Ethics Train Wrecks

Post 250th Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

That whiny, divisive, Trump Deranged video re-hashing familiar progressive, “No Kings” talking points while attacking the elected President of the United States is as good a symbol as any of the despicable efforts the Angry Left…now in the process of morphing into the Communist Left, made to undermine our 250th Anniversary celebration.

What a collection of Hollywood has-beens and hysterics! Then, for good measure, they had to include Margaret Atwood, because everyone knows President Trump wants to force American women to be baby machines. Then there was Chuck Todd, by far the worst, dimmest, most biased an partisan host “Meet the Press ” ever had, whining on his podcast,

Trump’s doing all of us a favor by selfishly trying to steal this anniversary from us. We now see who he really is. So no, it’s not the celebration we deserve. It’s not the one we could could have had. But we get a mirror, and the mirror is telling us something. The country is a lot bigger than Donald Trump. It is bigger than any president and it’s obviously bigger than any political party. And there’s no one definition of patriotism. But it still needs leaders who understand that. It still needs citizens who insist on it. And it still needs people willing to say that the national story belongs to all of us, not just whoever happens to hold power at any one moment. America at 250 may be a lost opportunity. Donald Trump has absolutely sullied the brand of America, doesn’t have to be at 275 Donald Trump has absolutely sullied the brand of America. But America 275 does not have to be…For some people the central text in their lives is religious and I respect that. For me the constitution has always carried that kind of weight. So that’s why I’m so angry and feel betrayed. I do. I feel betrayed as an American by him on this. The Constitution is not perfect, but it gives us a way to keep going. It gives us structure for disagreement. It gives us a method for repair. It gives us the possibility of becoming better without pretending we were always good.May it makes some of the same promises that some religious texts do for people.And this is why I’m so pissed off. Not because I love the country less, but because I love the idea of America enough to resent seeing it cheapened by this man.America deserved better at 250. Someday, I believe it will get better, but it’s in your hands.”

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Unethical Weekend At Mitch’s, As the GOP Imitates Democrats [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Is the reference to “Weekend at Bernie’s,” the silly cult hit from 1989 about two guys lugging a corpse around, too obscure now? Remember?

But I digress. In addition to that awful film, the current machinations of the Republican Party to conceal the presumably dire and maybe even Bernie-like condition of former Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell is disturbingly redolent of how the Democrats humiliated the late Senator Diane Feinstein in her dotage in 2023.

I wrote then:

“The party’s reduction of Senator Diane Feinstein, 90, once a sharp and professional Senator from California, but now a sick, mentally-diminished shell, to its marionette is particularly ugly. Last week, Feinstein relinquished the power of attorney to her daughter, a tacit admission that she was no longer competent to handle her own affairs. Yet she remains in a position that requires her to participate in decisions regarding the affairs of the United States and its many millions of citizens. How could she be incapable of acting in her own interest but still qualified to do the job her constituents (foolishly) elected her to do? Obviously, she can’t.

“Feinstein had already begun to display disturbing signs of age-related cognitive decline before a series of health issues sent her into medical earlier this year. She was missing from the Senate for months, and when she returned appeared frail and confused. Since returning to Washington DC, she has appeared frail and has shown the public several alarming mental lapses. She should resign, of course, but may no longer have the requisite mental acuity to understand that she should resign. Her party, meanwhile, is perfectly satisfied to allow her to embarrass herself and scar her reputation as a distinguished public servant as long as she allows it to pull her strings so Democrats can maintain their filament-thin majority in the Senate…”

McConnell is arguably worse off than Feinstein, since he may be dead. From the Washington Post:

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And Speaking of Fake News: NPR!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says! I’m smart, and I want respect!“

Excuse me while I gleefully gloat over pointing out once again what a rotten, biased, disgrace of a news organization NPR is (and has been for a long while) right before it beclowned itself spectacularly yesterday by breaking the imaginary story that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the Supreme Court.

