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Yecchh! Pooey! Instant Ethics Train Wreck In Minnesota…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Nothing but dunces, villains and fools in this tale….

1.Unethical catalyst: In Rochester, Minnesota, a state that has gone certifiably nuts, home of the George Floyd Freakout and a government headed by Knucklehead Tim Walz while voters send anti-Semitic Rep.”Fuck you!”Omar to Congress, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix was at the playground at Soldiers Field Park when she found a young black child looking through her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag. The kid is a nascent thief and needs more attentive parenting.

2. First identifiable unethical adult: Hendrix, who upon discovering the invasion of her personal property called the child a “nigger.” That’s signature significance in 2025—indeed at least since the 19th Century. She’s a low-life racist, a blight on society, and deserves to be shunned and reviled. To Hell with her.

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Ethics Villain and Unethical Quote of the Month: Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (Guess What Party…)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Yet more smoking gun evidence that the Democratic Party of the 21st Century does not want or support democracy. We shouldn’t need any more proof after the horrors of 2024, but an amazing number of Americans with misty-eyed memories of JFK, “The Great Society,” and even Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (the fools!) refuse to accept what the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Truman and FDR has metastasized into.

Pritzker was one of the primary state dictators during the stupid pandemic response, signing 41 consecutive emergency orders during the Wuhan virus freakout to give himself unlimited powers so he could keep businesses and schools closed. His whole family is a menace: his sister is the woke empress that had Harvard select the DEI plagiarist Claudine Gay to lead Harvard further down the path to intellectual corruption.

President Trump is doing no more (and amazingly, not much less) than what he promised Americans when he was the only choice voter were given to avoid a DEI fraud claiming perfection for the most incompetent President in U.S. history. The hysterical and hypocritical Left is screaming “Dictatorship!” when the elected President is using his powers appropriately and necessarily to address the looming debt crisis, enforce the law, protect commerce, and remove the metaphorical termites from the foundations of democracy and its institutions like universities, law firms, and journalism.

And just listen to those morons cheering for this jerk! It has been speculated that Pritzker’s insurrection act (his party’s prosecutors and pundits have taken the position that telling a crown to “fight” is a call for violence, remember) is a prelude to his entering the 2028 wide-open race for President among his party’s current group of boobs, totalitarians and losers. Yeah, good luck with that, J.B…

And no, I’m not making fun of the Guv’s weight, I’m making fun of the fact that he’s deluded. In fact, conservative writers and pundits are behaving unethically by taking the low road and issuing cheap shots based on Pritzker’s girth. Here’s Powerline, for example: “The underlying message of Pritzker’s call for ‘disruption’ is that he is running for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Heavy!”

It’s this man’s brain, not his belly, that’s the problem. Try to stay focused.

Wow, Look at All the Nice People and Respectable Organizations Profiting From Listerine Killing Alcoholics!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I last posted “The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit” in March of 2024, about a week after my wife Grace died suddenly. Her death was almost certainly a direct consequence of her alcoholism, which she frequently serviced through the surreptitious consumption of alcohol-containing mouthwash, usually Listerine. I was not planning on re-posting the piece so soon afterwards, but today I discovered the weird story of how botched contract drafting in 1881 resulted in Johnson & Johnson having to pay six dollars for every 2,016 ounces of Listerine sold, (the equivalent to 144 14-oz. bottles) to Listerine’s many royalty holders. Even though the royalties have been split, sold and traded, they are still worth a lot of money because Listerine is the best selling mouthwash (and secret alcoholic beverage) in the world. You can read the whole, strange tale here , but what matters ethically is this: among the organizations making money off of this deadly stuff are…

  • Wellesley College
  • The American Bible Society
  • The Salvation Army
  • The Rockefeller Foundation
  • The Bell Telephone Company

…and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York owned a 50% stake in Listerine royalties for nearly two decades, making almost $13 million over 16 years.

Shame on all of them. As I first explained in 2010 in a post that has been read over 50,000 times (it’s still not enough), Listerine is a destructive resource for alcoholics, and that use represents an untold, but definitely large, percentage of Listerine sales. The companies that have owned Listerine have deliberately maintained the deception that it can’t be guzzled, and the deception benefits their huge market of addicts, and of course, the companies, their shareholders, and royalty owners.

In my 2016 introduction to the post, I wrote in part, “Most of all, I am revolted that what I increasingly have come to believe is an intentional, profit-motivated deception by manufacturers continues, despite their knowledge that their product is killing alcoholics and destroying families. I know proof would be difficult, but there have been successful class action lawsuits with millions in punitive damage settlements for less despicable conduct. Somewhere, there must be an employee or executive who acknowledges that the makers of mouthwash with alcohol know their product is being swallowed rather than swished, and are happy to profit from it….People are killing themselves right under our noses, and we are being thrown of by the minty smell of their breath.”

