethics stories involving dogs lately. I ultimately decided not to write about this one, the Penn State professor caught having repeated sex with his dog to “blow off steam” because there are so many tasteless—but funny!—jokes that come to mind and I might not be able to resist making some of them.

But I digress. Almost as revolting as that story is the new leader for worst 2023 excuse, Dr Nicholas Chapman, 55, a British general practitioner, who has been convicted of putting his semen into coffee he served to a female acquaintance in September of 2021. The court was told that Chapman was accused of adding his semen to drinks he made for the victim on several occasions. When the woman kept a sample of some of the cofee he had made for her, tests confirmed the secret ingredient and the DNA matched Chapman’s.

The doctor swore he was innocent. He had a rare condition that causes him to ejaculate while urinating, he said, and he just keeps forgetting to wash his hands after finishing up in the loo.

[I used a photo of Porter, the first driving dog, above instead of a picture related to Chapman’s excuse because…well, you know why…]

Juneteenth Weekend Ethics Picnic Continued, 6/17/2023: A Happy Dance Gone Wrong, Japan Figures Out The Obvious At Last, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I decided to restrict yesterday’s installment to the national divisions theme, and realized this morning that there are all sorts of random items hanging around that deserve some consideration.

Such as…

1. The angry banned commenter who has been leaving comment on various posts like a suspended junior high school student drawing penises on the school basketball court as revenge just wrote this in a comment you’ll never see: “Your blog is basically a torrent of hate speech.” No further analysis from me is necessary, I presume. I occasionally have regrets about banning commenters. This jerk I regret allowing to comment in the first place.

2. Speaking of fractured thought processes, an occasional commenter here wrote a Facebook post criticizing the fact that a male “identifying” as female won the “Miss San Francisco” title. Me, I wouldn’t care if an inanimate carbon rod got the crown, but one of my friend’s critics, a Woke World Warrior, wrote (and later too down) this response: “What impact does this have on your life?” I immediately flagged it as an exquisite expression of dead ethics alarms and the absence of comprehension of the principles of ethics generally. What a wonderful world we would build if we all only cared about conduct that affected us directly and personally! And that is the flaw in the logic behind the question.

3. Here’s an ancient but still common baseball rationalization that drives me crazy, but that isn’t used sufficiently in the real world to justify inclusion on the list. When a home plate umpire makes an obviously wrong strike call, a baseball “color” announcer, usually an ex-player, will say, “He’s been calling that pitch a strike all day. That’s all hitter and players want, consistency. It’s his strike zone today, and as long as it doesn’t change, nobody can complain.” That’s idiotic. It’s like saying, “Yeah, that cop always tickets pedestrians for chewing gum, but as long as he’s consistent about it, it’s OK.” The umpires’ job is to enforce the strike zone in the rule book, which is very specific. They don’t have the authority to decide what is “their” strike zone.

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Wine Ethics, Integrity, and The Roman Catholic Church

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

If you have trouble reading that, here’s the text:

Dear members of the Clergy: Please find the enclosed decree I have issued to address the use of wines of dubious or altogether invalid matter intended for the celebration of the Eucharist in this Archdiocese. It has recently been reported by two priests, having served in three different parishes, that upon their appointment to these parishes they soon discovered the long-term use of wines that were in fact invalid matter for the confection of the Eucharist. The result of this long-term practice in these parishes is that for any number of years all Masses celebrated were invalid and therefore the intentions for which those Masses were offered were not satisfied, including the obligation pastors have to offer Mass for the people… This is a gravely serious situation for which we must now petition the Holy See for guidance on restorative measures. Due to the grave nature of this situation, I must therefore forbid further use of any wines that are not specifically vinted for sacramental use in the Catholic Mass. Parishes must immediately discontinue use of all wines that have not been specifically produced to meet the requirements for sacramental usage. If upon checking the wine you currently use you find that it is invalid matter (contains additives such as elderberry extract, sugars, alcohol, etc.) you must notify Fr. John Riley by June 15 (your name will be kept confidential) so that the true scope of the situation in this archdiocese may be reported properly to the Holy See for its guidance.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this serious matter effecting the validity of the Eucharist…

It is times like these that I wish old Ethics Alarms commenting star tgt was still around. His epic battles with Michael West will be sung about by troubadours until the stars grow cold. Tgt was an icy-eyed foe of religion, and a story like this would have surely generated an epic Comment of the Day.

I’m not quite in tgt’s league regarding disdain for organized religion, but what an ethics mess. The Catholic Church requires all wine used for communion to be made from grapes without any additives: after all, it is supposed to be the literal blood of Christ. Additional flavoring, sugar, alcohol makes it “invalid matter.” The Church has lists of local wineries that produce wines that qualify as “valid matter” that Catholic priests can use; it also apparently has black lists of blasphemous brands that may promote their wines as “sacramental” when they are not.

How many masses have been held using “invalid matter,” thus rendering the masses themselves invalid? How many other masses around the country have been held using similarly taboo wine, and are similarly invalid? What is the remedy for that?

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