Leadership

Gee, I Wonder Why Americans Are Losing Trust In Their Nation’s Institutions? It’s a Mystery!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Science, Academia, Journalism, Government.

On June 3, 2022, the young protestor above tied her neck to the net during a tennis match at the French Open, with her shirt reading “We Have 1028 Days Left” sending the critical message to the world that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had decreed that if massive de-carbonization was not implemented before that (literal!) deadline, it would be too late to save the planet from a climate change apocalypse.

The 1,028th day was last week, Thursday March 27, 2025. Does that young woman feel ridiculous? She should. Now, she probably is one of those fanatics who won’t procreate because children are bad for the environment, but if she does, her kids will have a ball with that photo. I know I would have, just as if there was a photo of my mother as a teen dressed as a banana, or my father with dicks on his face after having them drawn on while he was asleep.

The Totalitarian Left in the U.S. has been citing “science” to justify irresponsible policies for years, indeed decades, and accountability is at hand. If the science of climate change is so “settled,” why are all the predictions and deadlines proven ridiculously false? Even our currently under-educated, critical thinking deprived rising generations are smart enough to figure out a con when they see, well, when they see the same con over and over again. Here’s an article about how the Great Barrier Reef that we were told was being destroyed by global warming (Science!) has more than doubled in a decade and its size and health is the highest ever recorded.

Continue reading →

It’s Official: “A Nation of Assholes” Has Come to Pass, and Its Herald is Jasmine Crockett

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The U.S. now has a member of Congress who is regarded as a rising leader of a major political party who talks like this…

“Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there. Come on now! And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey!”

That was Rep. Crockett speaking at a human rights event over the weekend. The intentionally vulgar, street-talking Texas representative (she was raised in a wealthy family and attended private schools, so her Samuel L. Jacskon imitation is pure cynical artifice) was already being justly criticized for telling Democrats to “take out” Elon Musk, at a time when her party’s loonies are looking for an excuse to move from domestic terrorism against Tesla owners to more direct forms of violence. Now this member of what styles itself as the sensitive, caring party is mocking a man, Texas Governor Abbott, who has been in a wheelchair for decades by calling him “Hot Wheels.” Be proud, Democrats, Texans, women, homo sapiens.

Crockett’s excuse after her cruel ad hominem attack was properly condemned tells us even more about the character of the latest “rising star” of the Left:

“I wasn’t thinking about the governor’s condition—I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable. Literally, the next line I said was that he was a “Hot Ass Mess,” referencing his terrible policies. At no point did I mention or allude to his condition. So, I’m even more appalled that the very people who unequivocally support Trump—a man known for racially insensitive nicknames and mocking those with disabilities—are now outraged.”

She’s beneath contempt, but Crockett’s “Whataboutism” (#2 on the Rationalization List) argument following her self-evident lie is not without validity. How far is calling a governor in a wheelchair “Hot Wheels” from calling a President obviously suffering from progressive dementia “Slow Joe”?

I’ll accept the utilitarian conclusion that electing Trump President twice was, on balance, important for the nation; I might even agree with it. However, I don’t think it is possible to credibly argue that the destructive decline in civility and decorum in society, and especially in political discourse, should not be laid at Donald Trump’s feet. It is a major cultural wound with implications for democracy as well as social relations in our society generally.

I warned about this on September 10, 2015.

Why Having Donald Trump as POTUS Drives Me Crazy (a Continuing Series), Reasons 1-4

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This post is partially catch-up: I decided to make this a continuing series so that I can have an accurate record of the posts dealing with the ethical dilemmas and conflicts created by this most unique White House occupant.

Reason #1 I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago: Trump and the reaction to him by the Axis of Unethical Conduct creates so many ethics controversies that it throws the balance on Ethics Alarms out of whack. I resent it. I get sick of focusing on national affairs and politics, which, I swear, are not where my greatest interests lie. But I also am trying to cover the entire ethics landscape in the limited time available to me. Trump and the intense reactions to him make that all but impossible.

