Many of you don’t get it, but baseball is a wonderful laboratory for general ethics problems, revelations and teachable moments. To wit…
Ketel Marte, 32, is one of the top second basemen in baseball, indeed one of the top players in the game at any position. However, Marte failed to show up for a game last week with his team, the Arizona Diamondbacks in the middle of a pennant race. He deserted his team mates without letting anyone connected with the Diamondbacks know the reason for his absence or his whereabouts for more than 24 hours. His manager, Torey Lovullo, said he was dealing with “personal problems,” then Marte was determined to be injured and was placed on the injured list. Cameras subsequently caught him enjoying himself at a casino. This isn’t the first time Marte has gone AWOL either: he did it last season too.
The Athletic, which serves as the New York Times captive sports service, asked Diamondbacks General Manager Mike Hazen why the Diamondbacks tolerate Marte’s behavior. The answer made me nauseous.
“He’s an extremely talented player,” Hazen said Wednesday. “At some point, there’s a balance between what you are willing to deal with to get a level of production that can win you baseball games. We’re in the business of winning baseball games.”
“Do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world? Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.So either you have buried your head in the sand … and that’s an intentional choice to be uninformed, or you took a gamble, and neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct.”
Aarons’ brief included references to imaginary witnesses and fake testimony from at least one real witness. That AI bots are likely to make up case cites and even statutory language has been recognized and publicized widely, not just in legal publications but in the general news media since early 2024. Lawyers, including those with large national law firms like Morgan & Morgan and even the Justice Department continuing to file these bogus bot-authored court documents is amazing to me. And they are too stupid, ignorant and lazy to even proof-read what the bots wrote! One judge recently railed specifically at using ChatGPT for legal work, which he compared to using Mad Magazine as a legal reference.
Bacon threw the metaphorical book at Aarons, removing him as attorney from the case of a 60-year-old man convicted last year of murdering his wife, found him in contempt of court, ordered him to pay $5,000 to a client protection fund, and referred him to the bar for potential discipline. The murder appeal will be handled now by a public defender.
It isn’t just lawyers, of course, who deserve tongue-lashings like this. Teachers, professors, newspaper editors, legislators, politicians, screenwriters, and, yes, judges to name just a few of the affected groups have an obligation to keep up-to-date on the AI revolution, and a disturbing number of them are not even close, which is inexcusable.
Two veteran members of Congress, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. James Clyburn recently indicated that they were ill-informed regarding AI. That this is, frighteningly, not unusual shouldn’t give us any comfort. Lawmakers are notorious for taking an inordinate amount of time to understand new developing technology, as when the late Senator Ted Stevens, while chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, described the internet as a “series of tubes.” Like the internet but perhaps even more so, however, artificial intelligence is a civilization-altering (and perhaps -threatening) phenomenon moving at the speed of light. Those who are too dim, indolent, unimaginative and irresponsible to keep up need to get out of the way and retire to some nice, safe, quiet pursuit like beachcombing or golf.
Oh…it’s the Rules of Professional Conduct, Your Honor, not the “code.” Judges have ethics codes. Lawyers haven’t been governed by a “code” for 40 years.
The second I saw Teddy in the “Near Great” category and White House Ethics Villain Woodrow Wilson in the “Great” category (along with Andy), I immediately knew the source. It was a late 1940s assessment by Democratic hack historian (and Kennedy shill) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. It even used the same pictures. Oh, someone cut and pasted Clinton’s face in there, but no Truman? No JFK? No Ike? No Reagan? No Obama? Literally no historian today dares to rank Wilson, an open, virulent racist, as “great,” but that was typical through the 1960s. Similarly, Jackson, though a Democrat and presumed great in the overwhelmingly left-leaning history departments has been cancelled since they started focusing on Old Hickory’s treatment of Native Americans. (Jackson was still a great President.) I know the point was the joke of putting Trump on top, but this was lazy and irresponsible execution by whatever staffer prepared it.
The one thing that puzzles me is how John Adams ended up in the “Near Great” tier. Even back when people took Schlesinger seriously, nobody, literally nobody, claimed Adams’s single term was anything but a disaster.