And now I know that all sorts of nice people and admirable organizations profit from their deaths.

Once again, here is “The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit,” dedicated, as it always will be, to brilliant, beautiful, kind, loving—and dead—- Grace Bowen Marshall:

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Of Course Unethical, But What Was This Parent Thinking?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Most Ethics Alarms posts involve analysis of what I regard as ethical or unethical activity with larger lessons attached regarding society, organizations, institutions and prominent or influential individuals. Now and then I choose an incident where there is no dispute about whether the conduct was unethical, but it was just so unethical that I feel attention must be paid, if only to remind us how depraved and devoid of ethical instincts and values the people around us can be. An esteemed commenter recently complained about such a post.

My motivation for these no-doubters is usually what it is in this case: I want to know how such a thing could happen. What was the miscreant thinking? How could they ever believe that their conduct was acceptable? Where has our society and culture failed to the extent that an incident like this could ever occur?

Teresa Isabel Bernal, 33, was arrested this week for bringing jello shots to her daughter’s fifth grade Christmas party. The party was held on Dec. 20, 2024, at Jones Elementary in Tyler, Texas. Bernal told the Tyler Independent School District police officer that she didn’t know that the cups of jello contained liquor when she bought them, but the evidence indicates otherwise.

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Institutional Ethics Dunce: The Pittsburgh Pirates

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Wow. Morons!

A crucial component of institutional competence is “know the history and culture of the organization you work for.” Obviously the Pittsburgh Pirates, one of the original National League Major League Baseball franchises, contains too many employees who lack this component. Had not this been true, the team would not have taken down a tribute to Pirates icon and Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente, whose uniform number, 21, was retired by the club, to put up a liquor advertisement.

How clueless can you get?

“Hey, Fred, what does this “Clemente 21″ thing stand for?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Stinky, just some old guy nobody remembers! Just cover it up!”

Clemente, who died in a plane crash while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua, played 18 seasons for the Pirates, during which he joined the elite ranks of players with 3000 hits, had a .317 lifetime batting average and won four batting titles, twelve Gold Gloves, two World Series, and a National League MVP award. He may not have been the greatest Pirate—that honor goes to Honus Wagner—but he was and is the most beloved. For the team to replace his number with a liquor ad was spectacularly ignorant.

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After Serious Reflection and Analysis, I Reached the Professional Opinion That This Couple Is Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Tough one. (Kidding!)

In October 2023, a call to child welfare in Sissonville, West Virginia led authorities to a locked shed at the the home of Jeanne Kay Whitefeather, 62, and Donald Ray Lantz, 63. When they pried open the lock on the door, police found the couple’s 18-year-old daughter and her 16-year-old brother, both clad in filthy clothes, with a Port-a-Potty, no light, and no running water. One of the teens told police they had been locked in the barn without food for 12 hours, and had been forced to sleep on the concrete floor.

Police then broke into the main residence and discovered a 9-year-old girl, crying. Three hours later, Lantz arrived with an 11-year-old boy; Whitefeather soon followed with his 5-year-old sister. All five of the couple’s children were taken into custody by Child Protective Services as their parents were arrested. An investigation revealed that Lantz and Whitefeath had adopted the five black siblings in Minnesota, moved to a farm in Washington state in 2018, then moved to Sissonville in May of 2023.

The indictment stated that the couple targeted the five children because of they were black, and forced them into involuntary labor…slavery. Neighbors testified for the prosecution that they never saw the children playing but did see them standing in line and performing hard labor. The oldest daughter testified that most of their outdoor work took place at the family’s Washington farm, where some of them were forced to dig using only their bare hands. Testimony indicated that the children’s meals mostly consisted of peanut butter sandwiches at scheduled times.

Jeanne Kay Whitefeather was sentenced to 215 years in prison and Donald Lantz to 160 years after a jury found them guilty of forced labor, human trafficking, child abuse and neglect. “You brought these children to West Virginia, a place that I know as ‘almost heaven,’ and you put them in hell. This court will now put you in yours,” Circuit Judge Maryclaire Akers told the defendants at their sentencing last week. “And may God have mercy on your souls. Because this court will not.”

In a humorous note to this horrible story, the couple’s attorneys approached some kind of record for desperate defense arguments. Their basic strategy was to claim the couple was just “overwhelmed,” and that being bad parents isn’t a crime. Whitefeather’s attorney, Mark Plants, said during closing arguments “These are farm people that do farm chores,” Plants said. “It wasn’t about race. It wasn’t about forced labor.”

Right. I don’t think that even qualifies as a “nice try.”

I would like to know how a couple is approved to adopt five children without rigorous screening. I know that it is desirable to keep siblings together if possible—they had been removed from their biological parents after being abused by them—but five seems excessive unless the adoptive family is named Kennedy or Warbucks.

