Author: Jack Marshall

ABC to Terry Moran: It’s OK For You To Be Biased Like the Rest of Us, But For God’s Sake Don’t Be So Obvious About It!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

ABC News suspended senior national correspondent Terry Moran for, shall we say, a revealing but undiplomatic post on Twitter/X that gratuitously attacked both President Trump and top aide Stephen Millers as “world-class hater[s].” Nice!

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” Moran wrote. “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” Moran continued, “Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”

If you say so Terry. Amazingly, Moran apparently saw nothing unprofessional about his outburst, which he subsequently deleted. Talk about living in a bubble!

An ABC News spokesperson said in a statement shortly thereafter that Moran had been suspended, pointing to the post as the impetus for the disciplinary action.

“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage”—Excuse me, but HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA–<breath>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!—“and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” ABC said in a statement. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”

Silent Pondering Our Shared Tomorrows As The Road Stripes Streak By

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Guest post by Steve Witherspoon

From your host: The rioting in LA and other cities going on right now make this unusually emotional post by Steve especially timely. I have been pondering it for several days now. The essay is clearly a head explosion in process, an eruption of anger and frustration with the metaphorical fuse lit by the issues he mentions and others. [I hope Steve forgives me for more extensive editing than usual, prompted by his passion interfering with his characteristic precision]

I sympathize. This is an ethics blog, and part of my job is to keep the discussion focused on ethics, rational analysis, and open-mindedness. There has been so much in the past year particularly that reminded me of a legendary meltdown by a good friend, a lawyer, who suddenly snapped in the back seat of my car years ago and started screaming, “This is FUCK! It’s all FUCK! Everything is FUCK!” True, alcohol was involved. However, the outburst was therapeutic. We all knew what he was ranting about, he was essentially right, and after my friend had relieved himself of his frustrations, he was able to help us solve the problem at hand.

And we did.

Take it, Steve.…and don’t despair.

***


I know exactly what my laser-focused conscious mind is doing in this situation, but what does your subconscious mind ponder when you’re on the road for many hours over 4,800 miles, while you crisscross a big chunk of the middle of the United States of America on vacation?

For hours at a time, when the road seems to vanish into a fine point on the horizon and the visible land meets the sky, the subconscious mind kicks into gear and is actively working behind the scenes… at least mine is. In past years that subconscious would be working on something creative. Maybe a few guitar riffs that I could put into practice at a later date, writing some music, designing a new addition on the house, or putting the final engineering touches on a new product for work, etc. The creative juices get flowing when the subconscious is given the opportunity to ponder for long periods of time as long as it’s relatively uninterrupted. Then when you’re no longer spending all those laser-focused hours on the road and settling back to your regular life, the stored thoughts that your subconscious mind had been working on are suddenly released into the brain. It can cause a bit of an information overload. This has happened to me more times than I can count.

I’ve learned that, at least for me, if you give the subconscious mind a chance to do what it does best, think deeply for long periods of time, it can feed your intellect.

For the last three weeks of May 2025, my wife and I were on an annual vacation. This time we focused on some National and State Parks in the western and southwestern United States that we wanted to see thoroughly. I briefly wrote about it and shared a few select photos in a blog post titled “There’s A Great Big World Out There To See.”

As usual, my subconscious mind was doing what it does best; however, this time the output was different. My mind wasn’t working on creative things like music, product designs or engineering; it appears that it was critically thinking about politically related things. This was particularly surprising because I generally cut myself off from all things political when on vacation and simply enjoy stopping to smell the roses with my wife. In the great scheme of things, life can be short, and I think it’s really important to do things with your spouse, especially after you retire, and not end up with piles of regrets that outweigh finding real peace after the end of life catches up with a spouse.

Again, my subconscious mind seemed to be thinking about politics and more specifically the political division we have. It doesn’t matter one bit how much critical thinking and facts you throw at the absurd things that are coming out of the political Left, the divide keeps getting deeper. It doesn’t seem to matter that life-long Democrats are leaving the party and openly stating that the Democratic Party has fallen over the edge of reality and left them.  It doesn’t seem to matter one bit that politicians like the baldfaced liar Adam Schiff get nailed in one lie after another and that he’s spewing the lies to intentionally mislead the voting public.

