Ethics Train Wrecks

Why Hasn’t This Been a Headline Yet?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My Wuhan Virus-phobic friends and relatives pooh-poohed my assertion that the pandemic death statistics were being hyped and inflated by the news media and the CDC to keep the public terrified and in doors (and, quite possibly, unable to participate in a fair election.) For all I know they still don’t believe it, in part because the infuriating hasn’t been shouted from the roof-tops. A lead story on ever news network and a headline in every newspaper would be appropriate. It shouldn’t take all that, of course: I figured out we were being conned when the New York Times started running scare obituaries about 92-year-old black women who were “killed by Covid” while they were also suffering from cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

I had, frankly, forgotten about the fact that the news media still hasn’t taken responsibility for their unethical fear-mongering until I stumbled upon this, from July 18, 2023, in the 17th paragraph of a New York Times subscriber newsletter piece called “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt. He was one of the worst of the Times’ progressive op-ed writers until he was demoted. Leonhardt wrote: “The official number [of Wuhan deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death….CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”

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Nobody Should Trust The News Media Anyway, But Trusting It After This Is Unconscionable…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

How infuriating.

Ex-NBC News chief political analyst and “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd was a guest on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on yesterday, and when Morgan asked Todd “why was the mainstream media so reluctant” to cover President Biden’s mental state, especially when “everyone was seeing [it] with their own eyes,” Todd offered this: “The only thing I can chalk it up to is this, whatever you want to call it, this fear that some members of the media had sometimes that they would be perceived as helping Trump if they somehow diminished Biden, right?”

NO, you despicable asshole, NOT right! Your job is to report the facts that the public not only should know but has to know in order to govern themselves effectively, not to decide which facts will benefit a particular individual, policy or party and censor accordingly. Right before that damning statement, Todd said the American public should have been able to figure out that President Biden was failing cognitively because the media had been “subtle” in its coverage. “I would argue the reason people were able to come to their own conclusion on Joe Biden is because of the media coverage,” Todd said. “Look, we were subtle. ‘He’s using the back staircase. He’s not using the front staircase.’ ‘Hey, he’s not doing any interviews.’”

This isn’t a game of charades, you incomparable fool! The public isn’t supposed to have to guess what’s going on based on the clues you and your fellow propagandists for the Democrats are willing to reveal.

Over at Instapundit there has been a mantra repeated often lately: “No matter how much you hate these people, it isn’t enough.” Todd, the most inept and untrustworthy host of “Meet the Press’ in its long and once distinguished history, is among the worst of the worst in his field: he’s biased, he’s partisan, and he’s just not very bright.

The National Parks’ Dumb Response To Trump’s “No DEI” EO Explains So, So Many Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The National Park Service website has an Underground Railroad page. It used to feature a large photograph of the remarkable female “conductor,” Harriet Tubman (left above). The page began, “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.” But some boob or combination of boobs thought that the Trump EOs and other measures aimed at purging divisive, partisan and often discriminatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs from the government, education and other private institutions mandated eliminating straightforward and historically accurate information. It wasn’t just the National Parks Service, of course. The Defense Department also eliminated many pages that celebrated important minority veterans, such as civil rights champion and icon, Jackie Robinson.

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From Maine, A “Nah, the Democratic Party Doesn’t Embrace Censorship!” Head-Exploder….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Reacting to Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby‘s tweet above, the Maine House speaker and majority leader (Guess which party…) demanded that she take it down. Libby refused, so the body’s Democrats introduced a censure resolution. Their contrived reason: her post included photos and the first name of a minor, the male athlete who was allowed to compete in female-only sports. Both the photo and student’s name were publicly available and had been published by media sources. Obviously, this was an effort to silence an effort by an elected official to have the public understand “what’s going on here,” and, as we all know from the motto of an Axis-supporting newspaper of note, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

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What’s Up, Doc? UConn Med School’s Unethical, Woke, Ridiculous “DEI Hippocratic Oath”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Unbelievable.

In August of last year, UConn School of Medicine’s class of 2028 became the first to recite a newly revised version of the Hippocratic Oath:

“I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

No, this is not a sick joke. No, I am not making this up. Yes, our institutions of higher education really are in the clutches of maniacs who think this kind of indoctrination is part of their job.

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Fencing Ethics: What’s Going On Here?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’m afraid I don’t know enough about fencing to comment as intelligently as I need to regarding this episode, but I’m going to charge on anyway…

USA fencer Stephanie Turner was scheduled to face Redmond Sullivan at the Cherry Blossom Fencing Tournament held at the University of Maryland. As the match was about to begin, however, Turner “took a knee” and removed her mask, signifying that she would not compete against Redmond the Division 1A Women’s Foil event. Redmond, you see, is a formerly male fencer who has recently “identified” as female. Turner had decided that as a matter of principle she would not compete in women’s fencing against a “man.” “I saw that I was going to be in a pool with Redmond, and from there I said, ‘OK, let’s do it. I’m going to take the knee’,” she explained

After her protest, Turner was slapped with a “black card” signifying that she was suspended and out of the tournament.

