Ethics Train Wrecks

Helpful Ethics Alarms Tip For Girls’ and Women’s Athletes and Sports Team: Refuse to Compete Against Biological Males BEFORE Someone Gets Hurt

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The KIPP Academy girls high school basketball team includes a (“transitioning”…or not, reports are unclear) a male player who “identifies” as female, which is all that the increasing wokeness-crippled Bay State requires. Section 43.3.1 of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association handbook states that “a student shall not be excluded from participation on a gender-specific sports team that is consistent with the student’s bona fide gender identity.”

And what, you may ask, is “bona fide gender identity”? The player in question is six-feet tall, appears to have facial hair more consistent with a teenage male, and is much stronger than the average drum majorette. The Daily Item reported that “KIPP officials refused to confirm the player’s gender identification,” but if she (he?) is playing on the girls team, presumably he (she?) identifies as female. Now, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association also says a student like that one can’t be included on a roster “solely for the purpose of gaining an unfair advantage.” The key word there is “solely,” a weasel word all lawyers are familiar with. It literally means that having a boy who will seem like a superstar in a girl’s sport on a team supposedly for females will be acceptable no matter how unfair it is and no matter how much of an advantage it gives that team if there is any other reason for letting him (her?) change locker rooms. Maybe the newly minted female needs a boost in confidence!

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Why do communities keep electing officials who are ignorant of the law, history, and the U.S. Constitution?

Three days ago, North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown, (Guess which party!) announced on social media that her city would host a Black-owned business fair this coming weekend at the conclusion of Black History Month. The fest would feature local black vendors, community resources, an art corner and an area for children. Food trucks and live entertainment would enliven the proceedings. It would be a fun day of promotion for all participating—black-owned only!—businesses.

Who could have a problem with that?

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Biden Scores Yet Another “Bottomless Pinocchio,” But I Guess It Doesn’t Count.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

President’s Day on Ethics Alarms continues with another Biden Presidency Whopper. Once again, Biden, his mouthpieces at the White House, and VP Kamala Harris have stated in public that “Gun violence is the leading cause of death of children.” It isn’t. They keep saying this and it keeps being repeated by the mainstream news media, but the stat is as much of a lie as other hoary progressive myth narratives, my favorite being that women only earn 70 cents for every dollar men earn for the same jobs.

The reason for the fake gun stat is almost too obvious: it feeds neatly into “Think of the children!” hysteria and the media fearmongering narrative that every child is risking his or her life by going to school. It is an example of the tried-and-true fallacy the appeal to emotion. By all means, lets gut individual rights of self-defense, because if it only saves one child’s life….!!!

Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler, as I’ve noted before, seems to really want to be a fair and objective commentator but somehow can’t quite manage it. That’s Kessler’s
“Bottomless Pinocchio” above—if you can’t see it, it’s because WordPress’s image embedding feature stopped working a few minutes ago. If you recall, it shows a pile of little Pinocchio heads, which Kessler uses to denote a lie that the same public figure uses no matter how many times it’s proven false. The device was created for Donald Trump. In contrast, Biden’s repeated lies are seldom flagged by Kessler or anyone else. As Kessler has explained it, Trump lies, but “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible” .

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Yes Indeed, Most Presidents Have Had Emotional, Mental or Serious Physical Problems, But That Doesn’t Make Joe Biden Fit to Be One

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I’ve been holding on to this post for a while now, waiting for Presidents Day. An old “Psychology Today” article has been dredged up lately by various pundits desperately seeking a way to deny what is now undeniable. President Biden is in the throes of serious mental decline, and allowing him to run again, at an advanced age and when his memory, stamina, and cognitive health are rapidly receding into the fog, is irresponsible—which doesn’t mean that the Axis won’t do it anyway. The argument being mounted to justify such a desperate and stupid course is a version of the #1 rationalization on the list, “Everybody does it!” Joe’s problems are no big deal, you see, because, as Dr. Guy Winch wrote in 2016: “a study by Jonathan Davidson of the Duke University Medical Center and colleagues, who reviewed biographical sources for the first 37 presidents (1776-1974), half of those men had been afflicted by mental illness—and 27% met those criteria while in office, something that could have clearly affected their ability to perform their jobs.”

Whew! Well, that’s a relief!

I hadn’t seen the study, but it was heartwarming, since its findings echoed those of my American Government honors thesis, now deep in the stacks of Widener Library. I hypothesized that being outside the norm emotionally, mentally and physically was among the factors that selected out the extraordinary individuals who become Presidents of the United States. Leaders, to give an even shorter version, are not normal by definition.

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“This is What Happens…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Except that this was no shark attack, and it wasn’t a boating accident or Jack the Ripper. This is what happens when an entire political party decides that it will never give an elected official the minimal bi-partisan support required to make our three Branch system work, and will ignore, breach or distort basic, core essential democratic principles and traditions to destroy him for as long as it takes.

That arm belongs to Lady Liberty.

Yesterday, two of the terrible consequences of the Democratic mania to destroy Donald Trump, first as President, then as ex-President and Presidential candidate, became especially vivid. Let me say, because if I don’t blow my metaphorical horn no one else will, that Ethics Alarms warned about all of this, tirelessly and repetitiously.

