Business & Commercial

Baseball Ethics Dunce: St. Louis Cardinals Manager Oli Marmol

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On this date in 1941, Ted Williams got six hits in eight at-bats during a season-ending doubleheader in Philadelphia, boosting his average to .406. He became the first player since 1930 to hit .400., and no one has done it since. Of course, Connie Mack, the Hall of Fame A’s manager, could have walked Williams every time up and prevented him from reaching the .400 mark on the theory that he was the best Red Sox batter and that not letting him swing the bat would help Mack’s lousy Philadelphia team win one or two meaningless games. Mack didn’t do that, of course, because it would have cheated Williams, cheated the fans, and cheated baseball

Fast-forward to 2025. Yesterday, the Chicago Cubs led the Cardinals 7-3 with a runner on third and two outs in the bottom of the 8th inning. Michael Busch was up, and he was flirting with baseball history: the Cubs player was 4-for-4 with two home runs already, and needed just a single to complete a cycle—a homer, triple, double and single in the same game. Cycles are for hitters what no-hit games are to pitchers: rare historic accomplishments, in fact, there have been almost exactly the same number of each in baseball history. But Cardinals manager Oli Marmol ordered that Busch be given an intentional walk, ending his pursuit of the cycle. The Cubs fans booed, and I’m pretty sure that Cardinal fans would have booed the decision too if the game had been in St. Louis.

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Ethics Quiz: The Lawyer’s Facebook Post

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Insurance litigator Bradley Dlatt was fired by law firm Perkins Coie and has been erased its website after he posted on Facebook,

“Charlie Kirk got famous as one of America’s leading spreaders of hatred, misinformation and intolerance.The current political moment—where an extremist Supreme Court and feckless Republican Congress are enabling a Republican president to become a tyrant and building him a modern-day Gestapo for assaulting black and brown folks—is a result of Charlie Kirk’s ‘contributions’ to American media and politics. Hell, Kirk would likely be flattered by the underlying claim. His Turning Point USA began as a sort of Misbehaved Young Republicans and eventually overshadowed traditional right-wing organizations like CPAC in dictating the shape of American conservatism. Not to diminish Donald Trump’s media instincts, but when polls suggest young men turning more conservative helped get Trump to this point, that’s all Kirk. And he can take credit for all that flows from that, including the current Supreme Court making a straightfaced proclamation that forgiving student debt is executive tyranny and then deciding that sending people to South Sudan without due process is just “practicing executive authority the right way.” It’s not “celebrating” a murder just because you decline to whitewash Kirk’s legacy by acting like he “was practicing politics the right way” as Ezra Klein belched out onto the pages of the New York Times. Klein apparently believes saying that the guy who tried to murder Paul Pelosi with a hammer should be bailed out by some “patriot” or responding to the murder of George Floyd by calling him a “scumbag” is “the right way.” It’s a stunning display of pathological centrism brain: a compulsion to champion an angle that almost no one in the real world shares and then preen as though being an outlier is a sign of genius. Because while liberals didn’t think Kirk practiced politics the right way… neither did conservatives! If they’re being honest with themselves, the highest compliment conservatives give Kirk is that he broke politics. He saw the dusty, genteel norms of the post-War political divide and tossed them aside to build a following. He took Rush Limbaugh’s model and pushed it beyond its limits. That said, no one in this country should be murdered for their political speech. Wishing comfort to his wife and children in this difficult time. “

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Stop Making Me Defend (Ugh) Jimmy Kimmel!

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time I have used that headline. I also used it in 2017 in a post I began thusly: “I detest Jimmy Kimmel. I loathe him. He is the most revolting of all the Left-Licking late night and cable progressive comics, worse than Colbert, Maher, Samantha Bee, all of them. All of them combined. He is an ongoing blight on the ethics of American society, and yet he is self-righteous in the process.” My opinion of Kimmel has, if anything, deteriorated since I wrote that.

Nonetheless, fair is fair and ethics are ethics, and Kimmel’s suspension by ABC for a comment that was so much less objectionable than his biased, unfunny, obnoxious blather nightly is cowardly and indefensible.

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We Don’t Have To Debate This, Do We? Brian Kilmede Is an Ethics-Challenged Idiot and Fox News Must Fire Him Immediately.

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Why hasn’t he been fired already? Why wasn’t he pulled off the air with a giant hook before he could complete what would laughingly be called his “thought”?

“Fox & Friends” co-anchor Brian Kilmeade, who has long been an embarrassment on Fox News’ routinely embarrassing news happy talk moring show “Fox and Friends,” said during a discussion with fellow (almost equally annoying) anchors Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt last week that homeless people (like the maniac who killed the young woman on the train in Charlotte) should be given “involuntary lethal injection(s).” Homeless problem solved!

Jones began the assault on due process, civil rights and decency by saying about the homeless, “A lot of them don’t want to take the programs. A lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re gonna give you, or you decide that you’re going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.” Kilmeade added. “Or, involuntary lethal injection — or something. Just kill them!”

Nice.

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The Hyundai Raid: Parallel Universes

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Here is how Fox News reported on the massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia:

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the arrest of 475 illegal migrants during a major immigration enforcement raid on Thursday at a Hyundai electric car battery factory in Georgia. 

HSI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Steven Schrank noted that while the raid was at a Hyundai facility, not all the migrants worked for the parent company. Some worked for subcontractors at the site.

“We are sending a clear and unequivocal message that those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy and violate federal laws will be held accountable,” Schrank said during a news conference on Friday.

