U.S. Society

Joe Biden Takes the Lead In The Ethics Alarms “2025 Asshole of the Year” Competition

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Ethics Alarms assessment of Joe Biden as the Worst U.S. President Ever looks better and better as more information regarding his disastrous Presidency comes out (after either his corrupt government tried to hide it or the corrupt news media refused to report it).

For example, remember that idiotic pier Biden ordered to be built in Gaza? You know, the plan to send “humanitarian aid” to the people in the region that the U.S. was handing over dollars and weapons to help Israel devastate so it would get rid of its Jew-hating terrorists? The brilliant maneuver that was akin to the U.S. sending humanitarian aide to Berlin during World War II if FDR had been insane or Sherman handing out CARE packages to Atlanta residents during his army’s “March to the Sea”? That stunt? As stupid, wasteful and cynical as it seemed at the time, the reality was even worse. One American soldier assigned to the job, Sgt. Quandarius Stanley, was injured in the process of Biden’s virtue signaling (to his anti-Semitic base) and died five months later for the injuries: that was reported. Now it has been reported that 62 more soldiers were injured during the construction of a floating pier that cost U.S. Taxpayers $230 million to build, that was operational for barely twenty days, that damaged millions of dollars worth of equipment, that was supposed to help the murderous enemy of a U.S. ally that we were supporting while it tried to defeat that enemy, and that literally accomplished nothing.

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Yes, Actors Who Refuse to Perform With Trump In The Audience Should Be Blacklisted

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Grennell is absolutely, 100% correct. For actors to withhold their talents and services from an entire audience because they may have ideological differences with a member of that audience (or many) is unforgivably unprofessional and a breach of ethics deserving punishment, condemantion and shunning.

Howard Sherman, an author and critic whose existence I had been blissfully unaware of before this day, issued an insufferable essay on Facebook that naturally my many show biz friends, Trump Deranged all, rushed to share and applaud. The post is as nauseating as it is overlong and unethical: I read it so you don’t have to, but here are some lowlights to “How the Blacklisting Starts.”

See, he’s saying that an industry deciding that members who are unethical and refuse to do their jobs is the same as an industry putting members on a blacklist for their political beliefs, as Hollywood did to Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and asd Hollywood does now to conservatives (like, say, James Woods). That’s bonkers, and exactly backwards. It is the misguided artists linking their art to political views who are emulating those blacklisters of yore. I’ll pick out some of the more pernicious misrepresentations in Sherman’s post… Continue reading →

Today’s Unethical Political Cartoon Posted By A Trump Deranged Facebook Friend…

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Come on. Really?

There is no excuse for drawing this, paying someone to do it, publishing it, or treating the opinion it represents with anything but contempt. It is the epitome of the simple-minded, reductive, dishonesty that typifies the political cartooning genre, which deserved to die decades ago, as I’ve stated here for years. As for the once thoughtful, fair, analytical friend who posted it to get cheers from his fellow Trump Deranged, his loved ones have reason to worry.

So do those of another FBF, a retired lawyer of note, who posted today a question: “Can anyone recall Trump ever saying anything that was true?” In a sane world, I would have rocketed back, “Sure: ‘Journalists are the enemies of the people.'” Now I just shake my head in the privacy of my office.

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UPDATE: “Gee What a Surprise. Britney Griner’s Unethical…At Least” Is Based on a Hoax And Is Officially Retracted

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Sorry.

The post about Britney Griner being caught betting on her own team’s games was improvidently posted. It was based on an entry on a suspicious website that I should have investigated further than I did.

I’ve been caught before, though not recently. This time it was confirmation bias that got me: I think Griner is a grifter and Ethics Villain, and was obviously (note the title) predisposed to believe the worst. As several commenter have noted, the report I was relying on didn’t make sense, but it was also, as web hoaxes often are, not sufficiently clever to tip me off that it was intended as satire. As Ethics Alarms has stated repeatedly, false stories on teh web should be flagged as such or are unethical. And despicable. I hate them to pieces.

So, here come the apologies: I apologize to Britney, readers here, the WNBA and anyone who was fooled by my carelessness and stupidity. I had an unusually busy morning, was distracted and tired from a bad night, and should have waited until I was in a more competent state of mind.

Let that be a lesson to me. And you. And everyone.

%$!@#$!

I‘m leaving the post up below, as, to quote Paul Newman (as Doug Roberts, the architect) at the end of “The Towering Inferno,” “kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”

***

Britney Griner, the anti-American WNBA star who made the Biden Administration give Russia an international criminal (an illegal arms dealer whose nickname is “The Merchant of Death”) in order to save her from her own stupidity and recklessness, is now accused of betting on her own team’s basketball games.

