Professions

Now THIS Is an Unethical Nurse!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yikes. Fortunately she is also a fired nurse, and, I presume, a permanent ex-nurse.

Crystal Tadlock (that’s not her above; it’s the late Louise Fletcher as nightmare nurse Rached in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), who worked in the intensive care unit at Memorial Hermann Greater Heights Hospital in Houston, had a Mel Gibson moment abusing the police who arrested her for DWI last week on October 11.

“I’m a fucking nurse!” Crystal began, in a drunken rant that was duly recorded. “When you come through my hospital, don’t worry, I’ll let you die,” she went on. “All your family members, and this is all on recording. Greater Heights, bitch. Don’t go there.”

Oh, don’t worry, Crystal, I’m sure they won’t. I don’t know who in their right mind would, after listening to that threat. So the hospital hires medical professionals who are drunks and who are capable of killing patients as revenge, eh? Good to know.

It may be time to become a Christian Scientist.

Does anyone want to bet against my conviction that Crystal, like Mel, Michael Richards and others who have sunk their careers and reputations with similarly outrageous outbursts, will resort to the Pazuzu Excuse in her inevitable groveling apology? That she will swear that what she said doesn’t represent who she really is or express her true feelings, that those frightening threats just tumbled out of her mouth from who knows where, that “something came over her”?

Trump Derangement and Professional Ethics Rot Update: The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

As the American Bar Association amply demonstrates, the American legal profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning and left-biased, not because lawyers are especially informed or intelligent, but because they overwhelmingly graduate from law schools devoted to progressive indoctrination, with law journals that actively discriminate based on viewpoint bias. State and local bar associations are governed and staffed by similarly aligned individuals; reading these organizations’ flagship magazines is an exercise in wading through progressive propaganda. Fighting for the rights of “migrants.” Celebrations of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” White men are a minority among bar association presidents.

I belong to association of legal ethics lawyers, including ethics partners, professors, CLE ethics trainers, those who defend other lawyers accused of malpractice or professional misconduct. Most of the time, the topics discussed on the group’s listserv are interesting and pertinent to my practice (legal ethics experts don’t agree on much). Since 2016, however, the Democratic Party bias of the group and its attendant Trump derangement has increasingly raised its ugly metaphorical head. The conservatives on the list as well as those who realize the inappropriateness of political topics generally stay silent (those ethics referrals are lucrative, after all) until the screaming at the sky gets ridiculous, and the moderator steps in to remind everyone that the discussion is supposed to be confined to legal ethics.

I just renewed my membership, and almost immediately a topic titled “Desperate Times” popped up, launched by (of course) the California lawyers in the group. After waking up to another long post about how “we lawyers” needed to organize to fight all of these terrible policies, I replied,

“This topic has nothing to do with legal ethics, and reinforces my conclusion that the legal ethics profession, like so many others, has deteriorated into a partisan, biased, bubble-dwelling  cabal increasingly incapable of objective and trustworthy analysis. The furious effort to spin Fani Willis’s flagrantly unethical conduct was one of many dead canaries in the mine. Is this listserv moderated, or not?”

If you can’t trust ethicists to be objective and unbiased, who can you trust?

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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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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Ethics Quote of the Month: SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“If it’s totally stupid, you don’t go along with it…”

—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in comments at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as he explained why he thinks the traditional reverence for Supreme Court precedent (stare decisis) makes neither legal nor logical sense

In discussions with some of my more fair and rational progressive lawyer friends about the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, several of them admitted that Roe was a terrible opinion, badly reasoned and sloppily written. This has been the consensus of most honest legal analysts since the 1970s, but never mind, Roe declared the right to kill unborn children for any reason whatsoever a right, so for abortion-loving feminists and their allies (including men addicted to promiscuous sex without responsibility), Roe was a “good” decision. But my colleagues who knew it was not just a poor decision but a terrible one condemned anyway, because, they said, it violated stare decisis, the hoary principle that the Supreme Court should eschew over-turning previous SCOTUS decisions even if they were outdated or clearly wrong, in the interests of legal stability, preserving the integrity of the Court and insulating the institution from the shifting winds of political power.

Like many principles, that one sounds better in the abstract than it works in reality, and Roe is as good an example as one could find short of Dred Scott. Roe warped the culture and turned living human beings into mere inconveniences whose lives could be erased at whim. How many millions of human beings don’t exist today because of the ideological boot-strapping logic of that decision, which bizarrely equated the right to contraception to the right to kill the unborn?