I’ve been writing about some of the absurdities coming from the political Left for a few years. What they are trying to force upon the American people is delusional, and undermines the core foundation of values that our country has been built upon.   

Continue reading →

More Thoughts and Observations on the LA Pro-Illegal Immigration Riots

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

1. This morning, while CNN and MSNBC were raging about the riots, Fox News had an extended feature about how to make faux cocktails using coffee. Gee, it would be nice to have a responsible, trustworthy broadcast news network that was both unbiased and that didn’t assume that is viewers dropped out of junior high school.

2. I am surprised that so few readers have commented on this morning’s introductory post. Was everyone at church? “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”

3. Here’s the comment on Facebook by an old friend, a retired journalist, and, of course, a Trump Derangement sufferer:

Continue reading →

Quick Morning Thoughts About the L.A. Rioting

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Haven’t had a cup of coffee yet and heading to a business meeting. But I have to get this out.

Demonstrations broke out in the Los Angeles area on Friday and continued on yesterday. The rioting aims to interfere with ICE lawfully and necessarily removing illegal immigrants from the area. The law enforcement has intensified its raids seeking people who are in the U.S. illegally. There is no justification for rioting ever in response to lawful government acts, but this rioting is particularly noxious. Not only are the rioters protesting legitimate law enforcement and interfering with it, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has said protesters have exhibited “violent behavior” and that “intervention became necessary.”

  • President Trump is sending in the National Guard. Good. If California’s anti-American, super-woke incompetents won’t keep the peace, than he should, strongly and without hesitation. I’m sure the Axis will call this decision “autocratic.” The correct word is “responsible.”
  • Classic: The New York Times headline is “Trump Is Calling Up National Guard Troops Under a Rarely Used Law.” Fascists pounce! The law is rarely used because American citizens do not often riot against legitimate law enforcement, and most state and local elected officials won’t sit back and let it happen. The news is the riots, not that the President has acted appropriately to stop them.

  • “President Trump bypassed the authority of Gov. Gavin Newsom to call up 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protests” is the Times subhead. Deceit, lies and propaganda. Newsom wasn’t doing anything; his authority was ‘bypassed” because he isn’t doing his job. The National Guard is there to stop rioting, not to “quell protests.” The issue isn’t “immigration,” the issue is enforcing the law against illegal immigration.

  • Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the National Guard’s presence would “not be helpful.”Why would anyone pay attention to what Karen Bass says or thinks after her fiasco avoiding her duties and lying about it when the city started burning? 
  • Apparent, the Crazy Left is determined to die on the open borders hill. Wonderful. Last week, Boston’s progressive mayor called ICE the equivalent of the Gustapo. The people who lead the Democratic Party want these riots. 

More later, after I wake up…

Confronting My Biases, Episode 21: Graduation Lawn Signs (and Others)

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Regular readers here know that I regard laws signs of all stripes obnoxious and borderline unethical. EA has discussed the dumb “In this house…” virtue-signaling signs, and I have mentioned several times the huge “Black Lives Matter” display another lawyer inflicted on the neighborhood for nearly three years (despite the several notes and news items I taped to it.)

Now, however, the current rage is graduation signs. It is hard to describe how much this increasingly popular practice makes me wince. The last thing in the world my parents would ever have considered doing was to put up signs announcing that my sister or I had graduated from high school, made the honor roll, or been admitted to college, in the case of both of us the Institution That Must Not Be Named on the banks of the Charles River.

In all cases, such signs breach the ethics values of self-restraint, dignity and humility. What are the parents in these homes teaching their children? Presumably, the lesson is to boast whenever possible. This is what social media is for: to publicize good news to friends and colleagues who have a reason to give a damn. Frankly, I don’t see graduating from high school in a middle-to-upper middle class neighborhood like Alexandria, Virginia as that big a deal. Are we seeing the sign because there was some doubt whether Kathleen would make it, considering her drug addiction, promiscuity and drinking problem? Are Kathleen’s parents trying to show-up the family next door, whose ne’er do well son dropped out of high school to become a pimp?