Reason #2 is the way Trump Derangement renders so many friends, relatives, colleagues and associates emotionally and intellectually dysfunctional. My brilliant younger sister, for example, has been angry at me as well as the world ever since November 5; I can hear it in her voice. On Facebook, one or more of my friends embarrass themselves every day with rants, reductive outbursts, or inexcusably ignorant declarations, and nobody challenges them because a) it’s futile and b) if you do, one or more friends will decide you’re a fascist. Here’s one that I just saw:

Continue reading →

About the “Appearance of Impropriety,” the Limits of “Deny, Deny, Deny,” and the Foolishness of Defying the Lessons of Michael Clayton

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Yes, ProPublica is generally a one-way-only ethics watchdog, but that way is still worth watching.

It is reporting that Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), had a romantic relationship with a legislative affairs official for the Navy. According to two sources with knowledge of an inspector general’s nvestigation, this was not the GOP combat veteran’s only inappropriate relationship with military personnel. Earlier this year, the Air Force revealed that Maj. Gen. Christopher Finerty, who oversaw its lobbying before Congress, had inappropriate romantic relationships with five women, including three who worked on Capitol Hill. One of those, though the names in the report were redacted, was allegedly Ernst. Because the Senator is an influential voice in Congress regarding the Pentagon and she sits on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee which has a crucial role in setting its annual budget, these are troubling accounts.

ProPublica says that neither Ernst nor the two military officers were married at the time. Current Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates, although why I don’t know. Nonetheless, government employees and officials, like judges, are supposed to avoid appearances of impropriety.” “Ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest,” ProPublica tells us. “A former legislative affairs official for the military” tells ProPublica that “From an ethics standpoint, [these relationships] are severely problematic.”

Continue reading →

Never Mind “The Appearance of Impropriety,” Democrats Need To Avoid The Appearance of Stupidity

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Let’s see: the ethical values that Congressional Democrats spat upon last night were competence, responsibility, integrity, respect, civility, courtesy, decency, dignity, self-restraint, prudence, fairness and patriotism. That’s quite an accomplishment in a single event. The party’s decision to challenge the GOP’s well-earned title as “The Stupid Party” last night during the State of the Union address was, in turn,

  • Foolish
  • Juvenile
  • Desperate
  • Embarrassing (to their party, the  nation and the institution of Congress)
  • Damning
  • Damaging to democracy
  • An appeal to the Trump Deranged while simultaneously proving how crippling the malady can be…and…
  • …a gift to the man they hate so much, President Trump.

In “True Grit,” the villain Tom Cheney is shot by young Maddie Ross after he taunts her by telling the girl how to cock the giant pistol she has aimed at him. He is stunned when she shoots him, and cries out, “I didn’t think you’d do it!”

I might make “The Cheney” a new Ethics Alarms distinction. I had read about the ridiculous college campus protest-level tactics Democrats were considering, and posted about them yesterday, as well as noting that the party’s leader in the House, Hakeem Jefferies, had advised them to eschew such nonsense in favor of a “strong, determined and dignified Democratic presence in the chamber.” Jeffries was right for a change, and I really thought all of the stories about the Democrats bringing props and dressing up would prove to be false alarms. I didn’t think they’d do it! Yet when the time for the yearly Presidential “speech “state of the nation” speech arrived, there were the Democrats, looking like the studio audience in a particularly ugly episode of “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Continue reading →

“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…

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?

I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.

Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”

But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.

And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.

Here is AM Golden’s illuminating Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”…

***

Continue reading →

Behold! A Fascinating Visit To The Mind of a Trump Derangement Sufferer

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This was just reposted by a very astute and generally learned lawyer friend (who, I should mention, is a retired USAID employee who never returned to the land of her birth except for visits and who has lived abroad for decades). I could write about this screed for pages, but I’ll leave it to you.

I will only observe that Ethics Alarms commented critically on many of the incidents and statements listed when they occurred, while others are framed according to Axis media narratives (look at the sources) or are the kind of exaggerations and hyperboles that Trump critics call “lies” when he engages in the same techniques.

I will also observe that making this statement without considering who and what this admittedly flawed leader is opposing and the demonstrated values and conduct of the alternative is hypocritical, deliberately misleading, or, ironically, stupid.