No, you can’t excuse this putrid example of the variety of fake news I call “Wishin’ and Hopin’ News” (in honor of the late, great Dusty Springfield) with the rationalization (#19 on the list) “Anyone can make a mistake!” For a professional news organization that has any scruples or legitimate editorial procedures literally never makes a mistake like this. NPR didn’t check its “facts” with the subject of the story. It didn’t get confirmation from the Supreme Court. It literally broke a story that didn’t exist because the Axis and the Axis propaganda network and the Trump Deranged and so, so many fans of NPR wanted this to be true so badly that NPR decided that Ethics Don’t Matter….though, to be fair, NPR decided this long, long ago, as when, oh, just to pick a random example out of the air, they blacklisted me as the network’s go-to ethics expert after a woke hostess deemed my 100% accurate explanation of how celebrities are vulnerable to late-hit sexual harassment accusations intolerable because, she told me, “I thought you were trying to defend Donald Trump.”

I may use the Alito episode from now on as my routine example of confirmation bias. The fiasco is so wonderful for Ethics Alarms in so many ways!

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Ethics Quiz: The Weenie King

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I read about King Charles renouncing his traditional title and, I must confess, shrugged. Then a couple of well-regarded commenters suggested an EA post on the matter, so I rethought the issue.

In an annual review published for 2025-2026 reported by the U.K.’s Telegraph last week, the King who was previously been both “Head of Nation” and “Head of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith” was revealed to now be “Head of Nation” and “Supreme Governor of the Church of England who protects the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation.”

“What is the king trying to say with this shift?” asks the conservative Western Journal. Its answer: “That the United Kingdom is not Christian, and that her monarch represents a non-Christian people — Muslims.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it ethical for the King to do this, cowardly, just pragmatic or does it really matter at all?

In considering this, and I am strongly pulled to the last alternative, one must remember that Charles has always been drawn to progressive positions, and that, unfortunately, he is not very bright. The King is also hanging on with his metaphorical fingernails to a position that his own people increasingly see as anachronistic and superfluous, undercut by a royal family that has enmeshed itself with increasing acceleration in one scandal and embarrassment after another, some of which he participated in.

SCOTUS Reaches The Only Fair, Factual, Logical, Ethical, and Legal Decision Regarding Biological Males in Women’s Sports

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Late yesterday, while everyone was concentrating on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the President’s Executive Order on birthright citizenship, the Court upheld two state laws barring the participation of biological males “identifying” as female (a.k.a. “transgender females”) in girls’ and women’s sports teams. Although the 6-to-3 ruling involved upholding laws in West Virginia and Idaho, 25 states also restrict biological males from cheating in women’s sports, and the decision represents a decisive splash of ice water in the faces of those who support one of the silliest and most unpopular of the Woke Left’s delusions.

Of course it is unfair, dangerous and absurd to allow individuals who have gone through puberty as males to compete with girls and women in sports involving strength and speed, and where size and weight are an advantage. That the radical Left insists otherwise (because life ought to be different than it really is, a prime driver of so much progressive cant) should be one of the most damning tells on the whole ideology as well as strong evidence that the Democratic Party has jumped Fonzi’s metaphorical shark. The Democrat-stuffed U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 9th and 4th Circuits struck down sensible “no biological males in female sports” laws, but it was inconceivable that their biased and partisan reasoning would prevail at the U.S. Supreme Court. Sure enough, it didn’t.

West Virginia v. B.P.J. should have been a unanimous, 9-0 decision, but the Left’s fealty to the LGBTQLMNOP++ wing of the Democratic party is so strong that the three knee-jerk progressives on the Court just couldn’t manage it. Before noting Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion which didn’t need a judge, a legal scholar or a lawyer to write, just, you know, someone reasonablyintelligent with functioning eyes and brain cells, I have to begin with the Authentic Frontier Gibberish of Justice Jackson. Again. She wrote a remarkable dissent which, perhaps in a SCOTUS first, makes a persuasive argument for the opinion she’s railing against in its incoherence and “Don’t confuse me with facts my mind’s made up!” obtuseness. Seriously: what the hell is she babbling about?

“But there is reason to doubt the soundness of the concession that Title IX’s reference to “sex” means only sex assigned at birth….A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cis-gender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth. Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX. In short, the majority is wrong to suggest that the term ‘sex’ in Title IX ‘ cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.’ Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity…”

No wonder Jackson infamously said in her confirmation hearing that she could not define what a woman is. After reading that mess, neither can I. I’m not sure I can understand English any more, either.

