On NYC’s “Social Media Is a Health Hazard” Advisory

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

New York City proudly proclaimed this week that it is the first city in the U.S. to issue an advisory officially designating social media as a health hazard, and illustrated its achievement with head-exploding nanny state (nanny city?) overreach in a “health advisory.”

What the document mostly demonstrates is the culture’s flat learning curve regarding unstoppable cultural developments. In earlier generations, it was dime novels, dancing, jazz, rock-n-roll, TV and rap lyrics that communities sought to ban to protect the young. Now it’s social media. These are desperation screams in the dark. It is amusing, I must say, to see a far-left East Coast city government like New York’s take this course: traditionally it has been conservatives and their church-going contingent in Middle America who have advocated radical steps to”save the children.” “A pool table, don’t you understand?”

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Last Chance January Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

January is always slow around these parts thanks to holiday hangovers, but January 2024 was especially quiet. I have no idea why; it was certainly full of ethics news, and I know (by looking at my backed-up inventory) that I didn’t cover everything I should have.

This is the last chance to salvage the month’s honor and send us into February with some momentum.

So belly up to the bar….

Mutual Assured Destruction in Arizona

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

At least I hope so.

What’s going on here?From my perch, I see two Arizona politicians I wouldn’t trust to take out the trash setting each other’s career on fire. And, with any luck, both will burn to the ground.

The chairman of Arizona’s Republican Party, Jeff DeWit, resigned this week a day after The Daily Mail released a 10-minute recording of his conversation with Kari Lake, the recent losing GOP candidate for Arizona governor, seemingly offering her a bribe to drop her plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024.

The recording reveals Jeff DeWit, the state party chair, telling Lake that there are “very powerful people that want to keep you out” of the race. He says they told him to ask her if “there any companies out there or something that could just put her on the payroll and give her — to keep her out?” DeWit repeatedly urges Lake not to repeat what he is saying to anyone, and asks, “Is there a number at which — ” before Ms. Lake interrupts, saying “I can be bought?” “Not be bought,” he answers, just, you know, wait a few years before running. She sounds offended by the offer. “That’s immoral — I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror,” she says on the recording. DeWit persists: “I actually just wish you’d give me a counteroffer that’s big. Lake answers: “I can’t be bought.”

Holy cow, as Phil Rizzuto used to say.

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NOW Will You Sign My Petition?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I got a lot of eye-rolling, real and metaphorical, after I announced my petition aimed at persuading the Harvard Corporation to address the university’s credibility problem in the wake of the Claudine Gay scandal by offering the Harvard presidency to Barack Obama. As far as I can tell, I was among first to make the suggestion in print.

Today the New York Post reports, “Last week the Harvard presidency job was offered to Obama. He deferred the suggestion. Didn’t outright reject. Deferred.”

My Change.org petition pretty much died on the vine last week. Maybe a surge of support could tilt O toward Cambridge and give him something to do besides operating a shadow third term in the White House.

See? I’m smart! Not like everybody says, dumb! ….

A Boomerang For Republicans In New Hampshire [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

OperationChaosII

You may recall that Rush Limbaugh was lambasted in the non-conservative media when in March of 2008  he launched Operation Chaos.  Rush directed his zombie followers to vote in Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton to stop Barack Obama from clinching the Democratic nomination early and to maximize the chances of a messy Democratic nominating convention. In 2016, Rush declared Operation Chaos, The Sequel open for business.   He instructed the Dittoheads to vote for socialist Bernie Sanders, whom none of them would consider voting for in a real election even if someone was pulling their fingernails out with pliers to make them Bernie Bros.  Instapundit, Newsbusters and other rightward sites cheered Operation Chaos II on.  As Ethics Alarms concluded at the time, “Conservatives are no more ethical than progressives, it’s just that their lack of ethics expresses itself in different ways.”

Or the same ways, in some cases. Trump Derangement, after all, justifies anything and everything, so Democrats in New Hampshire pulled off their own version of Operation Chaos (and didn’t even give credit to Rush, since departed to that Big Talk Show in the Sky, for their inspiration).

Exit polls in the New Hampshire primary indicated that  70% of Nikki Haley’s votes came from from non-Republicans who, at least one analyst surmised,  had no intention of voting for her in a general election. They would be Biden voters, presumably, and some said so. More non-Republicans voted for Haley, in fact, than Republicans. (Also, Haley got more votes than the President did, but you had to write in Joe’s name, so that may not mean much.) Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202, but the Left’s version of Rush’s unethical stunt allowed the mainstream media to spin the results into a “Trump is weaker than he thought” narrative.

In 2016, I wrote that “Rush’s steaming pile of depraved Machiavellianism is not worth my composing a new brief against it.” Then, I reprinted part of what I had written  about Operation Chaos the first time. For the sequel, I substituted Bernie for Hillary. This time, I’ll use Nikki Haley, and I also have to replace “Republicans” with “Democrats” and strike the references to conservative pundits like Mark Levin who were cheering on Rush’s stunt.

And yes indeed, it is satisfying that the GOP and conservatives were hoisted by Rush Limbaugh’s stinky, unethical old petard. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: My Neighbors, Ted and Linda West

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Wests have been our neighbors on the little cul-de-sac called Westminster Place in Alexandria, Virginia since Grace and I bought our home a week after getting engaged. They are the ultimate good neighbors in every respect. Today they really stepped up.

I have a year-long contract this year to do monthly legal ethics CLE presentations over Zoom for a national audience of lawyers in need of ethics credit. Today was the first of sixteen; with new material and a good impression to be made, I was a bit anxious. Scheduled for 9 am, the program occupied my attentions from 7 am on. Finally, I was ready.

