Ethics Train Wrecks

Fact: The Axis Media Is Straight-Up Lying About The Justifications For Trump’s National Guard Use

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

They are doing it, in great part, because their favorite party is lying about it too.

Professor Turley was making the rounds this morning on news stations trying to explain that the Insurrection Act is ambiguous enough to support a President’s judgment that an “insurrection” is occurring in a state when the governor or a state legislature refuses to request such support, and send in the Guard on his own authority. The professor also pointed out that even if Trump were blocked from doing so in a state, he clearly has the power to use other states’ National Guard units in the state that is resisting, if the other states agree. The description of the sanctuary cities and states as engaging in neo-Confederate nullification is quite accurate.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, leading its fellow travelers in Orwellian spin, is doing its damnedest to back the incipient Stars and Bars. Here (gift link), a biased lawyer writes that “No, Trump Can’t Deploy Troops to Wherever He Wants.” How is that for a false framing? But the Times published it anyway. Unethical quote: “Can presidents unleash the armed forces on their own people based on facts that they contrive?” Yeah, that scene above, where the Chicago police deliberately stood down, was “contrived.”

Then we have this consequentialist argument: “In 2020, Trump Intervened in Portland’s Protests. They Got Even Worse.” First, how do “protests” get “worse”? They were riots. Second, the mess in Portland didn’t involve attacks on Federal law enforcement and defiance of Federal law. Third, the Mongo Principle (No, don’t use force, it will only make him mad) is not a valid approach to law enforcement.

Ethics Quiz: FREEDOM

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments

Libs of TikTok…you know, that account that progressives call racist and homophobic and transphobic even though it only re-posts damning evidence of woke lunacy from TikTok and other platforms?…posted an email exchange between Arbor Creek Elementary Principal Melissa Snell and an (unnamed) individual in which Snell indicated that “Freedom” T-shirts were banned in her school.  “I just want to make sure that you have told your staff to not wear those ‘Freedom’ shirts to school anymore. Thank you.” Jonathan Turley confirmed that there is such a ban, though it may be temporary. Superintendent Brent Yeager confirmed the emails that Libs of TikTok had postedbut suggested that it was temporary as Snell “reviewed district practices.”

Turley says there is nothing to review.”I fail to see why Snell had to suspend the wearing of such shirts pending review. “This is clearly a content-based limitation on speech,” he writes.

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How Long Can Harvard Maintain the Myth That It Is a Trustworthy and Resepctable Institution With Stories Like These?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A brief introduction: Last night I attended a lavish Georgetown Law Center reunion gala. I boycotted the previous reunion of my class and would have boycotted this one, but two classmates I hadn’t seen in decades persuaded me to attend. Georgetown being a sort-of Catholic institution there was prayer before the meal, but the cleric involved felt it necessary to lead into the blessing with a long string of dog-whistles to angry progressives, “the resistance,” Democrats and the Trump-Deranged, droning on about “troubled times” and “losing hope” and the need to “navigate the waters of societal division” with kindness, mercy and respect for humanity. I started eating long before she got to amen: another ad for illegal immigration was a good bet to spoil my appetite. Later on, one of my left-wing classmates volunteered the opinion that she was glad that Harvard had stood up to the Evil One. I began listing all of the reasons I have my diploma to that school turned to the wall, and, of course, she was aware of none of them. Why? You know the reason: she only reads and watches the Axis news media, which carefully gives minimum attention to incidents that tend to discredit fellow propagandists and indoctrinaters of the Left…like Harvard. I stumbled across a useful new website last week that highlights embarrassing news and developments regarding Old Ivy, but lost the link. I searched for it using every possible search term, and couldn’t locate it on Google.

Gee, I wonder why…

Sorry for the digression. Back to the topic at hand: here are two bits of damning Harvard news:

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Incident at a Law School Reunion or “The Disturbing Arrogance of the Political Left”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is one of the big reunion years for my law school class, and I just returned from a very nice luncheon featuring members of my class and older. The new Dean spoke, and during a question and answer period, a strident woman, an alumna, stood up and asked the dean what the school and its alumni association were planning to do to “stand up for the rule of law” and “democratic principles” during the current “crisis.” As usual, the “current crisis” is an elected President who does not approve of or want to continue policies near and dear to leftist hearts.