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“It Can’t Happen Here”? Brazil Gives Us A Glimpse Of What The Woke Passionately Wish For America

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In April, Brazilian father and mother, Audato and Ieda Denardi were found guilty of the crime of “intellectual neglect” and were sentenced to 50 days in prison for homeschooling their two daughters without sufficient instruction on“gender and sex education” or “tolerance and diversity.”

The court also found that the girls, aged 15 and 11, not enjoying popular Brazilian musical genres such as “trap” or “sertanejo” was evidence of a criminal deficiency in their cultural education.

Even though the prosecutors in the São Paulo trial requested an acquittal after concluding that the minors were not suffering from any neglect and were demonstrating appropriate academic and social development, the conviction was handed down. It is currently under appeal before the Seventh Criminal Court Chamber of the São Paulo State Court of Justice. The Christian legal organization ADF International is representing the family, and it denounced the case as “a grotesque abuse of criminal law.”

Ya think?

Despite the fact that both girls are pianists with advanced training and are fluent in several languages, the judge accused the parents of “using their daughters as pawns in an ideological struggle, subjecting them to a form of unregulated education, the effectiveness and quality of which lack adequate metrics within the Brazilian legal system, while completely excluding the state’s involvement.” Julio Pohl, legal counsel for Latin America at ADF International, neatly pointed out the obvious: to be concise, the verdict is crackers.

“An independent educational psychologist found no sign of neglect. The girls themselves described rigorous daily education,” Pohl said. “The judge convicted anyway because a fifteen-year-old said she finds some music lyrics morally questionable, and because the curriculum didn’t include state-approved content on gender. A parent has been sentenced to prison not for failing to educate her children, but for educating them according to her own values. This is a grotesque abuse of the criminal law, and we will not let it stand.”

Let’s go through the occupants of Congress, the Senate, state houses and mayors’ offices and speculate which of them secretly (or not so secretly) would like to see similar “justice” in the United States. Do we even have to speculate on the how the leadership of the teachers unions would regard the Denardi case?

The Rest of the Story: The Brandan Sorsby Debacle Has The Predictable Domino Effect, and Where It Stops, Nobody Knows…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In this post I wrote about the dispiriting tale of Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, an admitted gambling addict whom a ADA-addled judge ruled could not be banned from playing Big 12 football this season. I wrote then,

“The larger issue is what kind of society this will become if the progressive obsession with empathy and forgiveness for all wrongdoing continues on its current path. Sorsby is an addict, not a bad guy! He shouldn’t be prevented from doing what he loves just because his addiction makes him likely to cheat. It isn’t his fault that he has this affliction! And really, aren’t all criminals just addicts or emotionally damaged in some way? They shouldn’t be in prison. This is why “restorative justice” is the only caring way to deal with our fellow human beings who deceive, cheat, rob, and harm us.”

Meanwhile, the loopy decision was throwing all of football into chaos. After the excessively empathetic judge granted a temporary injunction that allowed Sorsby to return to the team with a slap-on-the-wrist two-game suspension, The Big Ten considered a ban on playing Texas Tech altogether. Athletic directors at other schools erupted in anger. Kansas State AD Gene Taylor called the judge’s ruling “fucking bullshit.” “I think there needs to be serious conversations about not playing Texas Tech in any sports,” University of Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks said. “We cannot in good conscience put our student-athletes on a field where the competitive integrity of the contest is compromised and overridden by the courts.”

This month, Sorsby came to his senses and Texas Tech finally realized the school, its reputation and its athletic program would suffer more than any quarterback was worth if he wasn’t gone. Sorsby dropped his lawsuit against the NCAA and opted to enter the NFL Supplemental Draft, ending his Texas Tech affiliation. But yesterday the NFL announced that it was cancelling its 2026 supplemental draft, and that the decision was entirely because of Sorsby,. The NFL doesn’t wantito have to deal with the controversy. As of now, however, the player is still eligible for the 2027 NFL draft.

The gambling in sports pathogen is not going away, and will continue to spread because of greed, stupidity and the fact that most of the people running collegiate and professional sports, especially football and basketball, have no ethics alarms at all.