Reverence of bad decisions as beyond reversal is also a handy political weapon: as several wags have noted, stare decisus is mandatory when the precedent at issue is progressive cant (like Roe), but when the Left passionately believes a SCOTUS decision was wrongly decided, it’s time for an “exception” to stare decisus. In his recent appearance at D.C.’s Catholic University, where he taught at the law school until protesters against Dobbs in his classes forced him to stop, Justice Thomas pointed to Brown v. Bd. of Education, the landmark decision that overturned a well-established Court precedent holding that “separate but equal” was a principle that allowed segregation in the public schools as he neatly eviscerated the intellectually dishonest position that SCOTUS precedent must be sacred.

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Mets Announcer Gary Cohen Was Right and Cubs Rookie Matt Shaw Is…What, Exactly? And What Am I?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Chicago Cubs rookie third baseman Matt Shaw skipped the Cubs’ game against the Reds on Sunday after receiving a call from Charley Kirk’s widow. Instead, the player attended the memorial event for the assassinated activist at State Farm Stadium in Arizona. Shaw is not just a Kirk admirer: Shaw had something of a personal relationship with Kirk that he described as important to him, though they were not close friends.

During Tuesday’s Mets-Cubs game at Wrigley Field, game, Mets play-by-play announcer Gary Cohen said, “Shaw had Cubs world in a tizzy this weekend when he was not here for the Cubs game with the Reds — a game they lost (1-0) and in which his lack of presence was felt. It was later revealed that he had been given permission to attend Charlie Kirk’s funeral.”

Cohen added, “I don’t want to talk about any of the politics of it, but the thought of leaving your team in the middle of a race for any reason other than a family emergency really strikes me as weird.”

Naturally, Kirk-worshiping Mets fans erupted on social media, with some pledging to boycott any games announced by Cohen and others insisting that he be fired. Now, Cohen didn’t say anything negative about Charley Kirk at all. Moreover, he was 100% right. It is very weird, although weird would not be my word for it. Skipping an important game in the waning days of a baseball season when your team seeks your services is selfish and unprofessional. Shaw is a rookie and “only” makes the MLB minimum of $760,000; nonetheless, that salary commits him to being available to play if he is healthy. This wasn’t his wife giving birth or a desperately sick child or the death of a parent—the MLB Players’ Union bargained for special leave for such events.

Some wags have pointed out that the rookie is hardly a star: he’s about a league average hitter, though his fielding at third is outstanding. That misses the point. He was obligated to play baseball, not to go to a memorial ceremony. An actress bailed on an ethics program she was supposed to assist me on, with almost no notice, because her grandmother died. ProEthics, as in me, blackballed her after that, and I told her not to bother auditioning for any professional shows in the D.C. area I directed. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up, and I couldn’t trust this alleged professional to do that.

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Ethics Quiz: The Lawyer’s Facebook Post

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Insurance litigator Bradley Dlatt was fired by law firm Perkins Coie and has been erased its website after he posted on Facebook,

“Charlie Kirk got famous as one of America’s leading spreaders of hatred, misinformation and intolerance.The current political moment—where an extremist Supreme Court and feckless Republican Congress are enabling a Republican president to become a tyrant and building him a modern-day Gestapo for assaulting black and brown folks—is a result of Charlie Kirk’s ‘contributions’ to American media and politics. Hell, Kirk would likely be flattered by the underlying claim. His Turning Point USA began as a sort of Misbehaved Young Republicans and eventually overshadowed traditional right-wing organizations like CPAC in dictating the shape of American conservatism. Not to diminish Donald Trump’s media instincts, but when polls suggest young men turning more conservative helped get Trump to this point, that’s all Kirk. And he can take credit for all that flows from that, including the current Supreme Court making a straightfaced proclamation that forgiving student debt is executive tyranny and then deciding that sending people to South Sudan without due process is just “practicing executive authority the right way.” It’s not “celebrating” a murder just because you decline to whitewash Kirk’s legacy by acting like he “was practicing politics the right way” as Ezra Klein belched out onto the pages of the New York Times. Klein apparently believes saying that the guy who tried to murder Paul Pelosi with a hammer should be bailed out by some “patriot” or responding to the murder of George Floyd by calling him a “scumbag” is “the right way.” It’s a stunning display of pathological centrism brain: a compulsion to champion an angle that almost no one in the real world shares and then preen as though being an outlier is a sign of genius. Because while liberals didn’t think Kirk practiced politics the right way… neither did conservatives! If they’re being honest with themselves, the highest compliment conservatives give Kirk is that he broke politics. He saw the dusty, genteel norms of the post-War political divide and tossed them aside to build a following. He took Rush Limbaugh’s model and pushed it beyond its limits. That said, no one in this country should be murdered for their political speech. Wishing comfort to his wife and children in this difficult time. “

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On Re-Watching “The Magnificent Seven” and Finally Realizing What It’s About

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I am trying hard to write about something other than the Charley Kirk Ethics Train Wreck despite the din making even thinking about other ethics issues difficult. Naturally, my default solution is the Great American Ethics Genre: the American Western.

