Health and Medicine

Clearly Tattoo Artists Need An Ethics Code or Better Yet, the Common Sense God Gave a Cabbage

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s a photo of a brand new tattoo on the arm of a nine-year-old girl.

The tattoo artist, who goes by the Instagram handle of “Cutzsosa,” posted a video of him giving the girl the permanent brand, and now he’s shocked that he’s getting a bad reaction on social media.

Yes, he’s an idiot. And an Ethics Dunce.

Now, it seems clear that the girl’s parents are worse: Cutzsosa says the girl and her parents traveled to his tattoo parlor, the Black Onyx Empire Tattoo parlor in Yuma, Arizona, from out of state specifically to get her the tattoo she wanted. What she wanted was a portrait of Donald Trump on her neck, and apparently her loving parents were determined to give their little darling what she desired. The artist claims he talked the girl into letting him ink a US flag on her arm instead. He thinks he deserves credit for that, since the neck-tattoo of Trump would probably get her beheaded in California. This is currently the basis of his Rationalization #22 (“There are worse things”) excuse for putting a tattoo on a child who cannot give informed consent for, well, anything, except maybe puberty blockers, but that’s “gender affirming care,” see, so it’s benign.

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Now THAT’S A Provocative Lawn Sign!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

And apparently a real one, the creation of Democrat for an Informed Approach to Gender. Its website is here.

I wonder how that sign would go over in my neighborhood, where the standard woke virtue-signaling signs (“No human being is illegal”…”Love is love,” etc.) sprout like poppies in Flanders Field.

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Pointer: Dr. Emilio Lizardo

“The Ethicist” Begins 2025 With a De Minimis Ethics Dilemma and an Impossible One

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

2024 was a bad year for the New York Times’s ethics advice columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah. “He”The Ethicist” showed unseemly sympathy for the Trump Deranged all year, and not of the “You poor SOB! Get help!” variety, but more frequently of the “You make a good point!” sort, as in “I can see why you might want to cut off your mother for wanting to vote for Trump!” I was interested to see if the inevitability of Trump’s return might swerve Prof Appiah back to more useful commentary on more valid inquiries. So far, the results in 2025 have been mixed.

This week, for example, Appiah thought this silly question was worth considering (It isn’t):

“I am going to tell a brief story about my friend at his funeral. The incident happened 65 years ago. The problem is that I am unsure whether the details of the story, as I remember them, are factual or just in my imagination. No one who was a witness at the time is still living. Should I make this story delightful and not worry about the facts, or make the story short, truthful and perhaps dull?“

Good heavens. This guy is the living embodiment of Casper Milquetoast, the famous invention of legendary cartoonist H.T. Webster. Casper was the original weenie, so terrified of making mistakes, defying authority or breaking rules that he was in a constant case of paralysis. The idea of a story at a memorial service or funeral is to reveal something characteristic, admirable or charming about the departed and, if possible, to move or entertain the assembled. This guy is the only one alive who can recount whatever the anecdote is, so to the extent it exists at all now, he is the only authority and witness. So what if his memory isn’t exactly accurate? What’s he afraid of?

The advice I’d be tempted to give him is, “You sound too silly to be trusted to speak at anyone’s funeral. Why don’t you leave the task to somebody who understands what the purpose of such speeches are?” Or maybe tell him to watch the classic Japanese film “Rashomon,” about the difficulty of establishing objective truth. “The Ethicist,” who shouldn’t have selected such a dumb question in the first place, blathers on about how “everybody does” what the inquirer is so worried about and cites psychological studies about how we edit our memories. Blecchh.

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Two More Pieces of Evidence Supporting a Mandatory Retirement Age and Term Limits in Congress

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I. Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), 79, was being wheeled into the House by a staffer when Politico photographer Francis Chung took his picture. Punchbowl News reports that the Congressman screamed, “Who gave you the right to take my picture, asshole?” Nice! The First Amendment gives him the right. Scott was in full public view, and has no expectation of privacy. He doesn’t know that? Why is anyone in Congress who doesn’t understand Bill of Rights 101? Scott has served as the U.S. representative of Georgia’s 13th congressional district since 2003. How can he not know this after 20 years in Congress? Did he once know it and somehow forgot? That seems plausible. Scott has chaired the House Agriculture Committee since January 2021, but colleagues in the House have expressed, all anonymously, of course, concerns about his fading mental abilities. They say he often reads from a script and has “trouble” discussing finer points of policy. Scott also frequently leaves Agriculture Committee meetings and does not return, even though he’s the chairman.

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Comment of the Day: “From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[Source: Health System Tracker]

In his useful Comment of the Day on the recent essay about “wanted” posters going up around New York City to target health industry executives, Chris Marschner examines some of the factors underlying the high cost of staying alive in the U.S.