Unethical Quote of the Week: Bob Greene, Board Chair for Rocky Mountain PBS

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“A nice stroke that turns him into a drooling, pooping blob in a wheelchair unable to speak.”

——Bob Greene, Chairman of the Board of Rocky Mountain PBS, on the station’s X account when asked about his birthday wish for President Trump, who turned 80 last week,

Nice! On the Rocky Mountain PBS website, Greene is described as “an experienced senior executive with over 35 years in sales, marketing and operations in the entertainment, interactive and broadband industries” who is “responsible for developing new revenue platforms and partnerships that leverage and enhance the global scale of Liberty.”

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Responding to this pure verbal hate, a spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Public Media said that it had “only recently become aware of this post in question” and that it violates their social media guidelines, which state that “Personal views and political positions should be kept separate from the station’s content, and should not appear on any RMPM-operated platform or dedicated page/stream” and ” that “when using the internet or social media in your personal life, please make it clear and conspicuous that all of your statements are on your own behalf and are not RMPM’s. Disclaimers such as ‘opinions are my own’ should be used whenever appropriate.” And Greene’s post magically disappeared.

But the official disclaimer doesn’t change the fact that the individual at the top of the station’s management pyramid felt comfortable posting his vile opinion because it was completely consistent with the bias and toxic culture at the station. Hiding that kind of deranged hate doesn’t solve the problem of programming being filtered through such attitudes and such irresponsible leadership.

The episode serves as a vivid reminder of how much NPR and PBS deserved to have their Federal Funding eliminated. I had another discussion with a Trump Deranged friend who was bemoaning the loss of the two Leftist propaganda organs, which bring essential services to remote rural communities, or so the story goes. All NPR and PBS had to do was be fair, objective and non-partisan to have a strong argument that they performed an important function for the public regardless of citizens’ political affiliations. They couldn’t do it. They allowed themselves to be co-opted and dominated by progressives and Democrats who proved unable to restrain their objective of using NPR and PBS to advance a partisan agenda and to indoctrinate listeners. Greene openly expressed that bias, which he was supposed to keep under wraps like the rest of the staff. Yet the NPR and PBS broadcasts are evidence enough.

These people have such contempt for the intelligence of Americans,

Exit Question: Has any previous POTUS been the object of such unrestrained verbal calumny?

The Great Stupid, DEI Mania Division:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Let’s see:

  • Because the best soccer players happened not to be black?
  • Because the team was constructed according to ability, not DEI mandates?
  • Because sports are not supposed to be about race?
  • Because sane fans don’t demand that athletic teams “look like them”?
  • Hey, you’re right! Funny, I didn’t notice because I was watching the game. Are there any Asians?

A wag from Argentina responded on X, “Because we are a country, not a Disney movie.”

Yeah, that too.

Confronting My Biases #30: Fake Puffy Lips

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

More than 10 years ago I wrote about Kristina Rei, 22, of St. Petersburg, Russia. She wanted to look like Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon character, so she got herself a pair of huge—lips.She has undergone over 100 silicon-injection procedures, and considers it just the initial step in her quest to look like Roger Rabbit’s Toon wife from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. ” At the time, I asked whether it ethical for a plastic surgeon to give her the ridiculous lips she coveted, since plastic surgeons are subject to the Hippocratic Oath like other doctors. My own position then and now, was that it is unethical, though I tried to give both sides of the issue.

“If Kristin can eat, drink and breathe with her mega-lips,” I wrote, “and there is no risk that they might explode, killing everyone near her, the decision to do what she wants is probably ethical, at least by medical ethics standards. The fact that her Chap-Stick costs will be astronomical is not the doctor’s concern, however.” Nevertheless, I concluded that “a plastic surgeon who assists a patient, especially one so young, in disfiguring herself to this extent is unethical. Autonomy is to be respected always, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Kristin’s lips are so far beyond reason that a plastic surgeon debases his profession by assisting in what can fairly be called self-mutilation.”

My bias regarding fake puffy lips does not involve such extreme disfigurement; indeed most would agree that young women getting their lips puffed up isn’t disfiguring at all. However, it is increasingly becoming apparent to me that this particular form of supposedly aesthetic enhancement is becoming a norm, and a harmful one.

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