Griner placed “several sizable wagers” on Phoenix Mercury games over the past two seasons according to a Vegas sportsbook employee named Art Tubolls. He noticed “a suspicious number of bets placed by someone who looks suspiciously like Britney Griner, except wearing a mustache and calling herself ‘Rick Slamson.’”

WNBA Ethics Manager Josephine Barron todl the news media,“We’re looking into whether or not she purposely fixed the scores,” adding that Griner could be banned for life if the allegations are true. The bets were disturbing. One wager read, “Mercury will lose by 7 because I’m taking the night off and pretending to have a groin injury.” Another bet was for $1,000 on “Caitlin Clark to drop 30 and break ankles.”

Right now Griner’s fans and allies are in the spin and denial stage, but it doesn’t look good for her, and anyone who is shocked—shocked!—hasn’t been paying attention. On the way to creating an international incident, she knowingly defied a State Department warning not to travel to Russia, doing so for money, although she was hardly destitute. She carried with her substances that she knew were illegal in Russia, and that she knew carried serious criminal penalties. Her explanations and excuses after she was caught breaking the law in Russia strained credulity: for example, a U.S. doctor has no authority to waive Russian drug laws, but Griner tried to use a letter from her physician justifying medical marijuana use by the athlete to get around her illegal possession charges. Then she sought diplomatic rescue from the nation she had condemned a racist while serving as a Black Lives Matter advocate. Griner is just not very bright, and there is a strong link between inadequate intelligence and unethical conduct. The link becomes stronger with wealth and celebrity.

Griner is, in short, a proven jerk, much like Pete Rose, baseball’s poster boy for forbidden gambling. The gambling allegations regarding the WNBA star, if true, just prove that she’s an even bigger jerk than I originally thought.

__________________

Pointer: JutGory

Gee What a Surprise. Britney Griner’s Unethical…At Least

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

This post is officially retracted.

Here.

[From the retraction: “I’m leaving the post up below, as, to quote Paul Newman (as Doug Roberts, the architect) at the end of “The Towering Inferno,” ‘“‘kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.'”]

***

Britney Griner, the anti-American WNBA star who made the Biden Administration give Russia an international criminal (an illegal arms dealer whose nickname is “The Merchant of Death”) in order to save her from her own stupidity and recklessness, is now accused of betting on her own team’s basketball games.

Griner placed “several sizable wagers” on Phoenix Mercury games over the past two seasons according to a Vegas sportsbook employee named Art Tubolls. He noticed “a suspicious number of bets placed by someone who looks suspiciously like Britney Griner, except wearing a mustache and calling herself ‘Rick Slamson.’”

WNBA Ethics Manager Josephine Barron todl the news media,“We’re looking into whether or not she purposely fixed the scores,” adding that Griner could be banned for life if the allegations are true. The bets were disturbing. One wager read, “Mercury will lose by 7 because I’m taking the night off and pretending to have a groin injury.” Another bet was for $1,000 on “Caitlin Clark to drop 30 and break ankles.”

Right now Griner’s fans and allies are in the spin and denial stage, but it doesn’t look good for her, and anyone who is shocked—shocked!—hasn’t been paying attention. On the way to creating an international incident, she knowingly defied a State Department warning not to travel to Russia, doing so for money, although she was hardly destitute. She carried with her substances that she knew were illegal in Russia, and that she knew carried serious criminal penalties. Her explanations and excuses after she was caught breaking the law in Russia strained credulity: for example, a U.S. doctor has no authority to waive Russian drug laws, but Griner tried to use a letter from her physician justifying medical marijuana use by the athlete to get around her illegal possession charges. Then she sought diplomatic rescue from the nation she had condemned a racist while serving as a Black Lives Matter advocate. Griner is just not very bright, and there is a strong link between inadequate intelligence and unethical conduct. The link becomes stronger with wealth and celebrity.

Griner is, in short, a proven jerk, much like Pete Rose, baseball’s poster boy for forbidden gambling. The gambling allegations regarding the WNBA star, if true, just prove that she’s an even bigger jerk than I originally thought.

__________________

Pointer: JutGory

Comment of the Day: “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal.” There isn’t a thing I could say as an introduction that would improve on it….

