Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Quiz: The Elizabeth Holmes Sentence

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

A Federal judge sentenced Theranos, Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes  to eleven years and three months in prison last week. Essentially the judge had limitless options, with only execution being off the table. Based on the maximum sentences for each the four crimes she was convicted of, she theoretically could have been given the equivalent of life in prison.  Prosecutors asked for a 15-year sentence, three years of supervised release, and more than $800 million damages. The layers for Holmes, now 38, had asked for home detainment, community service, and no more than 18 months in prison. (My son spent half that in jail for a reckless driving offense when he was 18. Just for perspective….)

What did Holmes do? Wikipedia has an excellent one-stop summary: the short version is that she invented a purported blood testing system that didn’t work, faked data, sucked in investors, doctors and patients, made billions, and engaged in all manner of lies, threats, manipulations and schemes to avoid the consequences of her actions. The government argued that Holmes deserved a severe punishment because “dozens of investors lost $700 million and numerous patients received unreliable or wholly inaccurate medical information from Theranos’ flawed tests, placing those patients’ health at serious risk.” This is undoubtedly true. Her defenders counter than “she didn’t kill anybody,”  she is a first time offender, and her crime was one of non-violence. This is also true.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Is Holmes’ 11 years+ sentence for her massive, 15-year fraud fair, just, proportionate and in the best interests of society—in short, ethical?

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Surely…SURELY…The American Public Will Eventually Stop Tolerating This. Right?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

RIGHT???

The increasingly unjust, unfair, harmful pandering to pseudo-transgender opportunists has got to eventually trigger a massive awakening in which Americans say, “Wait…what are we doing? This is crazy! Why have we allowed this to go on this long? Or at all?”

In the most recent debacle, Seattle Academy’s Aspen Hoffman, ranked 72nd in boys’ track as a freshman, transitioned to female, sort of, as a sophomore, was allowed to compete as girl, and suddenly started winning races.

Hoffman finished first in the 5,000 meter race, and broke Seattle Academy’s girls’ record with a time that would have achieved 48th place in the boys’ division. This is Barry Bonds-level cheating. It also shows how California derangement is infectious: both Washington and Oregon have lost their grip on reality, rationality, responsibility and ethics. When are their citizens going to stop being weenies and stop the madness? It’s their duty as citizens, after all.

Fifteen years ago, Washington state’s guidelines for transgender athletes held that male athletes had to undergo surgery and two years of hormone therapy before they could compete as females. Four years ago, the surgery mandate was lifted and only“documented testosterone suppression therapy” was required. Then, in 2021 as The Great Stupid raged, the state ruled that transgender athletes only had to “consistently express” a gender. Well, yes, that seems reasonable as far as it goes. You don’t want athletes saying, “I’m male!” “I’m female!” “I’m male!” “I’m female!” between races like Faye Dunaway between slaps in “Chinatown.” But then there’s the other matter—biological males have a huge advantage.

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And Yet, Against All Odds, Karine Jean-Pierre’s Was NOT The Most Outrageous Package of Deflections, Excuses And Rationalizations Concocted Last Week By A Prominent Public Figure To Avoid Accountability…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

No, the winner, and by a lot, was the blather spewed out by the head of the International Federation of Association Football, Gianni Infantino, to justify…well, to mitigate…well, to throw up so much dust that the general disgust at the World Cup being held in Qatar might be forgotten, or at least controlled.

All of the international sports organizations are corrupt, FIFA being among the worst. The soccer organization must have reaped quite a bonanza to take the World Cup to Qatar, which is a miserable human rights abuser, different but almost as despicable as China, where the Olympics allowed those champions of slavery, oppression and pandemic-launching to use the Games as a propaganda platform, just like Adolf in 1936. (The United States should have refused to “play” in both instances.) At a press conference last week, Infantino, defended Qatar against those condemning the Muslim nation for its treatment of immigrants, gays and women, with a flood of terrible analogies, excuses and rationalizations, saying in part:

Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker I feel this, all this, because what I’ve been seeing and what I’ve been told, since I don’t read, otherwise I would be depressed I think. Of course, I am not Qatari, Arab, gay or disabled. But I was the son of a migrant worker, saw their conditions. Not in Qatar, but Switzerland. What I’ve seen brings me back to my personal story. I am a son of migrant workers. My parents were working very very hard in difficult situations. I know what it means to be discriminated and bullied as a foreigner in a foreign country. As a child, I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles. I was bullied for that…. We need to invest in education, to give them a better future, to give them hope. We should all educate ourselves. Reform and change takes time. It took hundreds of years in our countries in Europe. It takes time everywhere, the only way to get results is by engaging […] not by shouting…For what we Europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years around the world we should be apologizing for [the] next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons.

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Who Couldn’t Tell That The Chrisleys Were Crooks?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Gee what a surprise.

Since my sock drawer has been in desperate straits, I missed the news that Todd and Julie Chrisley, the oogy, greed-obsessed mater and pater in the family reality show “Chrisley Knows Best,” had been convicted of federal charges of financial fraud and tax evasion in June. They are going to be sentenced today, maybe for as much as 30 years each, while having to disgorge about 20 million bucks of ill-gotten gains.

I watched less than ten minutes of the USA series maybe five years ago, got nauseous, and never went back. I was immediately reminded of the marketing line for the slasher film “Black Christmas”, “If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight!” It seemed screamingly obvious that this family that gorged on bad taste, conspicuous consumption and nouveau riche excess and smuggery was as corrupt and ethically inert as human beings could be. Even as accustomed as I was to really awful and/or sick people being the stars of these trashy shows—Danny Bonaduce, Scott Baio, Ryan O’Neal, the “Jersey Shore” cast, Anna Nicole Smith and so many others—the Chrisleys were special, so throbbingly vile that I would be tempted to investigate anyone who tuned in for more than one episode.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Karine Jean-Pierre

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

This is great huminahumina even for the President’s paid liar. Asked directly about growing evidence that President Biden and his family benefited financially from black sheep son Hunter’s influence peddling, Jean-Pierre blathered,

“So, look, uh, you know, um, there’s — there’s some — a little bit of, uh, interesting, uh, you know, kind of, on-brand, uh, thinking here, because, um, you know, congressional Republicans, uh, ran, uh, saying that they were going to fight inflation. Uh, they said they were gonna make that a priority. They were very clear about that these past, uh, several months, and instead, what they’re doing is they’re focusing, uh — you know, they’re focusing — they’re making their top, top priority — they get the majority, and their top priority is actually not focusing on the American families but focusing on the President’s family.”

Wow. It was such an obvious deflection that she might as well have begun by saying, “I’m now going to avoid this issue completely because I don’t have a good response for it.” It’s also an ineffective deflection. This is condign justice, and self-inflicted by Biden: the U.S. President who most desperately needed a competent, articulate, quick-thinking press secretary is burdened by the most inarticulate, dull-witted individual in the position ever. She was hired because she would be “historic”—first black, foreign-born lesbian, or something—but those features are completely irrelevant to the job. “Most flagrantly incompetent White House mouthpiece” is a genuine historic accomplishment, especially when one considers some of Karine’s predecessors like Sean Spicer and Joe Lockhart. I have a fertile imagination, but I cant conceive of how any press secretary could be worse than Karine. There are more articulate and persuasive mimes.

It’s wonderful, don’t you think, that the President can’t possibly fire her? Continue reading →

Sunday Afternoon Ethics Reflections, 11/20/2022, Part 2: The Rest Of The Stories…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[Part I, consisting of the introduction to today’s random collection and a related selection from the EA archives, is here…]

1. This marks the official beginning of the yearly holiday runaway emotions train wreck for me, with which I have permanent love-hate relationship that grows more intense each year. I inherited from my mother an immediate nostalgia, regret and sense of loss with this season, typically kicking in with the first Christmas song, which Sirius was cruel enough to offer weeks ago. I think that’s why I gravitate to the Karen Carpenter version of “Home for the Holidays,” because her early loss was so tragic, and her unique voice was so emotionally expressive. This coming week is our 42nd anniversary, of which I am proud from a perseverance and integrity standpoint, since almost nobody among our contemporaries are still on their first marriage, Thanksgiving, which will have fewer people around the table than ever before, then the anniversary of my finding my father dead in his easy chair on my birthday, followed by the annual hell of getting 2000 lights on a live 8 foot tree, a task that falls entirely on me now, and then Christmas madness. What fun. And yet I love the memories, the lights, the music, the spirit and the values the season represents.