“I knew what I had to do because USA Fencing had not been listening to women’s objections,” Turner said. “I took a knee immediately at that point. Redmond was under the impression that I was going to start fencing. So when I took the knee, I looked at the ref and I said: ‘I’m sorry, I cannot do this. I am a woman, and this is a man, and this is a women’s tournament. And I will not fence this individual.'”

U.S. Fencing responded with a wokey, weaselly statement undoubtedly drafted by the DEI Dept.:

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Briefly Noted: The Dumbest Question “The Ethicist” Has Ever Chosen to Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Here it is: “Can Male Authors Publish Books Under Female Names?”

Well, of course they can, but the real question is little better. “I’ve recently heard some sharp comments from friends about male authors publishing books under female names. The pseudonyms are sometimes gender-neutral, but in genres dominated by women, readers assume that these writers are women too,” blathers “Name Withheld.” ” I know there are historical examples of the inverse: female writers using male names or gender-neutral names that are assumed to be male. But are these equivalent? Whatever difficulty male authors may face in majority-female literary genres today cannot compare to women’s historical struggle to live a public life. Is it unethical for these male authors to present themselves this way?”

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Not Only Are “Sex Neutral” Physical Fitness Standards For Combat Ethical, They Shouldn’t Be Controversial

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The Pentagon has eliminated lower physical fitness standards for women in combat units via an order by Defense Secretary Hegseth announced yesterday. All physical fitness requirements for combat arms positions will now be be “sex-neutral.” Well, a) GOOD!, and b) Why did anyone ever think it made sense to have it any other way?

The New York Times, being pathetic, spins like crazy to make the order sound mean and discriminatory as well as harmful. The order “is likely to significantly reduce the number of women who meet the requirements,” the paper sniffles, and is “likely to hinder the recruitment and retention of women in particularly dangerous military jobs.” So what? The military sets standards for being qualified for combat, and having different standards for different groups is the epitome of DEI idiocy. Hegseth “argued that women should not be allowed in combat units if they could not meet the same fitness standards as men,” sayeth the Times. Why would he have to argue that at all? What’s the counter-argument? I don’t see one.

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Gee, I Wonder Why Americans Are Losing Trust In Their Nation’s Institutions? It’s a Mystery!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Science, Academia, Journalism, Government.

On June 3, 2022, the young protestor above tied her neck to the net during a tennis match at the French Open, with her shirt reading “We Have 1028 Days Left” sending the critical message to the world that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had decreed that if massive de-carbonization was not implemented before that (literal!) deadline, it would be too late to save the planet from a climate change apocalypse.

The 1,028th day was last week, Thursday March 27, 2025. Does that young woman feel ridiculous? She should. Now, she probably is one of those fanatics who won’t procreate because children are bad for the environment, but if she does, her kids will have a ball with that photo. I know I would have, just as if there was a photo of my mother as a teen dressed as a banana, or my father with dicks on his face after having them drawn on while he was asleep.

The Totalitarian Left in the U.S. has been citing “science” to justify irresponsible policies for years, indeed decades, and accountability is at hand. If the science of climate change is so “settled,” why are all the predictions and deadlines proven ridiculously false? Even our currently under-educated, critical thinking deprived rising generations are smart enough to figure out a con when they see, well, when they see the same con over and over again. Here’s an article about how the Great Barrier Reef that we were told was being destroyed by global warming (Science!) has more than doubled in a decade and its size and health is the highest ever recorded.

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Ethics Hero: Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I admit it: this post is putting the cart before the horse. I need to complete a post about the leftist lawyer freak-out over Trump targeting ostentatiously anti-Trump, anti-Republican, pro-Axis law firms by handing them the just desserts for their abandonment of legal ethics and core professional principles to pander to the Democratic Party’s cabal over the past 15 years or more. But I am a bit short of time and energy right now, and Professor Vermeule, that rarity of rarities, a conservative Harvard professor, has done some of my work for me.

Last week, more than ninety members of the Harvard Law School faculty issued a joint letter supposedly concerning the “rule of law,” but actually embracing the same double standards and anti-Trump bias I have been witnessing from my lawyer friends on Facebook and especially in the online discussions among members of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers. It said in part,

“The rule of law is imperiled when government leaders:

  • single out lawyers and law firms for retribution based on their lawful and ethical representation of clients disfavored by the government, undermining the Sixth Amendment;
  • threaten law firms and legal clinics for their lawyers’ pro bono work or prior government service;
  • relent on those arbitrary threats based on public acts of submission and outlays of funds for favored causes; and
  • punish people for lawfully speaking out on matters of public concern.

While reasonable people can disagree about the characterization of particular incidents, we are all acutely concerned that severe challenges to the rule of law are taking place, and we strongly condemn any effort to undermine the basic norms we have described….”

This is disingenuous posturing by partisan academics pretending to be neutral patriots. Professor Vermeule called them out on their pretense, writing in part in an open letter to his own to students and the public,

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