Year: 2013

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Sister Antonia Brenner, 1926-2013

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

 

Sister Antonia dies at 86

Sister Antonia caring for a prisoner in La Mesa in 2002

Once again, someone remarkable has died whose life was insufficiently celebrated while she was alive. I had never heard of Antonia Brenner until yesterday. I wish I had.

Mary Clarke was born on Dec. 1, 1926—we share a birthday!— the second of three children. Her father, Joseph, was a prosperous business executive; the family had a second home overlooking the Pacific. After her second marriage, to Carl Brenner, she was known as Mary Brenner, and was the mother of eight children, comfortably ensconced in Beverly Hills.  While struggling through her second divorce, she began doing charity work for the poor in Los Angeles.  A priest friend, Monsignor Anthony Brouwers, took  her to La Mesa state penitentiary in Tijuana, Mexico, which was filled with convicted murderers, thieves, gang members, rapists and other hardened criminals, all living in brutal and inhumane  conditions even by the horrible standards of U.S. prisons. Everything—her life, her name, and most of all, the existence of the prisoners, changed after that.

She became devoted to their plight as human beings, and brought the prisoners basics of comfort that were being withheld from them, at her own expense. She gave them aspirin, blankets, tooth paste, soap, even prescription eyeglasses. She carried spare toilet paper with her, and kep a lookout for other missing essentials. Brenner acquired a prison contract to sell soda pop to prisoners and then used the proceeds to post bail for minor offenders. She began spending more and more time with the prisoners, gaining their affection and trust, even singing in their church services. She treated them with dignity and kindness: when prisoners died, it was Mary Brenner who prepared him for burial. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The SpongeBob Headstones

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

SpongeBob Gravestone Removed

You can’t make stuff like this up.

Apparently I was last one in the nation to learn about the surreal dispute between the parents of the late Kimberly Walker, a 28-year-old Iraq War vet who was  found murdered in a Colorado hotel room eight months ago, and the owners of Cincinnati’s historic  Spring Grove Cemetery, concerning the headstones erected over her grave on October 10.

The cemetery reversed its official approval of the twin monuments, apparently bestowed by someone who had momentarily been possessed by the spirit of Chuck Jones, saying that it would be inappropriate for a traditional and historic 19th Century pastoral cemetery that serves as the final resting place of Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, several Civil War generals including “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who lost the Battle of Chancellorsville, the Hall of Fame manager of the 1927 Yankees, Miller Huggins, and many others, to sport not one but two hideous 6-foot-high, 4-foot-wide, 7,000 pound slabs of granite lovingly carved to depict SpongeBob Squarepants in military gear, one of which displays Kimberly’s name on his uniform. (For those of you who are hopelessly estranged from popular culture, SpongeBob is a fictional deep sea yellow sponge who stars in a popular Nickelodeon cable TV children’s cartoon show. Kimberly, we are told, loved the show. SpongeBob is an idiot, by the way.)

The family is outraged, and feels abused. “I feel like, and we all feel like, SpongeBob should stay there. We bought the plots, all six of them. We put the monuments there, we did what we had to do and they said they could provide that service to us,’ said Walker’s twin sister Kara, who was looking forward to eventually being buried under the second headstone. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the cemetery. I even told the people there that I think this is the best monument I’ve ever seen. It’s the best headstone in the cemetery and they all agreed. It came out really nice.”

Yyyyyyyeah.

Still, putting considerations of taste aside—-and what American these days doesn’t do that daily?—the Walkers duly purchased the plots (they have four more…and just think of what might end up on them) and properly cleared the monuments.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for this lovely Fall day is this:

Does fairness dictate that the Walkers be allowed to erect whatever monuments they choose, including giant, garish sculptures of a cartoon character, to honor the memory of their daughter? Continue reading →

The Unprofessional Cause Of Unprofessional Lawyer Brian Zulberti

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Brian ZYoung Brian Zulberti may be nice guy. He may even be a competent lawyer, though the chances of his being able to demonstrate that are diminishing daily. Nevertheless, his quixotic and misguided, and dare I say it, really stupid, quest to show that professionalism, judgment and character are not properly relevant to the practice of law is an exercise in hubris that must fail, deserves to fail, and of course, will fail, leaving him to pick up the pieces of fifteen minutes of media fame purchased at the price of a reputation. It looks like he’s having fun, and that’s something, I guess. Ten years from now, I doubt that he’ll think it was worth it.