Whatever the reasons for these signs, they aren’t good enough. A family should encourage and reward accomplishments by family members privately unless they are trying to raise creeps who will run screaming through the streets, “I just got a job paying six figures! Suck it, losers!”

I don’t care that your kid graduated from high school or where he’s going to college.

I cannot close this chapter without expressing my disgust with three neighbors who still have their Harris-Walz signs out. It’s not exactly unethical, but it definitely is “Ick!” What are these people so proud of? Aren’t they embarrassed?

As American Sports Sink Further Into Society’s Deepening Ethics Muck, I Bitch (As Usual)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“A long, long time ago,” as Don McLean might begin singing this post, sports, the games and its participants, were where a young American sprout could find role models, innocent fun, and reliable ethics values. “Those were the days,” Mary Hopkin would warble back.

Item: Judge Claudia Wilken ultimate approval for the House v. NCAA settlement last night. approved the landmark, multi-billion dollar settlement of three separate antitrust cases against the NCAA and its conferences. Universities that opt into the settlement terms will be able to pay athletes directly through a revenue-sharing pool starting July 1, capped at roughly $20.5 million in 2025, the first year of the structure. About $2.8 billion will be set aside as back-pay damages for former college athletes athletes dating back to 2016 who did not have the opportunity to get compensated for their name, image and likeness Oh yeah, this will work out well. Didn’t colleges once exist for the purpose of educating all of its students rather than as big time sports money machines? You know, when sports were innocent entertainment and avocations, built character and social skills, student athletes weren’t employees, and college teams weren’t primarily the minor league systems for billion dollar professional sports leagues?

Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Why Haven’t You Written a Post About the Musk-Trump ‘Feud’?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Oh gee, I don’t know: because it’s stupid? Because it was inevitable? Because the news media is trying to pump it up to make Trump look bad, when what the reaction to the tiff really does is make them as well as the Democrats cheering for Musk look far, far worse?

I put the old reliable cognitive dissonance scale up right away to save time. The President of the United States is almost always higher on the scale than whoever his critics are. This was less true for Trump than most Presidents in his first term, but not Trump II.

Americans generally defer to their Presidents and support them when they are being criticized. The Trump Deranged, who are essentially mentally ill, are a special case, but they were Musk-Deranged too, because he was seen as an ally of Trump. So they burned his cars, and pretended he was a Nazi. They demonized him, and now they think they can suddenly flip-flop on Musk without looking like the foolish hypocrites we all know they are?

All the so-called “feud” proves is that Musk’s ego has no bounds, and his neurodivergence occasionally eats his brain. Trump gave him added power, prestige and influence: he’s throwing it away. Trump, meanwhile, is playing this exactly right. Musk is in negative territory on the scale: the more he attacks the President, the lower he falls and Trump rises. The more Democrats suddenly embrace Musk, who was supposedly a Nazi, the cruel killer of children and the poor in third world nations, the mean job-cutter and a chainsaw budget monster, the worse they look. Trump will get credit for what DOGE did under Musk, and Musk looks like a turncoat and whiner to turn on his patron.

Let him start his own party based on the “unsustainable debt.” That worked out so well for Ross Perot, who was weird, but not nearly as weird as Musk. What Perot’s crusade proved is that nothing will make Americans care about the unsustainable debt, and it is unsustainable, until it crashes the economy, which it will. The parties are handing a time bomb back and forth hoping that they aren’t the one holding the thing when it blows up. The debt will keep growing, because we will never, never, start paying the principle down. We should, but we won’t. Controlling the deficit just means that the debt becomes more unsustainable more slowly.

Yay.

Shut up and make your cars and rockets, Elon. This isn’t helping.