***

For most of history, the idea of modesty had nothing to do with the idea that the human body or sex was evil.  The idea was that the penis and vagina, as well as the female breasts (the focus of which is the feeding of babies) were indeed focused on reproduction, life giving, holy, and thus reserved from public consumption.  Avoiding public showmanship of the reserved and holy has been a common theme throughout most cultures, religions, and peoples throughout history.  We have a time, place, and occasion for every action in our lives.  Why do we not urinate/defecate in public?  I don’t want to see you do so, and frankly, nor do I want to see your sexual characteristics.

Though this is not a phrase thought well of on this site, we do need to think of children.  There is measurable harm that occurs to children who are exposed to the sexual before puberty.  Modesty, such as not going around bare breasted, is a protection for the children.  We don’t expose sexual characteristics to protect children’s innocence.  Sure, kids know they have these parts, but for the most part, what is not in sight is not emphasized.  We focus on teaching kids about their private parts and how to avoid excess attention focused on them for their safety.  We don’t want more teen pregnancies, child sexual abuse (which includes inappropriate exposure), or normalizing sexual attraction to minors, especially in the form of pederasty, which focuses on the fully developed sexual characteristics, like breasts, that the judges seem to be suggesting we should allow to be in full display. 

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Reviewing a Book You Haven’t Read? Ethics Verdict: Ethics Villain. Response: “Run Away!”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Boy do I hate this. When I was engrossed in local theater, a reviewer for one of the papers her in Northern Virginia gave a negative review to a show I directed when I had seen her leave at intermission…yet she still “critiqued” the second act. I got her fired, and enjoyed every minute of it. I once read a piece by the founding editor of Slate magazine and long-time “Crossfire” star Michael Kinsey in which he admitted that he had approved book-jacket quotes in his name for books he never read. That was the last time I paid any attention to Michael Kinsey.

New York Magazine has a feature called “Favorite Things” where various people of some stature (that I often have never heard of) write about what they like. A current entry is by Jane Pratt, once a frequent news topic for her Magazine ventures like “Jane.” Pratt’s ‘favorite things” include “The Great Pretender” by Susannah Cahalan, a tome that I haven’t read but might, since it’s about a research ethics scandal, the infamous Rosenhan experiments.

These were the studies supposedly run in the 1970s by Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan: Rosenhan and seven graduate students presented various (fake) symptoms to psychiatrists, supposedly got committed to psychiatric hospitals, and were then stuck in them despite the fact that none of them actually suffered from mental illnesses. The episodes were recounted and published, causing an uproar and sending the reputation of psychiatry even lower than it already deserved to go. Cahalan debunks the episode, for the “experiments” never actually took place; the whole thing was a hoax.

But Jane Pratt wrote in New York Magazine,

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‘Don’t Be Shy, Just Say What You Really Think, Counsel!’

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

New York lawyer Rahul Dev Manchanda was disbarred in 2024 by the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department of the New York Supreme Court. The primary charge was that he persisted in using racist and anti-Semitic language in his disciplinary complaints against other lawyers and judges. “Words fail to capture the severity and extent” of the lawyer’s bigotry, the appeals court wrote in its order.

Among other offenses, Manchanda was found to have,

  • Filed documents with “unacceptably bigoted language” in state and federal courts and “a panoply” of agencies.

  • “Used intolerably vile and foul language and divulged privileged information” when responding to clients’ online complaints.

  • “Used racist, antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic statements while holding himself out as a well-trained and extremely experienced lawyer” in New York City.

  • “Repeatedly made meritless, frivolous and vexatious arguments well beyond the point at which he should have known better.” His “targets for such filings have grown to include this very disciplinary proceeding and collateral attacks that he has launched on it in state and federal courts.”

No weenie he, the lawyer is striking back. Manchanda has now sued the Attorney Grievance Committee for New York’s First Judicial Department, seeking $20 million in damages, which he claims he would have made in his practice over the next 20 years.

Yeeeeah.….

The suit alleges that the lawyer was disbarred because he is “a Republican, conservative, Christian values lawyer” who is Indian-American, and that the discipline he has been subjected to was “a simple, draconian, defamatory, slanderous, libelous death sentence, simply for exercising protected speech” against “activist extreme feminist and lesbian judges, racist law clerks, LGBTQ+ and biased court administrators, who routinely would lose his motions, sabotage his filings” and “arbitrarily and capriciously threaten him with contempt or arrest.” Manchanda has been persecuted, his suit claims, because his actions targeted agencies in which “the vast majority of New York City government employees” are “predominantly leftist, communist, Democrat, … of African American descent, with predominantly Jewish supervisors, as well as LGBTQ+ activists and extremists.”