WordPress shows me the 10 tags I have used most frequently since Ethics Alarms began in 2009. Nine are what you would expect on an ethics blog: fairness, ethics, responsibility, integrity, trust, respect, hypocrisy, honesty…and the 2016 Post Election Train Wreck. That tag originated in 2016 when Ethics Alarms first blew the metaphorical whistle on the Democrats’ (along with “the resistance” and the news media) destructive, divisive, unprecedented and totalitarian-tending reaction to the (greatly deserved) loss by Hillary Clinton in a presidential race they thought was a sure thing. I have said repeatedly that the 2016 Post-election Ethics Train Wreck is the most serious and important ethics story in the 21st Century, and one of the five or so worst in our nation’s history. We survived the others, but were lucky. There is a substantial chance that this time, our luck will run out.

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Unethical “Journalist” of the Month: Jason Sattler

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms just added “Unethical Journalist” to its categories. I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier, but the furious “It isn’t what it is” caterwauling from so many mainstream media voices that it is absurd–absurd, I tell you!—for anyone to think that Joe Biden isn’t ready to win “Jeopardy” and recite the Constitution from memory sealed the deal. The spectacle has been as depressing for the public as it is embarrassing for the rotting profession of journalism.

Some sectors managed to barely turn around and accept reality, sort of: the New York Times, after publishing ridiculous denials from Paul Krugman and others, issued an editorial Sunday expressing alarm at the combined effect of the Biden DOJ’s Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 388 page report stating that the President had “diminished faculties” and was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” But even that cry in the dark concluded that Biden “needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86,” a statement that disingenuously implies that Biden has done anything that indicates he can do his job now, much less in five years.” How can he do “more” to show something is true when it is so obvious that it isn’t true? It’s like complaining that public schools need to do more to show that they are unbiased and competent.

And naturally, the Times’ only stated impetus for its alarm was not that having a mentally deficient President is a peril to the nation, but that “the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump.” (Don Surber, a newspaper journalist turned Substack pundit, notes that his old employers, which have seen their circulation more than halved in the last 20 years and opines that newspapers have destroyed their credibility by dropping all pretense of credibility and are doomed. “It is not that the media gets the story wrong; it is that the media seldom admits it was wrong,” he writes.)

Which brings me to “journalist” Jason Sattler.

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Forget “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Proper Reaction Should Be “What the Hell Is the Matter With You Hacks?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The furious wagon-circling by left-biased journalists (or “journalists,” for short) in response to the DOJ Special Counsel’s stunning “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!” declaration in his report is another smoking gun in the “controversy” over whether Donald Trump was as right as he has ever been to call the media “enemies of the people.” It might even be the smokiest gun of all—more damning than the news media’s blatant cheer-leading for Barack Obama’s candidacy and destructive Presidency, more damning than its Black Lives Matter pandering during the BLM riots and its fearmongering during the pandemic, even more damning, perhaps, than its successful efforts to hide the evidence of Hunter Biden’s laptop until Donald Trump was safely defeated.

Confirmation bias and willful blindness still have their limits. How can any American with two brain cells to rub together observe the shameless gaslighting compiled in the video above and not be offended, disgusted, and angry?

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Ethics Hero Elon Musk vs. Ethics Villain Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Elon Musk is weird, impulsive, sometimes hypocritical and often infuriating. He is also a national treasure: a true Ethics Hero in the culture wars.

Back in 2021, Disney fired Gina Carano, one of the stars of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts were insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant Disney is obsessed with (to its financial and cultural sorrow). The triggering tweet was one in which Carano, a conservative (can’t have that in Hollywood!) compared Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda to efforts by the political left to demonize people based on their political beliefs. Proving her point, Disney canned her, explaining, falsely, that her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms. Her complaint can be read here. She is suing under California law, which states that
“No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy: (a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. (b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.”

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What a Surprise. SCOTUS Agrees That the Left’s 14th Amendment Fantasy To Rig the 2024 Election Is the Cynical, Anti-Democratic Ploy That It Is.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Reports on the oral argument before the Supreme Court indicate that the Justices’ questioning was harshly critical of the ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court under scrutiny. That was the declaration that former President Trump’s conduct after the election in 2020 made him ineligible to hold office under the 14th Amendment section barring those who engaged in an insurrection from running for office.

It wasn’t just the solid conservatives (above) who doubted the Colorado ruling; even two-thirds of the so-called liberal bloc of the Court seemed unimpressed by the Colorado decision banning Trump from the ballot, which by extension makes the Supreme Court’s decision applicable to Maine as well as any other Trump-fearing states that are inclined to try the same tactic. Every Justice except the pathetic Sonia Sotamayor expressed skepticism at the Colorado argument and appeared to be more sympathetic with Trump’s lawyer’s positions.

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Normalizing Theft

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Since we began the day with a dead canary in the mine of democracy, here’s another. That video shows a thief rampaging through an Apple Store in Emeryville, north of Oakland (where Woke Kindergarten romps). Nobody tries to stop him. Nobody even appears alarmed by him. He escapes by running right by a police car.

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