Who Says The Supreme Court Is Partisan On Every Issue?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments


The Supreme Court yesterday sided 8-0 with a straight (okay, “cis”) woman in Ohio who filed a “reverse discrimination” lawsuit against her employer after her boss declined to promote her, preferring to promote “rainbow” staffers. In a unanimous ruling written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Justices agreed that a federal appeals court in Cincinnati erred by imposing a tougher standard for the case brought by Marlean Ames to move forward than if Ames had been a member of a minority group. 

The appellant, a straight, white woman, had filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that she had been the victim of employment discrimination based on her not being gay. The department had hired a lesbian for the position that she had sought, she contended, as well as a gay man to replace her after she was demoted.  The United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit threw out Ames’s sexual orientation claim, arguing that her claim could not go forward unless she could show “background circumstances” to support her allegations of reverse discrimination, such as a “pattern” of reverse discrimination. 

SCOTUS reversed, sending the case back to the lower court. Federal employment discrimination law, Jackson explained, prohibits intentional discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Period. Minorities have no more intrinsic grounds to claim discrimination than majority groups.

Thank you!

Continue reading →

June’s Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

I will be in a fascinating meeting much of today among various professionals, lawyers and activists seeking to address interlocking corrupt practices in the legal profession, particularly in mass torts. I am primarily focusing on the legal ethics facets, but the victims of these practices include hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent injured victims, including veterans, as well as ethical lawyers and law firms that find themselves facing programmed financial disaster.

Thus I don’t know how much time I will have to catch-up on ethics events and issues here until this evening.

One brief note: Isn’t it nauseating to read the anonymous attacks from White House staff and other Axis hacks on Karine Jean-Pierre now that Biden’s paid liar is trying to cash in?

NOW they are saying that she was incompetent at her job? It was obvious that the mop-top was incompetent literally from Day One, and she never improved. She is a walking, talking, embarrassing, Dunning-Kruger Syndrome suffering personification of what was and is so wrong about DEI policies, but before the Biden scam exploded and the other awful DEI mistake, Kamala Harris, helped drive the Democratic Party into disaster, anyone who pointed out the obvious about Jean-Pierre was risking being called a racist.

That’s enough from me for a while.

It’s your post now…and if you don’t know why that photo marks this post, your cultural literacy needs an infusion. Meanwhile, this is the anniversary of D-Day. Presumably everyone knows the significance of that.….

Greta Thunberg Is Danny Bonaduce

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Now hear me out.

The National Review has a scalding—but more or less fair—-evisceration of Greta Thunberg, the past-her-pull-date former teen climate change activist. An excerpt:

You remember young Greta, right? The vinegar-rictused, Swedish ecological activist whom the media turned into a global celebrity back in 2018…Who can forget the climax of it all, the legendary comedy of Thunberg’s 2019 United Nations address? Visibly reading from a script and adopting actorly mannerisms — shrieking “HOW DARE YOU?” and bawling about “stolen dreams” and “stolen childhood” — Thunberg condemned the capitalist West for desecrating the hopes of neurotics like herself. “We’ll be watching you,” she warned icily…A neurodivergent teenage girl was granted supreme moral authority over mankind by adults desperate to weaponize her “vulnerability” to club the world into bending to the eco-socialist agenda pushed by her handlers. We were asked to take it all extremely seriously…Hungering for continued relevance, Thunberg responded by escalating her tactics, seeking arrest at anti-mining and anti-oil protests across Europe to garner headlines. But the media reaction was tepid, and the thrill was gone. It surprised me not the slightest bit when she instantly transitioned from environmental activism (old and busted) to pro-Palestinian activism (new and sexy with the kids these days) in the wake of the October 7 massacre. A year later, she was performatively arresting herself on podcast appearances to signal her solidarity with Hamas.

The bombardment ends with this: “As for myself, I couldn’t care less about Thunberg’s fate. If the Israeli Navy wants to hole her boat below the waterline as the French did to sink the Rainbow Warrior, then it’s no problem of mine. I don’t ever want to write about her again, and unless she escalates to suicide bombing, I intend not to. For as much as her astringent mien and unearned pretense make her a figure of comedy, I find her morally repulsive.”

Continue reading →