“Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” An Ethics Movie That Seems Disturbingly Relevant Today

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

How I missed the 1995 HBO film “Indictment: the McMartin Trial” for almost 30 years, I don’t know, but I did. The Oliver Stone produced legal drama about the insane events surrounding what turned out to be the start of a nation-wide freak-out over supposed Satan worship and widespread child abuse at day-care centers is unusually accurate for a docudrama. For this reason it is also infuriating. How could this have happened even once?

In August of 1983, the mother of a 2-year-old boy phoned the Manhattan Beach (California) Police Dept. claiming that her son had been sexually abused at the family-run McMartin Pre-School. That accusation prompted a series of sensational and inflammatory reports from an unscrupulous broadcast journalist (or “journalist,” for short) at WABC-TV. It also prompted the police to contact other parents with children at the school to ask if their children had been molested. Those children were, in turn, interviewed by a crusading social worker named Kee MacFarlane, who used controversial techniques to persuade the young children that they had seen and experienced terrible things, escalating from sexual abuse to having to witness ritual rapes and human sacrifices. (This was one of the seminal cases in the psychiatry profession’s “implanted memories” scandal.)

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Ethics Hero: EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well this was certainly refreshing and unexpected!

Donald Trump-knockoff billionaire Mark Cuban stated in gratuitous tweet that he has “never hired anyone based exclusively on race, gender, religion,” but that “race and gender can be part of the equation” because he believes “diversity is a competitive advantage.”

What virtue-signaling claptrap! What does that last part even mean? Does Harvard consider that its acceptance of diversity as a substitute for genuine credentials and ability has given the university a “competitive advantage” as it competes for the best students, faculty and donors? Yesterday, in addition to having it revealed that its top DEI officer is a DEI hire herself who rose to predominance with the assistance of bogus scholarship, a wealthy donor who last year gave the university $300,000,000 dollars announced that he was through. “Will America’s elite university get back to their roots of educating American children – young adults – to be the future leaders of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions [and]a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame…?” Ken Griffin asked in response to being asked if he could be lured back as a donor. Continue reading →

KABOOM! Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Is a Worse Plagiarist Than Even Claudine Gay!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And there goes my head. I just painted the ceiling of my office, too.

Unbelievable! The Washington Free Beacon, in an exclusive (hey, you wouldn’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe of “Spotlight” fame to do any investigative journalism that might embarrass a black, female DEI officer at Harvard, would you?), revealed that Harvard University’s Sherri Ann Charleston appears to have “plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks” and even taking credit for a study done by her own husband according to a complaint filed with the university yesterday. Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first chief diversity officer—you know, because the negligent death of an overdosing career crook in Minnesota meant that Harvard had to launch a new bureaucracy. And what to you know? Charleston contributed to the fateful selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!

Charleston’s Harvard bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity,” whatever that means. Oh wait…it means that she’s aces at “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”

The allegations against Charleston look irrefutable and damning. From the Free Beacon report:

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The Russian Figure Skating Olympics Scandal Finally Is Resolved After Everyone Stopped Paying Attention.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m thinking about establishing an organizational version of The Julie Principle. When an entity, company, organization or government has shown that its culture is sufficiently corrupt and unlikely to change for the better, maybe it’s a waste of time and ethical analysis to keep complaining about the inevitable misconduct. “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.” Either just give up on trusting that entity, company, organization or government, or resolve to live with its flaws. Like Hollywood. The National Football League. Or, as in this ridiculous episode, the Olympics and Russia.

Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian figure skating star, was banned from competition for four years yesterday by a three-member arbitration panel at the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport. The reason was her positive doping test that messed up the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics beyond all reason, confusing everyone and keeping more than a dozen other athletes from receiving their medals.

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Well You Know, God DOES Work in Mysterious Ways…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Denver, Colorado pastor Eli Regalado announced in a YouTube video last April that he would be selling cryptocurrency. The pastor said he was “setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.” Regalado and his wife then began selling cryptocurrency, dubbed INDXcoin, to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area using his “the “Kingdom Wealth Exchange,” an online cryptocurrency marketplace he set up for the purpose. They peddled the holy investment with prayers, quotes from the Bible, and entreaties to have faith in their product. Sure enough, the plan was a godsend, at least for the pastor and his wife: the Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors.

Unfortunately, the INDXcoin was worthless, except for the purpose of making the pastor and his wife rich. The Regalados used around $1.3 million of the supposedly “investment funds” on a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and vacations, while renovating their Denver home. Hallelujah!

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The Rest of the Story: The Latest in the Alex Murdaugh Murder Trial Train Wreck Has Me Depressed About the American Justice System

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is bad for me: after all, my profession is substantially involved with the justice system and the law. I keep learning things that make me increasingly cynical regarding the fairness, competence and integrity of the American justice system, and lately it has been

…right in the kisser. (I’ll have another horror story for you later today, if all goes according to plan.)