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Ethical Standards Needed, Precedents Lacking

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the gap between a Presidential election where the office is turned over to a new POTUS, and especially a President from the opposing party, a lot of partisan mischief can be done before the lame duck limps out the door. This is legal, of course: every President has a right to serve four full years. However, when the exiting Chief Executive deliberately acts to throw obstacles in the way of the People’s Choice or lock in policies that the incoming President is certain to oppose, the conduct is unethical in my view. It is giving a metaphorical middle finger to the newly elected President.

Ethics Alarms discussed several instances between the November election and January 20 in which whoever was pulling poor Joe’s marionette strings engaged in particularly egregious examples of this kind of divisive conduct, and more have been uncovered since.

Here’s one that made me do a Danny Thomas spit: In the last days of Biden’s administration, a $89 billion, 25-year grant was awarded by the National Institutes of Health to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research. The nonprofit, which “operate[s] exclusively for the benefit of” the University of California system, according to its tax filings has never raised or spent any money since it was formed in 2022. The new regime at NIH is investigating, as well they might, and the massive grant is likely to be cancelled.

Then there’s the board that oversees the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. On January 17, 2025, “Biden” stacked the Holocaust Museum board with Democrats, appointing Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, Susan Rice, Biden’s director of Domestic Policy Council of the United States, Tom Perez, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Anthony Bernal, who was an advisor to former First Lady Jill Biden, and best of all, Doug Emhoff, whose claim to prominence is that he married Kamala Harris. Trump dismissed all of them last week, but he shouldn’t have had to.

The Axis is always blubbering about “democratic norms”: one norm I would like to see solidly entrenched in tradition is for Presidents ending their term to do nothing that will interfere with the agenda of the leader the electorate has made clear that it wants to shepherd the government. That shouldn’t be too hard.

Is There Any Way To Know If The Public Is Turning Against Trump As the Axis Claims?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

So far, I can’t find any. The Axis news media has made it clear that it is still determined to spin everything to undermine this President’s agenda to the point of flat-out deceit and misrepresentation. (I saw several other news platforms this morning claiming that Trump had said that he “didn’t know” if he would uphold the Constitution, a Big Lie, as I explained here.) In addition to polls being both incompetent and dishonest for at least a decade, there is an unforgivable lack of context in interpreting them, as I noted in this post.

Meanwhile, from the Right, I am reading claims that the polls showing Trump voter remorse are simply fake. Charlie Martin, one of the more rational pundits at PJ Media, writes in part,

…recent focus groups clearly demonstrate that Trump voters aren’t experiencing an ounce of buyer’s remorse. The mainstream media can push their fake polls and doomsday economic forecasts all they want—Trump’s base isn’t budging.

During a revealing segment on Fox News, Sean Hannity highlighted what the liberal media doesn’t want you to see: a focus group conducted by CNN’s Van Jones showing unwavering support for President Trump. Pollster Robert Cahaly, the founder of Trafalgar Group, exposed the left’s transparent strategy, explaining how they’re trying to drive a wedge between Trump and congressional Republicans.

“People are not regretting voting for Donald Trump. And then to watch their pollster say, ‘Yeah, if the election were held today, Trump would still wipe the floor with Kamala Harris,’ or probably any other Democrat, for that matter,” Hannity pointed out. “Why are they doing that? Are they trying to divide Trump with congressional Republicans and senators to stymie his agenda?”

“That’s exactly why they’re doing it,” Cahaly revealed. “They realize that Washington is full of political animals. And if they can convince the people in Congress that Trump is somehow becoming more toxic, then they can damage his agenda.”

The playbook is painfully obvious. The same pollsters who spectacularly failed to predict Trump’s electoral success are now doubling down on their flawed methodology. 

Well, is that fair? If polling can be distorted by rigged group selection, focus groups and “man-in-the-street” interviews are even more unreliable. I’m sorry to have to say it (all right, no I’m not), but Sean Hannity is not exactly a paradigm of objectivity. The theory that the Axis would use rigged polls as a “by any mean possible” weapon to stop Orange Hitler makes sense based on past experience, but that isn’t the same as evidence.

In a democracy, having a sense of what the public is thinking is important. It doesn’t mean that elected officials should rush to follow public opinion whatever it may be, since a) the public is substantially emotional, ignorant, selfish and/or stupid, which is why we have a republic rather than a pure democracy, b) they are elected officials theoretically because they are more reliable and trustworthy than the hoi pollois, and c) public opinion is constantly being warped by bad actors, also known as “journalists.”

But is it too much to ask that some trustworthy, unbiased, competent organization can provide a reliable snapshot of what the public’s view of this administration’s epic first three months is? Apparently, yes, it is too much to ask. All we are left with is confirmation bias.

I resent it.