The Incredible Sabrina Caldwell Ethics Train Wreck, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Now for the rest of the story begun in Part I.

The story of the rejected and abandoned Russian orphan haunted “48 Hours” reporter Troy Roberts after he bid the girl farewell  in the Russian hospital. He wanted to know what had become of her, and tried to track her down over the years, with no success. Then, after more than two decades had passed, Caralee reached out to him and they arranged to meet once again.

That supposedly homicidal little girl who was diagnosed as incapable of love now lives in North Carolina as Sabrina Caldwell. She is 33, happily married and has four young children. Roberts met with her near Sabrina’s home, and he spoke with her husband as well. Sabrina explained that she was depressed and even suicidal when she was with Crystal and Jesse, who she felt were more interested in her younger brother than her. When she was falsely accused of trying to kill Joshua, whom she says she loved, she told Roberts she “wanted out.” She agreed that she tried to kill him. She made up the claims that she was hallucinating. When she was abandoned by her adoptive parents in Moscow, she said she  felt like she was in jail, but now believes she was partially responsible, since she had agreed to her parents’ version of events and lied about hallucinating.

Then again, she was just a child at the time.

After two months in the mental hospital, Nina Kostina, who had helped arrange her adoption, rescued Sabrina and brought her back to the United States. Three years later she adopted by another family in North Carolina.  n 2008, Sabrina volunteered for the non profit Mercy Ships, spending two years providing medical care to the poor in Africa. That led to a job at a hospital when she returned to North Carolina. Two years later, she fell in love with  fifth grade teacher Phil Caldwell, whom she met through her church. Before she would agree to marry him, she made him watch the “48 Hours” episode about her first adoptive parents. He told Roberts that he was stunned at what she had gone through. They were married in 2014, and now have three daughters and an infant son.  Sabrina Caldwell has never been diagnosed with any mental or emotional illness, and takes no medication for such disorders. Continue reading →

Tales Of The Great Stupid: Monkey Pox Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I know, I know, that’s a macaque, not a monkey. But I love the photo.

Why can’t the news media and health officials just stick to the facts and stop trying to manipulated public opinion and conduct with word games and deception?

Well, it’s rhetorical question: the answer is inherent in the question. They are unethical, untrustworthy, and abuse their position and power.

Take monkeypox, for example.

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The Incredible Sabrina Caldwell Ethics Train Wreck, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

At the end of last year, CBS’s “48 Hours” broadcast an update of a horrifying episode from two decades ago. I missed both programs, but I stumbled upon a rerun of the December 2021 follow-up last night. The tale is a true ethics train wreck that, incredibly, had a happy ending, making it also an abject lesson in moral luck.

The story had special resonance for me because it involved the aftermath of an American couple adopting of a Russian orphan, a process my wife and I went through as well.  In 1997, Crystal and Jesse were a young married couple who had tried and failed to conceive. They fund Russian adoption agency’s website and were smitten by a photo of a beautiful 9-year-old girl. The couple began the adoption process.  The child’s medical records from the adoption agency, were concerning, though: they described developmental problems.

CBS made a big deal about this, but essentially all older Russian orphans have developmental issues. Crystal told CBS that the “were assured that this child was healthy and that in a good home … with the best doctors in America helping her with the developmental issues, that she should be fine.” That was accurate advice (and she and her husband should have known that by doing responsible research before deciding to adopt a Russian orphan). I should also mention here that Russian medical records regarding orphans are notoriously unreliable. Our son, who has been freakishly healthy, came with ten pages of supposedly serious medical problems. Our pediatrician literally laughed at the document. Continue reading →

Why Must I Be A Blogging Ethicist In Ethics Zugzwang?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I was going to sing it, but it doesn’t fit the music…

Here is my problem…

Describing the ugly developments arising out of the Democratic Soviet-style show trial aimed at neutralizing Donald Trump by criminalizing his post election excesses, and, if possible, intimidating and harassing his supporters past and present, esteemed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy writes in part, Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/28/2022, For All The Good It Will Do…

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
I’ve been intending to write about “Billions,” the Showtime ethics drama finally streaming on Amazon Prime, but an irritating moment in the third season has disrupted my thinking about the show. All the characters are pop culture trivia buffs, especially pre-90s movies. (It’s as if all the writers are over 70.) In a major scene in Season 3, Chuck Roades (Paul Giamatti), the Assistant US Attorney who is the show’s corrupted and conflicted protagonist, is trying to convince a target of his prosecution to plead guilty. Roades gives a long analogy that he says comes from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which he claims he knows backwards and forwards.
 