Comment of the Day: “More Re-Branding Ethics: ‘What is This “Boy Scouts” of Which You Speak’?”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Brad Davidson. the father of two Eagle Scouts and a silver award Girl Scout, wrote this Comment of the Day to defend the re-named Boy Scouts of America. now “Scouting America,” from a critical post here from May, 2024. Despite the criticism, I was very pleased to see his passionate, well-argued rebuttal. As I noted in the original essay, Jack Marshall Sr. regarded the organization as his savior, because the Boy Scouts gave him structure and a support network when he was a fatherless only-child growing up in Kentucky during the Depression. Dad would have been crushed if he had lived long enough to watch the Bot Scouts staggering under the terrible publicity it suffered in the wake of its child molestation scandal and the subsequent lawsuits that drove it into bankruptcy.

Since Brad mentions it more than once, I must pause briefly to to defend my use of the term “rot” to describe the Scouts ( I never used the terms “ethics rot,” “ethical tot” or “moral rot.”) I hold that any organization that has many episodes of adults in authority criminally molesting children under its auspices—and the Scouts had almost 93,000 claims across all 50 states and the District of Columbia when the organization went into Chapter 11—by definition has allowed its culture to fall apart in metaphorical chunks. The Boy Scouts induced families to entrust its sons to their care, and then did not adequately execute that care. Such widespread criminal activity cannot exist without an organization’s leadership engaging in contrived ignorance. The fact that other organizations were equally negligent is not a defense.

Here is Brad Davidson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More Re-Branding Ethics: ‘“’What is This ‘Boy Scouts’ of Which You Speak?’” I combined his comment on EA with a subsequent email he sent me off-site, with his permission.

***

You have made some claims about Scouting that are just that–claims, not based in reality. “Decades of ethical rot” is a claim, and I see no proof, other than you hate the name change.

I was a Cub Scout and then a Boy Scout (and then Scouts BSA) leader for 12 years, and have 2 sons who are Eagle Scouts. My daughter was in Girl Scouts, and I was a leader for that group as well but took a back seat to two women who really ran the group. My role was more of the “get ’em outdoors” role for the girls.

First, I am not sure what the “ethical rot” entails. Was it un-banning homosexual scoutmasters and scouts? Scouting is not the place for sexual education nor sexual encounters; we don’t care what you do outside of scouting, provided it is legal and has no influence on your scouting experience. This is the real world, scouting goes up to 18, and there are times when boys or adults get in legal trouble, and we had to make a judgement call–but again, if it involved sex, other than criminal sexual activity, none of it is our business. “Morally straight” gives us an opportunity to talk about personal relationships in general, but we are guys who take kids camping, not sexual educators.

Second, GSA and BSA are not related organizations. They actually compete, and from my point of view, don’t like each other. Scouting America (the new name) is part of an international scouting movement; it was not founded here in America, nor is it headquartered here. The global scout movement is overwhelmingly co-ed. We were one of the ONLY scouting organizations that had limits on female participation. We ended this in large part because, frankly, it’s hard for families to join and have the girls not involved. My daughter did a LOT of homework at scout meetings, and wished she could have gone camping instead of selling cookies.

Continue reading →

Tough Call: Who Is the Greater Ethics Dunce, David Hogg or the Democrats Who Elected Him Vice-Chair of the DNC? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

David Hogg, had he not been a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a mass shooting occurred, might have grown up to be a useful, ethical, productive and emotionally healthy human being. Unfortunately, he is likely to be a lifetime victim of the shooting, for it propelled him into the career path of being a professional single-issue fanatic, America’s Greta Thunberg but on the issue of gun control rather than climate change. In an example of the chaos PTSD can wreak on the vulnerable, Hogg has been transformed into a cynical grifter by a mass-murderer’s bullets. It’s tragic, but that doesn’t mean his unethical conduct should be tolerated, much less rewarded.

Barely two weeks after his election as a Democratic National Committee official, Hogg began using DNC contact lists to solicit donations to his own political action committee, “Leaders We Deserve.” That PAC pays his salary of more than $100,000 a year, according to Federal Election Commission records. “David Hogg here: I was just elected DNC Vice Chair! This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base: youthful, energetic, and ready to win,” reads one the texts he sent out to the DNC’s vast database. The texts include a link to his PAC.

Continue reading →