Rats. Here we go again…

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Sunday Afternoon Ethics Reflections, 11/20/2022, Part I: The Nuremberg Trials And Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This time I’m separating the usual intro to these ethics potpourris with the enumerated stories. I began by noting that this is the anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, as notable an ethics milestone as one could imagine, from several perspectives. The trials were an admirable effort to make grand statement about the line of inhuman evil that even war could not justify and that a world would not countenance. They were also significantly hypocritical, just as the post-Civil War trial of Andersonville Prison commander Henry Wirz, the sole judicial precedent for Nuremberg, was hypocritical, punishment inflicted on the losers of a terrible war that could easily have been brought against the war’s victors if the results had been reversed.

There really was no enforceable international law to base the Nuremberg Trials on, making the trials illegal if not unethical. Did they stop genocide? No, and one could argue that the show trails didn’t even slow genocide down. They did, I guess, make people think; one important result of the trials was that the films of liberated death camps, made by U.S. troops and supervised by the great Hollywood director George Stevens, were finally shown. How much the trials made people think is much open to debate. I have always been fascinated by the issues raised by the Nuremberg Trials, and Abby Mann’s 2001 stage version of “Judgment at Nuremberg” was one of the productions I oversaw at The American Century Theater. Directed by Joe Banno, it included post show discussions after every performance, some with D.C. area historians, lawyers and judges as guests. Incredibly, I felt, the show had never been produced in the Washington D.C. area, professionally or professionally. Disgracefully is perhaps the better word. TACT’s was a professional, thoughtful and excellent production, yet the Washington Post refused to review it. “Dated,” was their verdict on most of my theater’s productions. The apathy about “Judgment at Nuremberg” was a major factor in persuading me to end my theater’s 20 year-long mission of presenting neglected American stage works of historical, cultural, theatrical or ethical significance.

But I digress. While I was checking to see whether I had noted this anniversary before (I had not), I found the following post, which was the earliest Ethics Alarms entry featuring a reference to the Nuremberg Trials. Written in 2012, it makes fascinating reading today, so here it is. One nostalgic note: Among the commenters on that post more than a decade ago were Michael Boyd (last heard from on this date ten years ago), Brook Styler (final comment), Chase Martinez ( left in 2015), Julian Hung (last heard from in August of last year), Danielle (who wished me a Merry Christmas in 2016, and vanished), Modern Knight ( final comment in 2017), and several one-time commenters who never returned. But Michael Ejercito was among them, speaking of loyalty. The good kind.

The Donald’s Dangerous Ethics: Loyalty Trumps Honesty On “Celebrity Apprentice”

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The Great Stupid, Global Edition: Ethics Observations On The New U.N. Climate Change Fund

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’ve let Major Clipton (from the Ethics Alarms TV and Movie Clips collection, #9 of 27) make the first observation, which is that this is nuts, and that it ought to be obvious to everyone that it’s nuts.

In case you missed it, ” Nearly200 countries concluded two weeks of talks early Sunday in which their main achievement was agreeing to establish a fund that would help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the pollution spewed by wealthy nations that is dangerously heating the planet,” according to the New York Times.

The United States has reportedly “agreed” to contribute a billion dollars to the fund. Well…

1. The U.S. diplomats can’t “agree” to give away a billion dollars. Only Congress can do that. If you want a single reason to be glad the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives while falling on their collective, incompetent faces during the “pink ripple,” this is it. If…and it’s a big if…the new Speaker of the House can keep his troops in line, the U.N.’s Robin Hood Fund should be DOA.