He describes the last scene, as Butch and Sundance prepare to shoot their way out their final predicament in Bolivia, not knowing that the whole Bolivian army is outside and that they are doomed. Rhoades says they really think they will prevail as they always have before, so the two charge out, guns blazing, and thus  “die with honor,” because they never realized that their courage would be futile and that the foe they faced was unbeatable.
 
Well, this is a flat out misinterpretation of the scene.  I know that film well too: I’ve lectured on it.  The great thing about the final scene is that Butch and Sundance know it’s all over for them. Both are badly wounded. Sundance has to tie a gun to Butch’s wounded hand. They engage in bravado about where they will go next, knowing that there is no “next;” they bicker like they always have, each keeping up the fantasy that there’s no reason to give up or to despair, faking hope so the other will remain strong. In this ritual they demonstrate their love for each other. (The scene chokes me up every time; it did just now, dammit!) When they charge out shooting, it is noble, but because they know there’s no hope, and they decide that they might as well go down fighting, since they are going down one way or the other. It’s the Alamo.
 
Why would a show that makes such a fetish about movies let a main character, a smart and literate character, a character who normally makes perceptive  references to classic films, miss the point of a movie he purports to love? This is both a breach of the show’s integrity, but deliberate misinformation. I assume lots of younger viewers haven’t seen the George Roy Hill classic Western, and they have come to trust the show’s authority regarding old movies. Now they have been taught the wrong message of the ending….and it’s a great ending.
 
1. More on the media helping the Biden administration recession cover-up. Here’s how the New York Times begins its story on the fact that  GDP fell for the second straight quarter, the long-standing traditional definition of a recession.
 
Gross domestic product fell by 0.2 percent in the second quarter, after a 0.4 percent decline in the first, fueling fears that a recession may have already begun.
 
Yes, that’s like saying, “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor yesterday, fueling fears that Japan was now hostile to the United States.” And the media gets away with this. Sometimes, they even succeed in redefining something even when it makes no sense. My favorite: the Democratic Party allied media went all in arguing that Bill Clinton wasn’t lying when he said that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky, because oral sex isn’t really sex. That convenient (and absurd) rationalization was instantly adopted by teens across the country. Now there was a variety of sex that wasn’t “technically” sex. A President said so!

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Ethics Observations On Justice Thomas’s Exit From George Washington University Law School

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the only prominent black public servant who is unable (and unwilling) to use an accusation of “racism” to shield himself from criticism, will not teach a Constitutional Law Seminar this fall, as was announced in  an email addressed to students by Judge Gregory Maggs, who has co-taught the course with Thomas since 2011. Justice Thomas, Maggs wrote, is “unavailable” to co-teach the course in the fall. Now Thomas is no longer listed as a lecturer on GW Law’s course list.

Thomas’ withdrawal from the course certainly appears to be a reaction to a protest petition signed by 11,000 GW students and community members  demanding his removal from the university’s faculty in the wake of the Dobbs ruling and Thomas’ controversial concurring opinion. George Washington officials promptly  rejected the demand, but Thomas faced likely protests and disruptions to his class if he stayed on.

Observations: Continue reading →

Evening Ethics Cool-Off, 7/27/2022: “I Hate Being Right All The Time”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

On this date in 1974, the last truly bi-partisan, Constitutionally solid Presidential impeachment was sought by the House of Representatives after bi-partisan House Judiciary Committee voted an impeachment resolution out for the entire House to consider. The first Article of Impeachment passed the House on the 27th; two more, one for abuse of power another for contempt of Congress, passed on July 29 and 30. When August 5 saw Nixon complying with a Supreme Court ruling requiring that he provide transcripts of crucial White House tapes, he was undeniably implicated him in the cover up of the Watergate break-in. Three days later, President Nixon announced his resignation.

