Health and Medicine

AAAAAAH!!! Scary…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

By pure luck, I stumbled across the photo above of Demi Moore from earlier in the year right after watching a disturbing PBS documentary about the late Karen Carpenter, who died in her early thirties as a result of a long battle with anorexia. The frightening figure to the right is pop singer and actress Ariana Grande. Both performers chose to highlight their appearance; several publications that used the photo of Moore referred positively to her “toned arms.”

In a related development, women (and some men) as young as 18 are getting botox injections because the flat, unexpressive forehead look is unavoidable if one watches much TV. Icons such as Jane Fonda and Goldie Hawn send the message that natural aging is shameful—Jane’s appearance in her 80s is so disturbing I refuse to look at her. In the meantime, Nicole Kidman has found some elixir or spell that has kept her appearance at 59 creepily similar to how she looked at 30, with none of the tell-tale signs of touch-ups that make other actresses her age grotesque.

My late wife suffered from anorexia in college and was so traumatized by natural aging that by the time she died Grace had become a virtual recluse. The damaging behavior of youth-obsessed celebrities is hardly a recent development; still, after being reminded of how one of the most gifted female vocalists was taken from us by the body dysmorphia their narcissistic habits inspire, I felt it necessary to flag the issue—again—today.

Public figures become role models whether they like it or not, and they influence the behavior and attitudes of others, especially the insecure, the emotionally vulnerable, and those without healthy and responsible role models in their own lives. It is impossible to measure the damage they do, the Demis to the aging, the Arianas to the young.

But it is a lot.

Abortion On Demand Up To Birth

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I have two simple questions for pro-abortion (or perhaps “pro mothers and doctors being able to kill viable infants at will” is a more accurate label…a bit long, I admit) advocates.

How can you honestly and sincerely defend the new Massachusetts abortion law? If you can, how do you look yourself in the mirror or sleep at night?

Abortion will now be allowed at any time before birth in Massachusetts after Governor Maura Healey (D, or course: what other party would do this?) eliminated the state’s abortion limits yesterday. Previously, the Bay State had allowed abortion only up until 24 weeks. Now a fully developed unborn infant can be killed any time during the 40-week gestation cycle, even second before birth. That means that the child could be delivered via C-section and instantly be protected by law as a living human being, but an unborn infant at the exact same state of development and fully viable can be murdered in the womb after the mother’s water has broken and contractions have begun.

To be fair, now, the home of my birth and happy childhood isn’t the only barbaric state with such an immoral law. Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia of course, also believe that being able to kill living and viable infants in the womb is a human “right.” Peter Singer, the Princeton ethics professor, once caused an uproar when he said that as long as we were allowing abortions up to birth, why not let the mother see her baby first after it is born and then have the option to kill it? He was right: morally and ethically, either homicide is exactly the same. The distinction between born and unborn at that point is arbitrary and a legal fiction, created to let mothers feel better about a monstrous act.

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Wrong! Athletes Should Shut Up About Political and Social Issues and Do What They Are Paid To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I remember sports columnist Steve Buckley, now with the Athletic (the Times’ captive sports publication) from my halcyon days in Boston. Now he’s issuing badly-reasoned, ethically blind sports commentary from a national platform. Yecchh.

As a special annoyance, his poorly-reasoned observations on sports figures weighing in on national controversies are under a misleading headline: “Aaron Rodgers, Sophie Cunningham speak out. Caitlin Clark doesn’t. Either way, they lose.” I assumed from those words that Steve was going to echo my long-time position regarding narrow-range celebrities in general: “Shut up and sing/dance/act/ dribble/run/kick/pitch.”

But no.