Shortly after passing the Delaware Bar, Zulberti, a 2009 law school grad,  emailed the entire Bar membership asking for a job. In lieu of his résumé;  he attached a photo of himself in a Villanova Law muscle shirt that would be more at home on a dating site for the shallow. The web also contained his half-naked selfies, and various websites with varying motives picked up the story. Interviewed on YouTube, Zulberti proclaimed that being true to himself was more important to him than getting hired, and that he wasn’t about to change his Facebook privacy settings to portray himself as a traditional, dignified, applicant for legal work.

Let me pause here to say that in many ways I sympathize with Zulberti. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Fat-Bashing Film Critic Rex Reed

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

melissa_Elle

Actress Melissa McCarthy stole the film “Bridesmaids” right out from under its better known stars, including the screenplay’s author, Kirsten Wigg. In that film, her hit CBS sitcom “Mike and Molly,” and subsequent films (of varying quality), McCarthy has shown that she is s versatile, appealing comedienne with deep dramatic resources. Film critic Rex Reed, however, is mostly concerned with her weight, which is usually a component of the characters she plays and the quality, other than her talent, that sets her apart from the standard issue, impossibly thin, fit and sexy Hollywood actress.

In his withering review of her latest comedy “Identity Thief,” Reed causally refers to McCarthy as a “female hippo” and reduces her career to this: “Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids) is a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success.” Called on his fat-bashing, Reed responded, “I have lost entirely too many friends to obesity-related diseases to pretend Ms. McCarthy’s alarming obesity is anything to applaud.”

There are two aspects of this that are striking. One is that Rex Reed, who played the pre-op Myra Breckenridge in the awful movie version of Gore Vidal’s gender-bending, and considered scandalous at the time, satiric novel (Raquel Welch, now over 70, was post-op), is still alive and reviewing, albeit obscurely until, as now, he writes something outrageous. At one time—40 years ago? Longer?— Reed was considered the most quotable and one of the most influential film critics; now, to say he is passé would be a compliment.

The other striking aspect of this incident is this:  while the culture will turn with unforgiving venom on any public figure who derides individuals for their color, sexual orientation, malady or disability, any of which would be considered cruel, bigoted, and hateful, deriding individuals because their weight doesn’t meet with aesthetic norms—among which are now out-sized breasts on otherwise fat-free frames and sharply chiseled abdominal muscles, a look that was literally freakish until the dawn of Nautilus and personal trainers—-still is largely regarded as justified and acceptable. Continue reading →

Forgetting The Unwritten Boy Scout Law: “A Scout Is Not A Destructive Idiot”

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

David Hall, Glenn Taylor and his son—the first two are scoutmasters—face felony arrests after posting video, taken by Taylor’s son, of the two men destroying a 200 million-year-old rock formation at Goblin Valley State Park last week. They knock over the rock, high-five each other, cackle with joy, and then say—and this is now their defense—that a child could have been killed if the rock fell on its own. Moe, or perhaps it is Curley, also says, perhaps more significantly, “We have modified Goblin Valley!”

Some observations: Continue reading →

Hyping “Extreme Weather”=”Untrustworthy”…Also “Al Gore”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

sharknado

In their effort to create enough climate change hysteria to rally the public in support of scientifically dubious and possibly futile—but expensive!— regulations, some media outlets have resorted to censoring commentary that is hostile to current global warming cant, even though few if any of the editors involved  comprehend the data, research, or models. I propose that they would do more to bolster the push to accept  man-made climate change if they stopped publishing blatant and misleading hype, and they could begin by not quoting Al Gore.

Stipulated: both sides of the climate change debate are guilty of misrepresentation, lies, exaggeration and nonsense. The difference is that most of the news media adopts and legitimizes the pro-climate change misrepresentation, lies, exaggeration and nonsense, with this year’s model being the claim that climate change is already increasing “extreme weather events.” Continue reading →

The Accountability Failure In The Wake Of The Obamacare Website Crash Is More Significant Than The Failure Of The Site Itself

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments
It's nobody's fault, really...

It’s nobody’s fault, really…

More than two weeks into the heralded launch of the Affordable Care Act, the roll out of the Healthcare.gov website still qualifies as an ongoing fiasco. The Obama administration was fortunate that this was largely, though not completely, overshadowed by the silly, misconcieved and mishandled government shut-down protest by Congressional Republicans, thanks in part to a pliant and biased newsmedia that welcomed the opportunity not to focus proper attention on yet another inexcusable Administration botch. Nonetheless, it is inexcusable. A business that launched a much-ballyhooed new product this way would be out of business; the executive in charge of such a miserable failure would be toast. The fact that Obamacare is still in business after this competence and diligence betrayal speaks only to the benefits of a governmental monopoly. The fact that no executive is yet toast, however, is less explicable. Perhaps the more accurate statement is that the explanation for it is horrifying. Continue reading →

CBS’s “Blue Bloods”: Endorsing the Saint’s Excuse and Polk County Justice

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

 

Time for the department ethics training, Chief. You should sit in on it too...