I have been bringing a younger friend up to speed in his cultural literacy pursuits, and recently had him view the original John Sturgis-directed version of “The Magnificent Seven,” a great ethics movie and one of the ten best Hollywood Westerns ever made, a tough field. I have written about the movie several times on EA, but I am abashed to say that it never quite sunk in what the film was really about until that last viewing.

The film is about professionalism. Once that bell rang, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t realized it before. It is a filmed course in professionalism—the quality of justifying the trust a particular practitioner of an occupation dedicated to public service must maintain to be considered a professional. I would love to teach a professionalism course using the movie as the centerpiece.

Years ago, retired EA commenter Bob Stone-–I hope he isn’t Trump-Deranged now—wrote a piece for his own blog about how the film illustrated the difference between law and ethics. He wrote in part,

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I’m Sorry, But EA Cannot Resist the Saga of the Indignant Rhode Island Prosecutor

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The now viral video above pretty much says it all, but the episode warrants special notice.

Special Assistant Attorney General Devon Flanagan, was arrested for trespassing on August 14, and in her many recorded protests, including a variation on the infamous “Do you know who I am?” lament, earned not only social media immortality but probably a lifetime of ridicule. She was arrested for trespassing outside the Clarke Cooke House restaurant in Newport, ludicrously calling out “I’m an AG! I’m an AG!” as well as “You’re going to regret this! You’re going to regret it!” as she put in the back of a police car.

It is believed that alcohol was involved. She also told the officers that they were obligated to turn of their bodycams if a citizen demanded it, which was, as one of the officers sagely observed, “bullshit.” Flanagan has been suspended in the wake of the incident. Presumably she will be fired.

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha called her conduct “inexcusable.” Ya think?

“I’ve got 110 lawyers. She embarrassed all of them,” Neronah said. “It’s just really hard to find and keep capable lawyers, and so I just have to think really carefully about this one. But no question there will be a strong, strong sanction here.”

It’s really hard to find qualified prosecutors who don’t get drunk and make fools of themselves in public? Interesting.

“I’m not sure what she was thinking. Clearly, she was not thinking straight,” Neronha said.  “She’s humiliated herself. Regardless of what happens vis-a-vis her employment with us, she’s going to have a long time coming back from this,” he added. “It’s just really unfortunate.”

Mark this down as just one more chunk taken out of the public’s trust in our justice system. On the bright side, “I’m an AG!” may have some staying power. much like “Let’s go Brandon!” For example…

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Nah, The Democratic Party Hasn’t Become Openly Anti-Semitic! It’s Just That One of Its Biggest Allies Wants To Erase Jews From the Holocaust…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

When I read about this, I was certain that some NEA-hating conservative news source was exaggerating. Nope. It is right there in black and white, as you can see above in the entry from the National Education Association’s newly released 2025 handbook. My brain found this so shocking that it refused to explode as it should have, and just went into a safety shutdown. I can’t account for the last three hours…

The nation’s largest teacher’s union is a massive contributor to the Democratic Party, a major reason why public education has deteriorated into ideological indoctrination, and a force for ill in American culture and society. It was, for instance, substantially responsible for the disastrous decision to close the schools in the midst of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. Now it has openly proclaimed its hostility toward not just Israel, but the Jewish people.

The handbook, the NEA’s guide for the union’s nearly 3 million members, describes the Holocaust as having “12 million victims… from different faiths.” As unquestioned historical sources make undeniable, “The Final Solution” was at the core of Hitler’s extermination project. The NEA says the union will “promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day” by “recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” This section is on the page before the one shown above:

The NEA then promotes “Nakba” education, which describes Israel’s founding in 1948 as the “forced, violent displacement” of 750,000 Palestinians. The document further pledges to teach that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” and defends educators’ and students’ “free speech in defense of Palestine.” In case the graphic above is too hard to read, here are the key sections:

States one news source, “Critics argue the NEA is promoting a one-sided, revisionist history while ignoring the central role of Jews in the Holocaust.” This would warrant a “Ya think?” except that I have used my quote for today in the previous post. Where’s the “argument”? That is exactly what the NEA does in the handbook, and the position goes beyond unethical into evil. The group is obviously proud of its position and confident that the Democratic Party and the public supports it.

Did you know that the Republicans and Donald Trump are Nazis?

Now what? Here is what…

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