A half hour before the program was scheduled to begin, power at the Marshall house went off. The problem could not be addressed by the power company for several hours. Desperate and panicked, I woke my neighbors (and their gigantic dog, Peaches) from a sound sleep, and asked 1) if one of them had a Zoom account (YES!) and 2) if I could use their computer to conduct my two-hour seminar.

And they said yes to that too. They made me a cup of coffee, set me up, and then fled the house, as most people tend to do when I start talking about legal ethics. I was ready seconds before the program’s scheduled start; it was very well received. Missing the first session in a series would have been disastrous. My neighbors had my back when I really needed them.

As I knew they would.

How Bias Makes You Stupid: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I’ve written here quite a few times about the baseball pundit lawyer Craig Calcaterra, originally the author of an excellent baseball blog called “Shysterball.” Since then he’s apparently dumped law entirely, and is a full-time baseball analyst. Craig is a good guy, based on my many interactions with him over the years commenting on amd sometimes criticizing his work; he once called me “a handful,” which I take as a compliment. Now he makes his living on various paid newsletter platforms writing about one of my favorite topics.

I would dearly love to subscribe to Craig’s fascinating baseball musings, except for two thing. First, it’s awfully tight at the Marshall household since the pandemic wiped out 75% of our business, and second, Craig has increasingly marred the enjoyment he brings to baseball with metastasizing knee-jerk wokism. Yes, it has become worse since Donald Trump was elected.

Sadly, this hard left bias, which used to be undetectable, now frequently creeps into his baseball commentary, as when he opined that pitcher Josh Hader should have been fined or suspended from Major League Baseball because of some gay-bashing tweets he wrote to a handful of pimply faced friends when he was in high school. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it turned out to have signature significance. After that, Craig increasingly let his political obsessions creep into his view of baseball. Once he left NBC Sports for Substack, he indulged himself by including pure political punditry along with what people pay for, his baseball thoughts, in his newsletters. I know, I could just skip the progressive garbage, but it annoys me. Unlike his baseball instincts, these intrusions are emotional and logically sloppy.

Now Craig is pushing his newsletter to potential subscribers following his move to a new platform; sure enough, he is one of the Substack refugees who are boycotting that platform for not censoring a handful—okay, two handfuls—of neo-nazi and white supremacy extremists. (I wrote about this example of the new Left’s obsession with restricting ideas, speech and people they find “offensive” here.) For a while, he is sending out free samples of the new publication to people like me who have exchanged emails with him over the years. In today’s edition, he includes a deranged rant against “right wing politics” that perfectly illustrates how a progressive bias and hanging out in woke bubbles (lawyers, journalists) will poison even the best of minds.

Since he sent me that rant and I didn’t ask for it, I feel justified in reprinting the whole thing here, after which I will offer a few comments:

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Unethical Quotes of the Month: The University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is not an encouraging situation.

Last week, the University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council met to consider, among other matters, a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on school’s campus. An on-campus event in November included a speaker who said, referring to the barbaric terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, that “October 7 was for many of us from the region a beautiful day.” No one at the event did or said anything to reject that sentiment. The proposed resolution stated, “We strongly condemn the antisemitic statements made during a Unity roundtable event No Peace Without Justice held on November 28, 2023.”

That wouldn’t seem too difficult to agree with or too controversial, would it? Yet the resolution failed to pass. The Faculty Council voted 32-29, with six abstentions, to table the resolution for the foreseeable future. Here are some of the most striking comments made by those who objected to the resolution:

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On Re-Making Classic Films, Hubris, and Race for Race’s Sake

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Here is news you have all been waiting for, I’m sure. Kenya Barris, the black film and television writer, producer and director, is best known as the creator of the ABC sitcom black-ish as well as for writing or directing a number of mediocre-to-terrible movies like “You People,” “Coming 2 America,” and the “updated” versions of “Shaft,” “White Men Can’t Jump,” “The Witches,” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Now he has announced that he will be writing and directing new versions of “The Wizard of Oz” and “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

In a recent interview Barris revealed that his screenplay for “The Wizard of Oz” is completed, with the new Dorothy being black and not in Kansas any more, but rather a girl who lives in the Bottoms, a huge apartment complex located in Inglewood, California. “The original ‘Wizard of Oz’ took place during the Great Depression and it was about self-reliance and what people were going through,” Barris said. “I think this is the perfect time to switch the characters and talk about what someone imagines their life could be. It’s ultimately a hero’s journey, someone thinks something’s better than where they’re at, and they go and realize that where they’re at is where they should be. I want people to be proud and happy about where they’re from. But I want the world to take a look at it and I hope that will come through.” 

I’m so excited.

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The NY Times Promotes Big Lie #4 (“Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist”) Again

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Nah, there/s no mainstream media bias!’“

Despicable.

“Mocking Haley, Trump Adds to His Long History of Racist Attacks—The former president is again focusing on race and background as he campaigns against Nikki Haley in New Hampshire.” crowed the New York Times in what was allegedly a news report. The story is another installment of Big Lie #4 on The Big Lies Of The “Resistance” Directory, “Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist.”

The fact that the Times is still doing this—that lie is one of the hoariest and most persistent in the whole ugly batch—means, quite simply, that the paper can’t be trusted. Simple as that. Its editorial policy is to lie about Donald Trump, and other things, of course, but if a news organization will lie about anything to forward an agenda, then it should never be trusted.

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