“…Sports people (and this includes sports media people) who weigh in on political and social issues can count on being inundated with anonymous directives that they should “stick to sports.” It’s a mystery who these people are who feel empowered to tell others to stick to sports. The mere utterance suggests somebody with a doctorate in government affairs, or who perhaps has served in Congress or the diplomatic corps. The hypocrisy is at once comical and frightening. We like it when our athletes offer their opinions on this or that issue, except when we disagree with those opinions. (Stick to sports!) And athletes who choose not to play this silly parlor game are dismissed as cowards. At the risk of boring you with seventh-grade civics, but to use a kitschy sports term to make the point, this would be a good time to have a Turn Back the Clock event that teaches and celebrates the protections of the First Amendment. And if you happen to be a member of a championship team who’s been invited to the White House, go ahead and go. Or don’t go. Do that First Amendment thing and tell everyone else to screw off. For sports people who want to take a stand on this or that issue and who are prepared to deal with the avalanche of positive and negative commentary that ensues, go right ahead. For athletes who choose to say nothing, allow them that right. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

Because things are complicated, Steve—now I remember why I skipped your work at the Boston Herald—and because they are complicated, most sports celebrities have nothing of value to contribute in understanding them. Celebrities do, however, have outsized metaphorical megaphones that give their usually simple-minded opinions far more influence on the public than is healthy for democracy and the quality of civic discourse. I know why Buckley has his own simple-minded view of this issue: sportswriters are, with few exceptions (not him, obviously), also unqualified by intellect, education, experience and skill, to comment publicly on political and social policy matters. Like all journalists, they think they are smarter than they are. This column is a useful piece of evidence to the contrary.

The inspiration for Buckley’s piece was Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci after the Ethics Villain repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Senate hearing last week, plus Sophie Cunningham‘s public statements regarding trans-females competing in women’s sports, along with fellow WNBA star and team mate Caitlin Clark’s refusal to get drawn into the controversy. Right off the bat (that’s a sports metaphor), Steve trips on his sneaker laces by mixing apples and oranges (a fruit analogy).

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Ben Franklin’s Curse

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The House this week passed a measure, the Sunshine Protection Act, that would set America’s clocks to daylight saving time permanently once it clears the Senate and is signed into law by the President. The bill itself raises no ethics issues at all: it is the reactions to it and the reasons, real and alleged, for those reactions that ping ethics alarms.

The headline is tongue-in-cheek, incidentally. Most of my life I heard that Daylight Savings Time was Ben Franklin’s idea. Ben was an amazingly prolific innovator and out-of-the-box thinker, but he was not the originator of the practice, so we can neither blame him nor praise him. Another myth is that DST was implemented for the benefit of farmers. Actually, farmers have been one of the strongest opponents of DST because the factors that influence farming schedules, like dairy cattle’s readiness to be milked, are dictated by the sun, so clocks going back and forth just complicates things. In general, Retailers, sports, and tourism interests like daylight saving, while agricultural and evening-entertainment interests do not.

Personally, I just want one time in place all year, because the changeover is traumatic for me whenever it happens. I have a long list of screw-ups, missed deadlines and meetings on my record. I bet no year has ever passed without one.

Like so many policies, the Daylight Savings Time tradition has had and continues to have all manner of unintended consequences, and those are controversial too. There is some data that shows that crime and accidents are reduced by DST, but precise causation issues make such data inherently dubious. A 2017 analysis of 44 studies concluded that DST leads to electricity savings of 0.3%, but we now know, or should, we can’t trust studies because we can’t trust the reseachers who perform them. Ditto for a 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics that estimated that “the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually,” primarily by increasing sleep deprivation. Another study claimed that hospitals see a 24% increase in heart attacks and a 6% increase in fatal crashes each year when the time changes.

President Trump has advocated permanent Daylight Savings Time, so that’s enough for the Axis of Unethical Conduct to oppose it. Predictably, the Washington Post rushed to publish “Why standard time is better for your health than daylight saving time: A proposed bill would make daylight saving time permanent. But standard time is actually better for your body, according to science.”

According to science! Even the Post’s readers tended to agree that this take was hooey. A typical reaction:

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While We’re On The Topic Of Dumb Sports…THIS

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Yes, it’s true, I regard professional soccer and professional women’s basketball as less than diverting, but this sport, Australia’s Run Nation Championship (RNC), not only requires morons to watch and play it, the sport is likely to turn competitors into morons if they aren’t already.