Unethical Quote of the Month: “The Ethicist” (Kwame Anthony Appiah)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We are, as I’ve argued before, entitled to a life informed by the fundamental facts about our existence. Even the painful ones? Perhaps especially those. This truth belongs to her.”

—New York Times advice columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah, aka. “The Ethicist” concluding his advice to the inquirer who asked, “My Adopted Cousin’s Biological Parents Were Siblings. Do I Tell Her?”

Kwame is pretty clearly the best of the various “experts” who have manned the long-time feature in the New York Times Magazine; at least he’s a real ethicist, a philosophy prof at NYU. (I say “manned” because the Times has never given the post of “The Ethicist” to a woman. Go figure…) Lately, however, I’ve been a bit worried about the guy, and wondering if “The Great Stupid” is getting to him. More answers like this one, and I’ll be tempted to dub him the “Un-Ethicist,” in honor of the old 7-Up campaign branding the soft-drink as the “Un-cola.”

I’m just going to focus on the quote above and not the whole column, because The Ethicist is stating an absolute principle that is absolute hooey. The inspiration for the edict “The truth belongs to her” was the usual participant in the column, “Name Withheld,” asking whether he or she, as the only living relative who knows the actual family origins of a cousin, (or as Kwame puts it, is “the sole custodian of an intimate truth concealed from the very person it concerns) should spill the rotten beans now, when they both are seniors.

Because the dark family secret can be nothing but disturbing or worse, I see no possible benefit to anyone by revealing it to the cousin now. She knows she was adopted, but she does not know that her biological parents were brother and sister—at least that’s what the inquirer’s now-deceased mother told her “in absolute confidence.” All records are sealed: there is no way for the “truth,” if it is the truth, to come out, as all involved except the adopted cousin are dead. The clueless cousin has a husband, children or grandchildren.

Even in his (as usual) prolix answer, The Ethicist struggles to find any real benefit to the inquirer revealing the secret. Any genetic abnormalities, from which the Clueless Cousin has apparently been spared, would now be detected with modern medical screening and are increasingly unlikely with succeeding generations. So he defaults to the “rule,” encomium, or whatever he thinks it is, that the cousin must have this depressing, disturbing and useless information because “this truth belongs to her.”

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Goodbye, Elphie, and Thanks

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

My sister had to have her beloved Havanese Elphie (short for Elphaba, the character in “Wicked”) euthanized early this morning just after midnight. That’s not Elphie above, but it’s close: I don’t have a picture of her.

I’ve dreaded this day for my little sister almost from the moment she brought Elphie home as a puppy 16 years ago. My sister not only had never owned (or lived with) a dog before; she had been phobic about dogs her entire life, an unfortunate mindset she inherited from my mother. But true to her defiant, determined character, once my sister, divorced after a miserable marriage, knew that both of her children would be moving far away from the D.C. area, she set out to become a dog owner. “I’m not going to come home to an empty house every day,” she told me, “and for once, I want to have someone close who is always happy to see me.”

She researched dogs for a full year (“Dogs 101” on the Animal Planet channel was a crucial resource), ultimately deciding on the Havanese, the Cuban bichon, as the ideal “starter dog.” It was a wise choice, as the breed is small, friendly, devoted to its owner and innately adorable. I was amazed how quickly the little dog made a positive difference in my sister’s life and whole outlook on life. Always insecure and prone to depression, she seemed happy literally for the first time since childhood. Within months my sister went from being a dog owner to a dog nut, learning all the breeds, bonding with the last two dogs Grace and I owned (sweet Rugby and then Spuds), and vastly enlarging her circle of friends by meeting the other dog owners in her neighborhood, and my sister had never had a large number of friends before, and often none at all.

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“March Comes In” Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/3/25

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

March 1 was the 395 day anniversary of my wife’s sudden and unexpected death on Leap Year, 2024. I want to thank everyone who has been so kind , tolerant and supportive here. To be honest, it seems like yesterday that I found her lifeless body. I still have nightmares, anxiety, attacks of regret and sudden sadness when something triggers a memory, and almost anything can, from my dog to movies to songs, like this one, which for no reason at all suddenly started going through what I laughingly call “my mind”….

Anyway…thanks.

Meanwhile…

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Call Me Soft On Crime, But Revoking Probation For Assault-By-Sandwich Seems Unfair Somehow

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Public Service Announcement: Before we start, I want to establish and Ethics Alarms rule: the word is baloney, not “bologna” when I’m around. I’ve never understood why that archaic spelling has persisted.

Oquavious Chandler, a 29-year-old convicted felon, was arrested last week after his stepfather reported him for assault. The alleges victim told police that he had removed a PlayStation system from Chandler’s bedroom because he “was being too loud.” Chandler shouted at his stepfather and “threw a baloney sandwich at him, which ultimately hit him in the center of his chest.”

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