That, of course, is how it’s supposed to work and how the Founders envisioned the process. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was turned, by Clinton, into a purely partisan process despite very valid charges against him. Then Democrats destroyed the procedure by all time in their fervor to crush President Donald Trump, essentially voting for two impeachments on flimsy pretenses, the second one without even sufficient hearings, because they had the votes to do so. This both debased the process and unethically transformed it from a rare and emergency fail-safe to remove criminal President, into an ideological weapon without credibility or teeth. Ironically, this short-sighted, unethical and undemocratic blunder, the result of Speaker Nancy Pelosi caving to the whims of her party’s most extreme elements, both strengthened the office of the Presidency (when his party has a majority in the House) and weakened it (when his party dominates the House and Senate.)

1. Now THAT’S Incompetence! “Leave It To Beaver” star Tony Dow’s representatives announced on his Facebook page yesterday that the sitcom star (he was “The Beev’s” older brother, and unlike Jerry Mathers, could act) had died after being so informed by Dow’s wife. This was immediately picked up by most media outlets, and obituaries appeared. Brother Wally, however, was still breathing. The representatives then posted an “URGENT UPDATE” on the Facebook page, writing, “This morning Tony’s wife Lauren, who was very distraught, had notified us that Tony had passed and asked that we notify all his fans. As we are sure you can understand, this has been a very trying time for her. We have since received a call from Tony’s daughter-in-law saying that while Tony is not doing well, he has not yet passed. Tony’s son Christopher and his daughter-in-law Melissa have also been by his side comforting him, and we will keep you posted on any future updates.”

I don’t care how distraught Mrs. Dow is: how hard is it to tell if her husband is dead or not? There’s the old mirror trick, for example. If she’s so “distraught,” why did Dow’s representatives not seek conformation of their client’s death before announcing it to the world? I recall many instances where the news media jumped the gun with a premature death announcement, but I’ve never heard of a celebrity’s family announcing the End by mistake.

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Dispatches From The Great Stupid, Climate Change Grandstanding Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

We owe this tale to the always mordantly amusing Manhattan Contrarian.

Like his counterpart in the White House, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, (D, of course), is addicted to completely useless climate change measures. Last week he signed the bipartisan Clean Air Act, and in the subsequent celebration of this epic moment, a State Senator spouted rhetoric about waiting for Washington, D.C. to “save the planet.” Anyone who actually understands anything about the vicissitudes of climate change and the wildly complex interaction of factors affecting it knows that Washington, D.C. can’t “save the planet,” but Lamont’s state really can’t save the planet. The Manhattan Contrarian explains that Connecticut…

…has a population of only about 3.6 million. Its greenhouse gas emissions are in the range of about 41 MMTCO2e per year, which is well less than 0.1% of total world annual emissions of about 49,000 MMTCO2e. You could zero out Connecticut’s emissions entirely, and it wouldn’t even amount to a rounding error in the world total. Indeed, the increase that occurs each year in China’s CO2 emissions is a multiple of Connecticut’s total emissions. (According to Our World in Data here, from 2019 to 2020, latest years given, China’s CO2 emissions went from 10.49 to 10.67 billion tons, a one-year increase of about 180 million tons, or well more than four times the total annual emissions of Connecticut.)

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“Ignorant, Stupid And With Dead Ethics Alarms Is No Way To Stay In Business, Atlantic Sports Bar & Restaurant…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And now for something completely appalling! The Tiverton, Rhode Island eatery posted this meme to Facebook:

Now what?

What occurred after the meme went up was that a local talk radio host called to investigate. She says the restaurant owner told her that he thought the meme was funny and then cut off the call. The employee who posted the gag alleged that he didn’t know who the girl in the photo was.

After the post had been taken down by the restaurant, a contrite apology went up in its place:

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