Part Sumo wrestling, part Easter egg cracking, part “Jackass” and part bumper-cars, the “sport” involves muscular contestants running into each other at full speed to see who falls down. This idiotic competition was spawned by ‘run it straight,’ a social media trend that had random people running into each other for online views. The videos of stupid teens colliding and often suffering injuries have gotten millions of views online. The Run Nation Championship is trying to make the sport mainstream.

RNC has different weight classes. Most participants, called runners, have a background in combat sports, rugby, or American football. Run Nation co-founder and CEO Tremaine Fernandez says he’s trying to make the new sport as safe as possible…you know, like the electric chainsaw juggling contests do. Fernandez admits that the collisions still risk concussions and serious injuries, but his organization has doctors on the sidelines, so it’s all good.

Sports neurologist Rowena Mobbs, among others, has been calling for the sport to be banned.“Certainly every time they run up and clash in that way, there’s likely to be at least a microscopic brain injury,” Dr. Mobbs said. “They are high-risk and harmful activities, and almost having these protocols and practitioners there whilst good overall, I would ask, is it sort of giving an air of reassurance, an illusion or an impression that these activities are safe?”

You mean that children and teens and drunks and cretins will think, “Hey, this looks like fun!” and people will get maimed and killed? Of course they will! I guarantee this new pastime, which essentially takes the complex strategy, scoring and rules elements out of football and hockey to focus on what its fans really like—the violence—will become a sensation in the U.S., fueled by social media, on-line gambling, and low IQs.

Ban it? Hey, this is America. We have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and if running full tilt into consenting people makes some dim bulbs happy, then let them do it. A few thoughts:

1. The female runners should make just as much as the male runners. It’s only fair…

2. The biggest societal benefit of the sport will be its Darwinian selection features.

3. As with NFL football, anyone who watches this sport is complicit in the injuries it will cause.

Alcoholic Lawyer Ethics: An Inconvenient Truth

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

[That’s Paul Newman above, playing the alcoholic trial lawyer in “The Verdict.”]

I recently caused consternation (again) on the listserv of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL), the organization that brings together most of the lawyers who concentrate on the contentious field of legal ethics as ethics partners, professors, state bar disciplinary counsel, CLE trainers, consultants, and just interested lawyers. I had been considering dropping this metaphorical bomb on the group for some time. My thesis: lawyers who are alcoholics, “recovering” or not, are ethically obligated to inform their clients of that ongoing and incurable malady. I see no way out of this ethical obligation, but the legal profession has been scrupulously avoiding confronting reality for centuries.

Alcoholism was once the secret meaning of “moral turpitude” in state bar associations’ requirements for admission: if you were guilty of moral turpitude, you couldn’t get a law license because of a presumed character deficit. When alcoholism was finally recognized as the illness it is, being an alcoholic was no longer a basis for bar exclusion or discipline. Bar associations all established “Lawyer Assistance Programs” as the alternative to punishment for lawyers with alcohol or substance abuse problems. That’s nice. However, none of the measures currently employed deal with the inconvenient facts of alcoholism.

Based on my knowledge and extensive experience with friends, family and associates, all alcoholics are untrustworthy by definition. They have a strong tendency to lie, for example (and they will admit that, if pressed) to conceal their addiction as well as the often disastrous results of it. No one, including the alcoholic himself or herself, can know when a relapse will occur or what will trigger it. A binge alcoholic can seem healthy and dependable for months or years, and suddenly go on a bender that incapacitates him. My late wife, a brilliant and capable woman who struggled courageously with the illness her whole life and ran our business and finances (or, should I say, said she was and made a good show of it) would have sudden unpredictable relapses that she covered up with consummate skill. She was what is called a maintenance-level alcoholic. She had a degree of intoxication she needed to maintain to function well and appear sober; below that level of alcohol consumption she suffered from withdrawal symptoms. One drink over that set-point, however, and she was physically and mentally incapacitated. Many maintenance level alcoholics successfully hide their addictions while actually being drunk every day in highly challenging jobs…until they can’t. Alcoholism is a progressive disease. Over time, alcoholics’ ability to control their addiction deteriorates along with their over-all health and mental state.