Here is how the New York Times reported the same story (Gift link!):

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One More Time: If People Tell You the Mainstream Media Isn’t A Democratic Party, Progressive Propaganda Mouthpiece They Are Liars or Morons…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yesterday we had one more flagrant example of how completely useless our news sources have become in letting the public know what is happening in the nation and the world so they can be responsible citizens. Well, I guess they are not useless to progressives, Democrats and leftist totalitarians, because the biased and distorted stories, reports and interviews they spew out daily does keep citizens in the dark (where “democracy dies,” sayeth the Washington Post. Silly me, I once thought the Post meant that was a bad thing.) On the August 31, 2025 “Face the Nation,” host Ed O’Keefe interviewed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the American Left’s latest martyr, “Maryland Dad” Kilmar Abrego García. What the audience heard was this:

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The Unabomber Was Right, Example #7,853

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My first “The Unabomber was right” essay was in 2017, and he’s been proven more right with every passing year. In that post, I began,

“As I understand it, Ted believed that technology was destroying society, making us all slaves to it, and taking the joy out of life. I have yet to see how blowing people up addressed this problem, but then he shouldn’t have had to be right about everything. The evidence has been mounting since 1995, when he killed his final victim,that  the Unabomber  wasn’t quite as crazy as we thought.”

The intensity of that conclusion has only multiplied with time, further technological excesses and inconveniences, and experiences like today’s trip to Staples to buy some wildly over-priced black ink for my crummy Hewlett Packard printer, purchased by my late wife when our ethics training and consulting business was even more financial distress than it is now.

It is a Sunday on Labor Day weekend, and the parking lot at the strip mall near my house was, as I expected, nearly empty. Staples, however, had the longest line at the single register open I had ever seen there. Some of this was the fault of Staples, which like just about every other chain, decided to keep its workforce cut to the minimum after the pandemic eased. After all, where else will the customers go? All of the stores have lousy service now; all of them are understaffed. For that, you can blame the progressive idiocy of raising the minimum wage to the point where it costs too much to pay for minimally-able employees. The result: fewer jobs, inflation, Staples-style (CVS-style, Home Depot-style, etc.) non-service.

But I digress. The huge line moved like a rabbit through the alimentary canal of a snake (maybe slower) because, I soon realized, everyone was using an app on their cell phones, and neither they nor the clerk were quite sure how the system worked. One woman was at the register for 20 minutes all by herself, looking and pounding on her smart phone, showing it to the poor guy trying to check her through. Every single purchase appeared to take at least three times as long as it would have before the addition of the apps to the process.

When I finally got to the head of the line with my three items, it still took too long: I had to enter two phone numbers, confirm my address, and “tap” with my card, but I was easily the quickest customer through the line, because all I did was pay for my stuff. A woman behind me actually said, “Wow! That was quick!”

I replied, “Want to know my secret? I bring up what I want to buy and pay for it.” You warned us, Ted. We just didn’t listen….

Ethics Verdict On President Trump and the Silly Cracker Barrel Episode

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Verdict: President Trump abused his position, power and influence by weighing in on a private company’s choice of logo and continuing to make declarations about it as if it is any of his business or a proper matter of concern for the President of the United States.

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Ethics Villain: AOL

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I have AOL as my email provider. It was not by choice: Verizon handled my email (I get about 300 non-spam emails a day) but sold their business to AOL, which is why I have a jamproethics@verizon.net address. AOL is clunky, but I depend on email, and having to change over my address promises to be a disaster, losing me clients who are increasingly precious commodities. When Grace died, several clients who were supposed to always copy me in on messages to her didn’t, and moved on to other (and lesser) ethics trainers. So I have, though sheer inertia, kept my AOL account while paying the reasonable yearly fee.

But this month, the provider decided to force me and other users into paying them more. A third of my email home page is now taken up with obtrusive, often animated ads. If I click on an “expand” button to restore the page to the readable status it once was automatically, I get a message inviting me to pay for “ad free” email. Then the screen goes back to its ad-cluttered format. I can only “expand” three (or four: I haven’t counted) times before AOL informs me that I have exhausted my daily quota (of returning to the screen format I had been paying for), and that my only option is to pay extra to end the annoying interference.

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Stop Making Me Defend Cracker Barrel!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Wow. Just when I thought the Left’s outrage machine had reached new levels of absurdity over an attractive white woman advertising bluejeans by using a very old play on words (Jeff Goldblum uses the same one in “Jurassic Park”),the Right’s outrage machine says “Hold my beer!”

Cracker Barrel stripped its old logo of both its barrel and its “cracker,” and all of a sudden it was Bud Light all over again. The company’s stock even crashed. How the decision could possibly be seen as some kind of kowtow to wokeness is beyond me, and should be beyond everyone who isn’t Woke Deranged.

The old logo was archaic, messy and unattractive. Okay, so the old guy sitting by the barrel looked white, but he was yellow, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t like removing Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima, or that naughty Native American lass whose Land O’ Lakes box could be rigged to make a wallet peep show. I’d compare the Cracker Barrel change to Kentucky Fried Chicken becoming KFC, and no one freaked out over that, though, admittedly, it transpired before both conservatives and progressives had gone nuts in their distrust of each other.

The one aspect of this nothingcracker that supports the fevered conspiracy theory on the Right is the Cracker Barrel management’s deplorable past record as a pandering, cowardly, principle-free bunch of weenies.

Here is the Ethics Alarms post (from 2020) about the last time this company entered the culture wars. I still haven’t forgiven it.

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