I worked on health care costs and the various schemes to keep them down in the 1980s at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Then, the big panacea was going to be HMOs. The cruel reality was that they were over-sold: HMO’s were great if you had something very simple or something very serious: in between, the care just wasn’t any good, as I found out when I first started suffering from chronic gout. Unless there is some incentive for the health care consumer to minimize costs, insurance helps make health care more expensive. Personally, I blame Franklin Roosevelt’s socialist theory that Americans should be guaranteed “Freedom from Want,” meaning guaranteed housing , jobs, a “living wage,” and cradle to grave health care. If people are not sufficiently motivated to avoid unnecessary trips to the doctor or emergency rooms because they won’t have to pay for the consequences of their life choices, medical costs will keep going up. Thus Obama’s “Affordable Care Act” was even less effective at keeping health care affordable than Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was at reducing inflation.

Here is Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day on “From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:”….

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These posters would be, in my humble opinion, incitement to violence and immediate threats to the individuals identified. As such, claims of free speech cannot be defended.

I read an interesting article on the history of health insurance from PubMed A (Brief) History of Health Policy in the United States – PMC. While it outlined the historical development it fails miserably with respect to why health care costs have risen so dramatically. The primary reason for health care inflation is that insurance decouples the patient from the provider when it comes to making choices. If health care providers were not compensated based on a fee for service model it stands to reason that the number of services would fall which would allow greater access to health care when actually needed. Having your primary care physician have you make an appointment every 3-6 months just to evaluate you is an appointment that cannot go to someone in need resulting in long wait times.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”

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On Pete Hegseth’s Strange Drinking Pledge

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host and Army veteran told Megyn Kelly on her Sirius/XM radio show that he would stop drinking alcohol completely if confirmed as Doanld Trump’s Secretary of Defense. He referenced “general order number 1,” which prohibits military personnel from consuming alcohol during deployment, saying, “This is the biggest deployment of my life, and there won’t be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I’m doing it.” He continued, “That’s how I view this role as Secretary of Defense is, I’m not going to have a drink, at all. And it’s not hard for me because it’s not a problem for me.”

This is an issue because along with allegations that he has engaged in sexual misconduct in the past and the uncovered email in which his mother accused him of abusing women, CBS News has reported that when Hegseth accepted a six-figure severance payment and signed a non-disclosure agreement in his 2016 exit from Concerned Veterans of America, there had been reports (from unnamed sources, of course) that he was intoxicated on the job more than once.

I find Hegseth’s pledge more than a little strange. It is like a man being accused of beating his wife saying, “I have never beaten my wife and if you give me this job, I promise that I will never beat her again.”

“A drinking problem” typically suggests alcoholism, though there are non-alcoholic alcohol abusers. The latter can, in fact, just decide not to drink any more and do so successfully. Alcoholics, in contrast, have metabolic and psychological disorders that make sobriety a lifetime battle that they are likely to occasionally lose.

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Paging Moral Luck! Paging Moral Luck!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Judge S. Kato Crews, a progressive appointee by President Biden to the U.S. District Court in Colorado, refused to allow an injunction against the San Jose State women’s volleyball team from including a biologically male “transwoman” (above) to compete with the team in a women’s volleyball conference tournament this week. He ruled that appellate and Supreme Court precedents clearly establish that the protections of Title IX and the 14th Amendment apply to transgender individuals.

A key factor in the decision seems to be that the plaintiffs, which are the other colleges in San Jose State’s conference, a current co-captain of the San Jose team, other former players and the recently-suspended assistant coach, should have filed the suit earlier. The conference’s transgender participation policy has been in effect since 2022 and four conference opponents and one non-conference opponent forfeited games against San Jose State beginning in September.

“The rush to litigate these complex issues now over a mandatory injunction,” Crews ruled, “places too a heavy burden on the defendants”—the Mountain West Conference and its commissioner, two administrators at San Jose State, the school’s head volleyball coach and the board of trustees of the California State University System. That’s a reasonable judicial call under most circumstances, but the judge and the entire pro-trans movement in the U.S. is now at the mercy of moral luck. That is the annoying life reality that random occurrences out of the control of decision-makers have a way of retroactively defining a decision as either prudent and wise or reckless and wrong. Crews’ decision neatly tees up the perfect conditions for moral luck to settle the trans athletes in women’s sports controversy

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Ethics Verdict: The Trump-Deranged Harris Voters Are The Most Infantile Losers In US. Political History

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

There’s really no contest. EA has discussed the whining celebrities like Ellen DeGeneris who have abandoned their native country and the most remarkable democracy in world history because their favorite candidate—a spectacularly poor one—lost. We have discussed Rob Reiner, committing himself to a rest home because he can’t handle a competitive political process. We have talked about the social media hysteria and the progressives isolating themselves at BlueSky, a platform that censors conservatives. I have written about the people who are announcing on Facebook that if you voted for Trump, you are a racist and a fascist and not worthy of their friendship any more. But there is more…

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Ethics Quiz: Smoking Daddy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In the YouTube video posted by “web influencer” Rosanna Pansino (over 14 million YouTube subscribers—I’m all the way up to around 230 followers in my recent return to Twitter/X!—the 39-year-old baking star smokes her dead father’s ashes in accordance with his dying wish. She says her father, dying of leukemia, wanted her to grow a marijuana plant with his ashes and then smoke him. So five years after he died, with his pot plant flourishing, Pansino lit a joint that had particles of her father in it and smoked it for the entertainment of her YouTube audience.

Classy. So tasteful.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day…

“Is this unethical, or just icky?”

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