Ethics Quiz: Pronouns Again

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The New York Times says that reporters who contact Trump Administration officials to request statements or quotes on significant events or policies do not get a response to their emails if their signature includes their “preferred pronouns.” This has not been officially confirmed as administration policy, but Trump press spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the paper that policy it is, saying, “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios. Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story.” Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and spokeswoman for the Department of Government Efficiency, answered an inquiry on the topic, “As a matter of policy, I don’t respond to people who use pronouns in their signatures as it shows they ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts.” Trump’s presidential campaign account on X also claimed, “It is official White House policy to IGNORE reporters’ emails with pronouns in the signature.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is that policy, if that is the policy, fair and ethical?

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Ethics Dunce: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was unsure how to categorize the astounding photo above, depicting Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan behaving like an arrested mobster hiding his face from photographers as he is escorted by police to the paddy wagon because she has been “caught” visiting the White House. So it’s come to this, has it? So insanely hateful toward the elected President of the United States is the Democratic Party base that aspiring leaders of the party regard even meeting with their nation’s leader as such a brand of shame that they must act like the lepers in “Ben Hur.”

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Ethics Quote of the Day: Mrs. Q

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“I think I have figured out the new virtue signal of the progressive left. A conversation in the early stages begins with, “in these dark times” or “because things are so bad right now.” What this really means is, “I hate Trump, and I am letting you know that without directly saying it.” It’s almost a test it seems. What are some graceful yet pointed responses to such behavior?”

—-Star Ethics Alarms commenter Mrs. Q, in last Friday’s Open Forum

Mrs. Q’s free-standing comment was prescient, because I had been preparing to post about New York Times’ periodic progressive opinion writer Frank Bruni’s obnoxious “What Do You Tell a College Student Graduating Into This America?” [Gift link!] in his subscriber-only newsletter. Bruni, who has carved out a niche for himself at the Times because he is fat and gay, has been flummoxed (he says) when seniors visit him in his faculty office at Duke (he teaches writing) and ask, as a recent Duke co-ed did, her eyes “red” and “watery,” “Where do you find hope?”

If he were not the most knee-jerk of knee-jerk progressives and crippled by Trump Derangement, he could have answered, “Oh, grow the hell up! You can find hope everywhere, and more here in the good ol’ U.S.A. than just about anywhere else.”

Not Bruni. The piece is a great example of how an essay that is mostly biased foolishness can be enlightening, indeed often more enlightening than opinion pieces that are spot on. For example, Bruni begins by writing, “[M]y students have the privilege of attending one of the country’s most selective and affluent universities and that simply getting a college degree, any college degree, gives them a big advantage.” Yes, it’s a big advantage that graduates from Duke and other leftist indoctrination factories do not deserve, as the weepy senior’s question demonstrates. Leaving the womb of academia for real life in a nation you have been taught has been unrelentingly racist, unjust and evil since 1690 is certain to feel hopeless.

More from Bruni…

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Yes, I’d Say Having Sex With a Dead Man on a Subway Train Is Unethical…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

A friend who knows me too well sent me this headline. I find the sub-head as fascinating as the main headline. What’s the debate over? If someone can’t even die in New York City without risking being robbed and raped by a stranger, how much more “out of control” can a city be?

Of course, the dead man may have given consent for the suspect to to take his valuable and use him as a blow-up doll as his dying wish. Ya never know…it is New York, after all.

According to the Times report, a man boarded an R train in a Manhattan subway station and at some point died, though the cause and exact time of death are unclear. Another man boarded the same train car at around 11 p.m. n the Financial District, saw the fresh corpse, and began going through the dead commuter’s pockets. Then he began to have sex with the body in, uh, various ways. The scene was captured on surveillance cameras inside the train car. After the romantic liaison was complete, the man got off the train, perhaps because it would have been illegal to enjoy a post-coital cigarette in the car. The corpse reported feeling cheap and abandoned.

Okay, I was fooling about that last part….

Hit it, Blue-Eyes!

The Lawyer Disability Conundrum

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I frequently discuss lawyers continuing to practice under temporary disabilities, like bad colds, flues, serious pain (like migraines) or painful injuries. The lines are blurry indeed, but if a condition causes a lawyer to be sub-par in serving a client’s needs, the client should be informed, and the lawyer should be prepared to either delay the matter or find a replacement. Progressive disabilities, like age-related declines in stamina and cognitive ability, also have to be taken seriously by an ethical lawyer and dealt with responsibly in the best interests of clients.

Missouri has a rule that allows for a court to suspend a lawyer after an adjudication of disability or incapacity. This week the Missouri Supreme Court summarily suspended a lawyer after the lawyer had been found disabled by a Social Security judge. She has medical issues affecting her eyesight, back, and hands,and she also suffers from chronic migraines. Her lawyer insists that her judgment has not been affected, and that she is still capable of competent and zealous representation of her clients. The applicability of the Americans with Disabilities Act is obviously an issue.

The suspended lawyer cites the precedent of Paul Alexander, a recently deceased Dallas lawyer who specialized in ADA cases. He graduated from the University of Texas School of Law. Alexander had polio as a child, which rendered him a quadriplegic. He used an iron lung except when a case required him to leave his workplace in a wheelchair and practiced law for more than 40 years typing on his personal computer using a device he held in his mouth. Alexander also painted and wrote a book.