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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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Jill Biden’s Elder (And Former President) Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
What an awful human being...

This story is too awful to contemplate. If you have a soul, maybe you don’t want to read it.

Former President Joe Biden was planted in the audience this week at a New York City stop on his wife’s tour promoting “Dr.” Jill’s memoir, “View from the East Wing.” Whoopi Goldberg was moderating the Q and A segment (How’s that career going, Whoop?) when President Biden wandered up to the edge of the stage and said “I have a question.”

“Joe has a question? Like you couldn’t ask it later?” the distinguished author said. Oh, nice! If you didn’t want Joe to embarrass you or himself, why did you place a mentally declining old man in a position where he might do so? Or was he having another “stroke”?

Joe, as he has been for years now, was oblivious. “Who do you love most in the whole world?” what is left of Joe Biden asked. “I love you most, Joe. Was that it? Was that the answer he wanted?,” Jill said to the group, talking about him in the third person as if he were a toddler. The 46th President of the United States stood and blankly faced his wife.

The shell of Joe Biden then said, “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?,” whatever that means. At least he didn’t say “We beat Medicare.”

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How Bonkers Is Woke America’s Obsession With Normalizing The Transgender Fad? This Bonkers:

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

How far gone does a fanatic have to be to have an event like this and not expect most people to conclude that the organizers are out of their minds? Menstrual equity? Free period underwear?

The event is scheduled for June 17 and supported by Boston Mayor Wu’s “Office of LGBTQ Advancement.” I am solely tempted to do a riff on this, but I’m going to resist. Mayor Wu, who is about as wokey as a human being can get, is really getting away with this somehow. Wow. Talk about pandering to a minority! This may be an all time record.

So NOW the Climate Change-Hyping “Experts” Admit That Their Fear-Mongering Models Were Garbage!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
GUEST POST BY RYAN HARKINS

[From your host: I know the headline and graphic is my style and not Ryan’s. The valuable commentary below came out of a thread on the last Open Forum. I decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone guest post, especially since I should have written pretty much the same post when this news was first reported. Also, with this post I am officially Christening “The Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.” I should have done it years ago. JM]

I’m seeing some news that the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) has rejected the RCP8.5 model as pretty much an impossible scenario. What is significant about this is how much research and how many policies were based on this scenario. With the IPCC actually stating that RCP8.5 is simply not plausible, the foundation for so much of the climate change hysteria has been ripped away.

To provide a little more detail, RCP8.5 is one of thousands of different models (computer simulations) trying to predict the impact of human activity on climate change up to the year 2100. These models try to take into account factors like human population growth, adoption or rolling back of climate policies, differing degrees of climate forcing due to carbon dioxide (because the science is definitely NOT settled on how much forcing CO2 actually contributes), and a host of other factors. RCP8.5 has always been one of the most extreme models, predicting an increase of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100. There are scores of other models that are far more modest in their projections, and certainly observed data has favored models that project something closer to 3.4 W/m^2, though even those are diverging from observed data as time goes on.

The upshot, though, is the sheer scope of how much of the world’s climate policies are based on RCP8.5. From this article, we have

“Why this matters: these scenarios live in policy. The now-implausible upper-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research. They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital. National climate impact assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the Country Climate and Development Reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.”

We have trillions of dollars worldwide tied into climate policies. Europe is practically destroying itself trying to achieve Net Zero targets. Industries are dying, people are facing energy insecurity, prices are skyrocketing, and the entire continent is growing in unrest over the devastation to livelihoods. All this comes from countries making policies based on a model that people have warned for years is unrealistic. But the good news is at least with the IPCC ruling the scenario implausible, there is no defense for anyone to keep using those high-end scenarios to craft policy.

Sadly, I’ll bet few policies are actually updated to reflect this ruling.