Time for the department ethics training, Chief. You should sit in on it too…

“Blue Bloods,” Tom Selleck’s New York police family drama on CBS, began as a paean to the core values of public service, nobility, justice, courage and honesty as it chronicled the work and lives of three generations of the Reagan family. The Reagan men are all cops, the one female is a DA, and Selleck is the paternal Chief of Police. Based on last night’s episode, “The Truth About Lying,” series creators Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green have permitted the show’s writing staff to be infiltrated by the Dark Side in its fourth season, and now its calling cards will include the enthusiastic promotion of the abuse of power and the celebration of lying as long as it’s all for a good cause. That’s the Saint’s Excuse, one of the most deadly of the rationalizations, in which “good” people decide that they are empowered to do unethical things in the pursuit of what they believe are worthy goals. The Saint’s Excuse is something of a theme in the United States these days. Now “Blue Bloods” is making sure popular culture spreads the word.

The episode, which you can watch here, was ostensibly about Selleck’s Chief’s efforts to foil the city’s newly appointed “inspector general,” installed in the wake of a “ripped from the headlines” court rejection of an effective “stop and frisk” program by New York’s finest. Continue reading →

Facebook Ethics: Making Your Facebook Friends As Ignorant As You Are

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Foto-Facebook

All of a sudden, for some unknown reason (maybe THIS story!) there is an avalanche of Facebook users posting this language, or the equivalent:

Now that there has been a change in Facebook’s privacy policy, I am making the following change: I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, or posts, both past and future. By this statement, I give notice to Facebook it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of privacy can be punished by law.  NOTE: Facebook is now a public entity. All members must post a note like this. If you prefer, you can copy and paste this version. If you do not publish a statement at least once it will be tactically allowing the use of your photos, as well as the information contained in the profile status updates. DO NOT SHARE. You MUST copy and Paste.

================================
PRIVACY NOTICE: Warning – any person and/or institution and/or Agent and/or Agency of any governmental structure including but not limited to the United States Federal Government also using or monitoring/using this website or any of its associated websites, you do NOT have my permission to utilize any of my profile information nor any of the content contained herein including, but not limited to my photos, and/or the comments made about my photos or any other “picture” art posted on my profile. You are hereby notified that you are strictly prohibited from disclosing, copying, distributing, disseminating, or taking any other action against me with regard to this profile and the contents herein. The foregoing prohibitions also apply to your employee, agent, student or any personnel under your direction or control.

The contents of this profile are private and legally privileged and confidential information, and the violation of my personal privacy is punishable by law.

UCC 1-103 1-308 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

Impressive!

Scary!

Legal sounding!

But oh so wrong in every way. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong With The Florida Cyber-Bullying Arrests? Everything.

/ Jack Marshall / 193 Comments

“Bullying, as they are supposed to teach you in school, is when someone uses their superior power to subordinate and humiliate someone weaker than themselves. This is wrong, and it is always wrong.”

The Sheriff of Polk County...wait, no, that's Tom Cruise, searching for pre-criminals in "Minority Report." Well, close enough.

The Sheriff of Polk County…wait, no, that’s Tom Cruise, searching for pre-criminals in “Minority Report.” Well, close enough.

This is a quote from an Ethics Alarms post earlier this year, about a school that forced students to do embarrassing things in a warped effort to discourage bullying. There is a disturbing societal consensus brewing that opposition to bullying justifies all sorts of extra-legal, unethical, excessive, abusive and unconstitutional measures, and there are a dearth of persuasive voices point out that this consensus is dangerous and wrong. Those potential voices are being stilled by a kind of cultural bullying. How can you defend bullies! Look at the victims! Think of the children! What a horrible, unfeeling person you are!

This is the only explanation I can generate for the fact that none of the commentary and media coverage regarding the Florida arrests of a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl on trumped-up charges of “stalking” following the suicide of Rebecca Ann Sedwick pointed out that the arrests were a travesty of the justice system, an abuse of power, child abuse, legally and constitutionally offensive, and, yes, bullying of a different kind. Continue reading →