As for the silly thing in general, I know Trump does this stuff to annoy the people who hate him, but acting like a 12-year-old really does nobody any good, not Trump, not his party, not the country. In addition to making the Trump Deranged more crazy than they already are, such stunts make rational people question his judgment, not to mention his prudence and political skills.
But enough of that.
Let’s have a lively open forum this week. Last week’s was a dud.
The only way I could embed this video was to include the X-user’s commentary. No, liberal women are not “literally” brain dead.
However, it is hard to imagine a woman hearing such unethical, nonsensical junk escaping her mouth and not exclaiming, “Wait, did I really say that?” And useful research could and should be performed to determine how a woman ends up capable of thinking this way.
“The best way to protect my baby is to kill my baby.” This makes sense only in rare, dire circumstances such as when both mother and child are about to be eaten alive by a velociraptor or a ravenous zombie. With those remote exception, its an idiotic thing to say, or even think
Those of us who had high hopes that New York Times leftist cult exile Bari Weiss can be trusted to reform CBS News as a trailblazing journalism organization that rededicates itself to true objectivity, integrity and trustworthiness have been betrayed and disappointed again.
CBS News’s Editor-in-Chief, briefly principled in sacking some prominent “60 Minutes” hacks and propagandists, is seeking to hire that paragon of brilliance, that journalism ethics champion and conflicts-of-interest watchdog, that distinguished lawyer and Constitution scholar, Chris Cuomo.
This is signature significance. If Weiss thinks it’s responsible to hire a proven biased and incompetent dimwit like the Fredo of the Cuomo family, she’s just another ethics-free suit seeking ratings over competent journalism. Cuomo is arguably an even worse excuse for a broadcast journalist than Don Lemon, though it’s neck-and neck. Yet the Independent reports,
“In a bid to attract more big-name talent, the editor-in-chief is in talks with Cuomo to join the network, sources told Status. Oliver Darcy, a journalist at the publication, said Weiss was “enraptured” by Cuomo and had already met him in person. The pair, he reports, met for a meal and have often swapped text messages. If a deal did go ahead, Cuomo would join CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil as another high-profile Weiss appointee.”
She’s “enraptured” by that idiot? Great. Oh, why not just hire Scott Pelley back? He’s an unapologetic Axis agent and partisan hack, but at least his IQ hits three digits.
The New York Times is in a tender mood over I.C.E. deporting illegal immigrants who haven’t killed, raped, robbed or otherwise turned to a life of crime—at least as far as we know— being deported by I.C.E. In the deliberately deceitfully-headlined “ICE Arrests Soar as People With No Criminal Record Are Increasingly Targeted” (Uh, no, illegal immigrants are being targeted. I, for example, qualify for the group “People With No Criminal Record,” and I am not being “targeted”), the New York Times writes today,
A majority of the immigrants arrested in July were people who were accused of violating civil immigration laws but who had not been charged with or convicted of a crime, an analysis of newly released federal data shows. The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent. Overall, immigration arrests rose to record highs with 43,000 ICE arrests in June and 49,000 in July. Two fatal shootings involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, in Texas and Maine, drew outrage but did not meaningfully slow the pace of arrests…ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests…Immigration arrests are near all-time highs in almost every state. Even sparsely populated Montana and Vermont saw spikes, with arrest rates more than doubling…
…Deportations have averaged well over 1,000 people a day since last summer, and there are signs that they are picking up speed. The number of deportation flights began rising in the spring, and in July reached a record of at least 329 flights out of the country, according to ICE Flight Monitor, a tracking effort run by Human Rights First.
My one word analysis of that report, which the New York Times presumably thinks will outrage its readers: Good. (And why would, or should, two fatal shootings involving ICE agents slow down appropriate law enforcement?)
Hey, but just for perspective and giggles, let’s see what appreciative Times readers (there are some sane comments in there too) are saying about the article:
Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt has a bright future ahead of him, but it is brighter now because his manager, Pat Murphy taught him a lesson about what it means to be a professional in general and a Major League Baseball player in particular.