Yesterday, a judge refused to grant a new trial for Alex Murdaugh, the former South Carolina lawyer, now disbarred and convicted of murdering his wife and son. His defense team argued that a court clerk had improperly influenced the jurors in his case, which, if she did not, was only moral luck. I wrote about the unethical clerk here last Fall. Even before the allegations were made about the clerk, Rebecca Hill, signaling and sometimes prompting jurors that they needed to convict Murdaugh, the trial and his conviction looked like a travesty of justice.

Here is what I wrote about the case after the trial…

“Reviewing the astoundingly thin evidence, I do not understand why the trial judge didn’t throw out the jury’s verdict and declare Murdaugh acquitted because there was not enough to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt as a matter of law. There wasn’t. This was an example of a jury convicting a defendant of murder because they decided he was a bad guy and there were no other suspects. Alex Murdaugh lied repeatedly regarding the deaths of his wife and son and he was undeniably a thief and a sociopath—but prosecutors couldn’t and didn’t present much more than theories about whether he was the killer. Judges are understandably, reluctant to over-ride juries, but in this case it was necessary. If the Trump Deranged reasoning that the conclusion that someone is just an untrustworthy bounder is sufficient to assume guilt of criminal activity is becoming a cultural norm, our justice system is approaching a crisis, if it isn’t in one already.

The only motive that the prosecution could come up with for claiming Murdaugh was behind the double murder of his wife and son was that the lawyer thought he would be more leniently treated for the other crimes he was being charged with if juries and judges felt sorry for him as a result of their deaths. That’s just bonkers, and if I were a member of the jury, I’d regard the prosecution having to resort to such a theory as per se reasonable doubt. But as if that weren’t enough, Murdaugh’s trial was tainted by a fame- and fortune-seeking law clerk. (I recently wrote about the carnage triggered by another unethical law clerk scandal. What the hell’s going on out there?)

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If This Poll Is Accurate, The American Public May Be Too Incompetent and Irresponsible to Live In a Democracy…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek found that 18% of voters are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a candidate endorsed by pop singer Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift has been essentially dedicated to music since she was 14, though she did graduate from high school in three years. There is nothing she has to offer in trenchant political commentary besides celebrity, and to a large number of Americans, as we already know, that’s enough.

So naturally, as the buzz was in Washington, D.C. today, the Biden campaign is working hard to get Swift to endorse Joe, if possible at the Super Bowl.

It is estimated that 8 million new voters will enter the ranks of the US electorate this year, making a total of 41 million Gen Z voters. This is also a group that surveys show has a low opinion of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, free enterprise and the United States generally, so maybe they don’t even need Swift’s OK to vote Democratic. My guess, and maybe I’m whistling past the metaphorical graveyard, is that most of that 18% may be more likely to vote if Taylor tells them who to vote for, but the majority of them won’t be engaged enough to vote anyway.

If the election is going to turn on somethings as trivial and meaningless as celebrity endorsements, its not even worth worrying about. Those idiots will deserve what they get, and so will their elders, for letting society and the culture get that stupid.

Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.

Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,

  • “Trump is a racist.”
  • “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
  • “white silence is complicity”
  • “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”

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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Rep. Omar?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was actually going to begin this post with a parody of the cheery song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,” but decided against it for two reasons. First, no English words rhyme with “Omar,” so you’re stuck with fake sort-of rhymes like “home are” and “sonar,” and second, this is too serious a problem to cover in a song parody.

Among Donald Trump’s myriad offensive, stupid and gratuitously inflammatory comments while President was when he said in 2019 that the members of “the Squad” should “go back to where they came from.” This was particularly inept since most of that group of radical, socialist, anti-Semitic and or dumb-as-bricks Democrats are “from” the good ol’ USA, but in the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at least, Trump may have had a valid point that he, as usual, chose the worst possible way to express.

In 2019, Omar declared as part of the anti-Semitic theme much of the Squad vocally embraces, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says that it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Her message was that a lot of U.S. officials—you know, Jews— allowed a conflicting fealty to Israel to blunt their duty to pursue what is in the best interest of the United States. But yesterday, a video surfaced on Twitter/X showing Omar rousing a Somali-American crowd in her district by saying in part,

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About Gov. Newsom’s Claim That “We Have the Best 3-year Record of Any Modern American Presidency…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I didn’t want to start the day with an Unethical Quote of the Month right after last night’s post, but attention should be paid to what California governor Gavin Newsom told a stunned Jonathan Karl on ABC News’ “This Week” yesterday. The full quote was: “We have the best three-year record of any modern American Presidency, period, full stop. And you look at the issue, issue by issue, they poll overwhelmingly, the American people support what Biden has done.”

What’s going on here? The most recent polling shows Biden with the worst three-year approval rating going back to Gerald Ford half a century ago (my, how time flies). How could the American people “overwhelmingly” support (“approve of” is a synonym for “support”) what Biden has done while roughly two-thirds tell pollsters that they think he’s a lousy President?

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