2. The Biden Administration has exploded the National Debt like no other peacetime administration in history, and seems to be under the mistaken belief that taxpayer funds are just cryptocurrency—you, know funny money. The bigger the debt the more interest the U.S. pays on it, and the same regime that has exploded the debt has also created inflation that makes the debt more expensive. In fiscal 2022 alone, the federal government made $475 billion in net interest payments. It was “only” $352 billion the prior year, according to the US Treasury Department. That is more than the government spent on veterans’ benefits and transportation combined. But hey, why not just give away a billion dollars that will be mostly used to line the pockets of the corrupt and incompetent leaders of those “poor, vulnerable countries.”

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Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sigh.

I can’t decide whether it is completely predictable that the richest man in the world has a 5th grader’s comprehension of ethics and integrity of principles, or whether it should alarm us all. I do know that those of us hoping that Musk could transform Twitter from the censorious, leftist propaganda organ that it has become into a fair and valuable platform for public discourse are probably going to be disappointed.

Musk said on Twitter yesterday that he was reinstating former President Donald J. Trump to the platform, and poof!, Trump was back on the site. That’s fine: Musk should have reinstated him immediately as soon as he had the metaphorical reins of Twitter in hand. His banning in 2021 was both partisan and political; as the immediate former President, Trump’s ability to express his opinions and positions on the most used social media platform was essential to the national dialogue, regardless of what he had to say, or how obnoxiously he might say it. The principles that supposedly led Musk to spend billions of dollars buying Twitter demanded that Trump be reinstated.

But what did Musk do? He put the matter up for a vote on Twitter. How does that compute, as the robot on “Lost in Space” might say? Allowing a group to vote to decide whether an individual gets to speak or not is the epitome of censorship. Stifling free expression by those who are unpopular or who have unpopular opinions is the antithesis of the First Amendment. Doesn’t Musk understand that? Apparently not, or, perhaps more likely, he does understand it to the extent he has thought about it in his brilliant but weirdly wired brain, but doesn’t care. The vote was good publicity. The vote would get headlines. The vote would attract new accounts. Principles, shminciples; ethics, shmethics. I own this place and I’ll do what I want.

That’s basically the Donald Trump approach to ethics. Great.

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At Last! A Systemic Racism Accusation That I Almost Agree With. Almost.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

CNN suddenly discovered this week that state lotteries are regressive and overwhelming exploit poor people and minorities. Too bad these inquiring, always-alert-to-new-issues journalists don’t read Ethics Alarms (but then, few do). I raised this issue in many posts, notably here (in 2010), here (1n 2012), here (also in 2012), and here (in 2016). The news media being shocked–-shocked!—that lotteries are cynical, unethical devices to deal with state budget deficits by legislators who don’t have the guts to raise taxes is like anyone who is surprised to see the cryptocurrency scam come crashing down. Welcome to the party, pals! (You incompetent morons…)

The CNN piece this week interviewed critics calling lotteries in general and PowerBall in particular a form of systemic racism that targets poor black and brown communities across America. Researches told wide-eyed CNN talking heads that despite the extreme low chance of winning, state lotteries aggressively market the lottery to sell tickets at higher rates to low-income communities, who are vulnerable to get rich quick without working schemes. Well of COURSE they market the lotteries: it makes the state millions of dollars! Why would they have a lottery and not market it? CNN also noted a report from 1999 finding that black Americans, high-school dropouts, and low-income citizens played the lottery on a more frequent basis. 

Gee, I’m stunned. Who would have suspected that, except for the fact that everyone knew this would be the case before the first state lottery was approved many moons ago. State lotteries are just the old, illegal numbers racket nationalized. Who played the numbers? Poor people. For heaven’s sake, the dirt poor denizens of Catfish Row in “Porgy and Bess’ are shown playing the numbers (and singing!) What a shock: the linear descendants of those player are also the primary targets and market for today’s lotteries.

CNN needed researchers to point this out to them?

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