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Michael Mann Helpfully Continues To Prove Just How Much “Climate Science” Is Warped By Partisan Agendas and Unprofessional Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Climate change hysterics cannot discuss the basis for their passion without mentioning Michael Mann, who must be regarded as the face of whole climate change movement. Wikipedia makes him seem like a master of his domain:

Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.

As lead author of a paper produced in 1998 with co-authors Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, Mann used advanced statistical techniques to find regional variations in a hemispherical climate reconstruction covering the past 600 years. In 1999 the same team used these techniques to produce a reconstruction over the past 1,000 years (MBH99), which was dubbed the “hockey stick graph” because of its shape. He was one of eight lead authors of the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001. A graph based on the MBH99 paper was highlighted in several parts of the report and was given wide publicity. The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was won jointly by the IPCC and Al Gore.

Mann was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003 and has received a number of honors and awards including selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. In 2012 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and awarded the status of distinguished professor in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications. He has also published six books: Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (2008), The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012), together with co-author Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016) with Megan Herbert, The Tantrum That Saved the World (2018), The New Climate War (2021), and Our Fragile Moment (2023). In 2012, the European Geosciences Union described his publication record as “outstanding for a scientist of his relatively young age”. Mann is a co-founder and contributor to the climatology blog RealClimate.

All the honors and accolades prove is how politicized the scientific community is, and how progressive bias has infected so many of the world’s institutions. His so-called “hockey stick graph,” supposedly a reconstruction of past climate temperatures, was shown to be the product of dishonest statistics methodology; for example, it conveniently ignored the Medieval Warm Period that continues to bedevil the climate change narrative.

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A Popeye: A Trump Derangement Note That I Have to Mention…[Corrected and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Several readers have sent me this insane, hysterical post by a guy who claims to be “middle of the road” and it caused me to pledge not to keep posting on Trump Deranged outbursts: there are too many of them, they are embarrassing, and it doesn’t change anything. Then I see a post by an old freind, a tenured history professor at a major U.S. university, in which he writes, “106 years ago today (i.e., 02 Oct 1919), President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke. His wife Edith essentially took over running the White House for the rest of is term. The 25th Amendment was still 48 years away in the future. No particular reason for mentioning the 25th Amendment right now…”

You mean now as opposed to during the previous four years, when this same scholar saw no reason to make a comparison with Wilson when it was screamingly obvious that the President really was cognitively disabled and needed to be removed?

Of course this objective, trustworthy “expert” detected no parallels with Wilson while POTUS shambled around, got disoriented and had his wife handling him like a member of Visiting Angels, but now, as his successor displays staggering amounts of energy and purpose not just for a man his age but for anyone of any age (the correct parallel isn’t Wilson but Teddy Roosevelt), a credentialed historian thinks he can’t do the job, and that an elected President should be removed from office as “disabled.”

Translation: “Disabled”= “Not a Democrat.”

Trump won’t do the job the way that the batty American Left wants him to do it. That’s all.

I need some spinach…

Unethical Quote of the Month: Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

“Diversity involves recognizing, including, celebrating, rewarding and utilizing differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age and thought – sweetening and often strengthening the pot.”

—-The Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism in the document supposedly designed to give Continuing Legal Education trainers (like me) guidance in preparing seminars on “professionalism,” exemplary conduct that goes beyond the Rules of Professional Conduct to bolster public trust and the reputation of the legal profession.

What utter, illogical, embarrassing, unethical, woke garbage this is…and from a judicial commission no less! I dare anyone to defend it. The putative author is someone named Karlise Y. Grier, who is supposedly a lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to be trained in critical thought. Gee, I wonder if…[checking]….of course she is. Only the undeserved beneficiary of such nonsense could endorse it so fatuously.

I’m going to be teaching, not for the first time, a professionalism seminar for Georgia lawyers, who are among those in the few states that require special “professionalism” credits. I had to read, in due diligence, the guidelines for such programs in Georgia that almost took longer to read than the course will last (one hour) because it was full of bloated bureaucratic babble. It is a professional requirement for lawyers to write clearly, but most don’t, and this thing was a disgrace. Nothing was as bad as that paragraph above, though.