Presumably his clients were aware of his disability ans consented to his representation of them despite his disability. Presumably also, he would have been suspended in Missouri. Still, is the proper standard to be applied to all lawyers reasonably embodied by Paul Alexander, who was an outlier by anyone’s definition?

It’s Come to This: Yesterday’s Incompetence Is Today’s Brilliant Innovation

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

When I saw the photo above and followed the reports like this one…

… I was certain that I had posted on an almost identical story a few years ago. And I had…with one significant difference.

The photo above comes from the Montgomery Township in Pennsylvania, where authorities have introduced wavy lane patterns on some streets. The regular lane patterns have been replaced by curved and zig-zagged lines. Montgomery Township officials explain that the erratic lane margins are their solution to too many speeding automobiles on some of the most trafficked streets. They are “traffic-calming measures.” “Our Highway Safety Officers and Traffic Engineers have determined that this is the best course of action for the area to ensure the safety of the local residents,” Montgomery Township police wrote in a Facebook post.

That’s funny: back in 2022, an Ethics Alarms “Res Ipsa Loquitur” post featured this, from Hollister, California:

In that instance, the wavy lines were definitely not by design. Hollister Mayor Igancio Velzaquez explained, “It just comes down to the contractor. Somebody didn’t read the plans correctly. It was not designed to look very odd.”

You may agree with me that the intentional eccentric lines look like a mistake, and the the accidental lines in Hollister look intentional, but that is neither here not there.

And I’m with Hollister. If there’s too much speeding an a section of a street, put up speed limit signs with reduced numbers. Pull over drivers. Up the fines for speeding. Speed humps are a lousy way to control traffic, but they are better than this nonsense. Heck, why stop at wavy lines? Try broken glass! Puppies in glass cages in the middle of the road! Land mines! Okay, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but why not set up fun obstacles, and make the street like a miniature golf course?

Ethics Verdict: The President’s Executive Orders On Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is easy: irresponsible, petty and stupid.

President Trump signed a pair of executive orders directing that there be federal investigations and other sanctions against high-profile administration critics from his first term. The first is former homeland security official Miles Taylor. He’s the jerk who wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 boasting about how he and others were working behind the scenes to sabotage the first Trump term. describing an internal resistance to Trump in his first term. The other is Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who worked to oppose Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “fixed” and “stolen,” and was was subsequently fired.

In the case of Taylor, the President implied in his remarks that he engaged in “treason,” which is a stretch, to put it lightly. Krebs was fired: that should have been punishment enough. In either case, Trump has bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes, and these orders do nothing to advance his agenda.

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Unsolicited Virtue Signaling and Grandstanding Like This Should Be Slapped Down, and Hard

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Anderson Cooper, as we all know, is a weenie, and he proved it in this exchange.

Ms. Thomas may be an activist, but she’s also an asshole. Cooper should have said, “Excuse me, but did you inform me of your favored pronouns? Did I ask what they were? Do they have any relevance to the matter we are discussing? Since the answer to those questions are all “no,” your making a point to correct me on live TV is rude, obnoxious, and uncalled for. Sit down, please.

Next questioner!

Why Hasn’t This Been a Headline Yet?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My Wuhan Virus-phobic friends and relatives pooh-poohed my assertion that the pandemic death statistics were being hyped and inflated by the news media and the CDC to keep the public terrified and in doors (and, quite possibly, unable to participate in a fair election.) For all I know they still don’t believe it, in part because the infuriating hasn’t been shouted from the roof-tops. A lead story on ever news network and a headline in every newspaper would be appropriate. It shouldn’t take all that, of course: I figured out we were being conned when the New York Times started running scare obituaries about 92-year-old black women who were “killed by Covid” while they were also suffering from cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

I had, frankly, forgotten about the fact that the news media still hasn’t taken responsibility for their unethical fear-mongering until I stumbled upon this, from July 18, 2023, in the 17th paragraph of a New York Times subscriber newsletter piece called “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt. He was one of the worst of the Times’ progressive op-ed writers until he was demoted. Leonhardt wrote: “The official number [of Wuhan deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death….CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”

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Some Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Ethics Alarms Friday Forum…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Last week’s open forum was wild, man, and I hope today’s can be as lively.

Based on the early returns, there’s a lot to bloviate about in the ethics world. The amateur golf champ playing in the Masters was caught pissing into a creek on n the 13th hole at Augusta National golf course. Pennsylvania judge Sonya McKnight was just convicted of shooting her sleeping boyfriend in the head. (Seems awfully judgmental…). Almost all Democrats in the House voted against the bill requiring voter ID in Federal elections. Yes, their determination to prove the cognitive dissonance scale wrong continues apace! A black Congressman tried to discuss issues with a Trump-Deranged white female and was called a “race traitor”…

…and we learned that after VP JD Vance’s March visit to Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, the Col. Susan Meyers, the commander of the 821st Space Base Group who also oversees the Pentagon’s northernmost military base, issued a gratuitous email to the base’s personnel stating that he did not speak for her of the base. What an idiot. (She was fired.) Finally, we have this stupid incident, in which Frontier Airlines let a woman fly to Puerto Rico with her “emotional support parrot” but wouldn’t let the bird on the return flight. (Gift link.)

Be careful. It’s stupid out there…