As you can see in the video, Pratt hit what looked like an easily caught pop-up in the fifth-inning of last night’s game against the New York Mets, so he jogged down the baseline more slowly than Pete Rose used to run to first after a base on balls. The Mets, because they stink this year, managed to mess up the play and the ball dropped in for what would have been a double if the kid had been running hard. Standing on first, he looked surprised to see that Murphy was replacing him with a pinch-runner, pulling him off the field in an old-school public rebuke for unprofessional play.
A Facebook “influencer” whom I had never heard of before somehow invaded my Facebook feed with this:
“All the news channels yesterday were full of tributes to Dolly Parton. Of course, it’s sad that she died and I was aware of many of the wonderful things other than the music and performances she gave us. What surprised me was how refreshing it was to see this in review against the against the constant chronicle of the cruel, corrupt, inane, buffoonish, disgusting lying narcissist who is usually dominating the news.”
I responded that he needs to get help, because being compelled to express hatred for the President of the United States in discussing completely unrelated topics is the definitive symptom of crippling Trump Derangement. I expect his post to attract dozens of “likes” and “loves.”
“[T]he majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”
—-Justice Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, again putting into black-and-white her intolerable political bias and lack of judicial decorum in her dissent to the 6-3 majority SCOTUS decision, a 10-page, unsigned opinion staying an injunction by a federal judge against the implementation of President Trump’s executive order imposing restrictions on mail-in voting.
I won’t pretend to know enough about the substantive law underlying the majority decision, and after trying to read Justice Jackson’s seemingly endless dissent, my brain hurts. However, I can say with ethical certainty that a judge who is automatically inclined to ascribe sinister motives to an elected President’s actions should be disqualified from weighing in on any controversy regarding those actions.
I read Trump’s EO regarding mail-in ballots as consistent with his oath of office and the definition of his powers under the Constitution. Mail-in ballots threaten the integrity of Federal elections and therefore the Constitution itself. There are limits to state sovereignty in determining election regulations and procedures, something Justice Jackson refuses to acknowledge. Gee, I wonder why only 23 states have challenged the EO. Which states might they be?
Elsewhere in her “War and Peace”-length dissent, Jackson complains that the claim that mail-in ballots risk election integrity hasn’t been proven. In fact, some courts have taken judicial notice of the fact, and it is a fact and an obvious fact, that mail-in ballots are unacceptably vulnerable to fraud. But I digress. The ethics issue now is that a Supreme Court Justice begins her analysis of an Executive Branch controversy with the biased presumption that the President of the United States is not pursuing what he believes is in the best interests of the nation under the Constitution. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has again demonstrated that she is a dangerous blight on the Court, the Separation of Powers, and the functioning of U.S. constitutional government.
As you must know by now unless you have been in a submerged submarine with a broken communications system like the one in “Crimson Tide,” Dolly Parton died yesterday at 80. Why her death is being described as a shock is a mystery: as my father said when he hit 80, “It’s the Red Zone, son. I can kick off any second from here on!” Nonetheless, the public and official outpouring of grief, love and admiration is unlike anything we’ve seen at least since Princess Diana’s demise in 1997.
The tectonic reaction is certainly not based on Dolly’s singing, acting or song-writing. Personally, I was never a fan; Dolly’s singing voice always sounded to me like someone who has inhaled helium. Her songs were pleasant but unremarkable to my ear. As an actress, I place Dolly Parton in the large category of experienced public performers who can project their own personalities effectively into roles and stories where their personalities seem appropriate, a diverse group that ranges from the late Fred Thompson to the late Bob Newhart to the not-quite-late Ringo Starr.
Clearly, the reason Dolly is being mourned so vigorously is that her public persona was entirely benign, virtuous and lovable, even aggressively so. She literally gave nobody any reason not to like her. In 2020, as the Great Stupid was grabbing American society by the throat, Hollywood producer Rob Long wrote an appreciation of Dolly in “Commentary” exploring her universal popularity. He wrote in part,
Ethics Alarms 