What does “recognizing” differences in gender mean, and what does it have to do with the ethical practice of law? (Hint: Nothing.) Lawyers should treat all clients and adversaries the same regardless of race, gender or other group characteristics. Is that paragraph saying that Georgia lawyers should be able to tell a man from a woman? Is this a problem in Georgia?

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Unethical Tit-For Tat: Great, Now The Trump Administration Is Playing “WrongSpeak” Games…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This revolting development was completely predictable to the extent of being virtually inevitable. Nonetheless, it is ominous, dangerous and disgusting, not to mention Orwellian, for the government to try to manipulate public opinion by banning words and phrases that can support opinions and beliefs authorities don’t want the public to hold.

The Energy Department last week added “climate change,” “green” “emissions” and “decarbonization” to its list of banned words and phrases at its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The WrongSpeak/ThoughtCrime linguistic offenses already included “energy transition,” “sustainability/sustainable,” “‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ energy,” “Carbon/CO2 ‘Footprint’” and “Tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies.”

“Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid — and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the Administration’s perspectives and priorities,” the acting director of external affairs Rachel Overbey decreed.

The order applies to both public and internal communications and extends to documents such as requests for information for federal funding opportunities, reports and briefings. It’s obvious why the Trump Administration is going down this pro-indoctrination path. “It works!” as the late Harry Reid assures us from Hell. The ends justify the means, “They (the Democrats) did it first,” “Everybody does it,” yada yada yada: there are at least a dozen rationalizations on the list including #31. The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now” that will doubtlessly be resorted to by our current ruling censors. The practice is still unethical and the impulse is anti-American.

I believe that the linguistic attacks are encouraged by the reality that the news media is engaged in permanent pro-climate change hysteria propaganda. “Climate change is caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions, which is driven primarily by burning oil, coal and natural gas for energy,” Politico states confidently while reporting on the new language edict at Energy. More:

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The Democrats’ Way: When The Facts Are Damning Just Make Stuff Up and Count On Your Complicit News Media To Have Your Back.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Kamala Harris, the worst, most unqualified major party Presidential candidate since Horace Greeley, continued her ridiculous “It wasn’t my fault!” tour last week by telling Rachel Maddow on MS (MSNBC) that 2024 was “the closest presidential election in the 21st Century.”

It wasn’t. It wasn’t even close to the closest. Donald Trump beat Harris in the Electoral College 312-226. Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 by a tighter margin, 306-232. Trump beat Hillary Clinton 304-227 in 2016. also closer. Only two elections in the 21st Century have been decided by wider margins in the EC, 2008 and 2012.

The 2024 election wasn’t closer than most of the recent elections in the popular vote either. Bush lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College in 2000, as did Trump in 2016. Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Clinton in 2016, and Trump in 2020 all needed fewer votes to flip to win the Electoral College than Harris in 2024 too. In short, Harris’s claim had no basis in reality. At all. Whatsoever. Sort of like the claims that she ran a “flawless” campaign. Or the DNC’s spin that Harris lost because America is racist and sexist.

Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? He exaggerated the size of his inauguration crowd in 2017!

Yet there was Rachel Maddow, nodding and smirking away as Kamala flogged her fake history, helping to make her show’s viewers more ignorant and misinformed that they already were, which, he show being on MSNBC, was already considerable.

Nice.

Oh-Oh. Here Come the Robo-Judges…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Google “AI judges” and you will see many links to news articles and even scholarly treatises about the use of artificial intelligence in the judiciary. There are already bots trained as “judicial opinion drafting tools,” and manuals written to help judges master them.

There have already been incidents where judicial opinions have been flagged as having tell-tale signs of robo-judging, and at least two judges have admitted to using AI to prepare their opinions.

I hate to appear to be a full-fledged Luddite, but I am inclined to take a hard line on this question. The title “judge” implies judgment. Judgement is a skill developed over a lifetime, and is the product of upbringing, education, study, observation, trial and error, personality, proclivities and experience. Every individual’s judgement is different, and in the law, this fact tends to imbue the law with the so-called “wisdom of crowds.” There will be so many eccentric or individual analyses of the troublesome, gray area issues that cumulatively there develops a learned consensus. That is how the law has always evolved. In matters of the law and ethics, an area judges also must often explore, diversity is an invaluable ingredient. So is humanity.

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