The 8th Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2016: The Last Of The Worst

February 5, 2017February 5, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Ethics Alarms wraps up the Worst in 2016 Ethics with the usual education and journalism breaches, Ethics Dunce of the Year, and more delights for the sadistic…

Unethical Government Fiasco Of The Year

The Flint, Michigan water crisis. A failure of competence, diligence, responsibility and honesty, compounded by bureaucrats, elected officials, the city of Detroit, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and the EPA made people sick and cost billions.

Good job, everybody!

Scam of the Year

Sen.Ted Cruz’s fake “official” mailer before the Iowa Caucus. Cruz’s campaign sent out mailers labeled in all capital letters, “ELECTION ALERT,” “VOTER VIOLATION,” “PUBLIC RECORD,” and “FURTHER ACTION NEEDED.” On the other side, the mailer said, in red letters at the top, “VOTING VIOLATION.” The text read:

You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record. Their scores are published below, and many of them will see your score as well. CAUCUS ON MONDAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE and please encourage your neighbors to caucus as well. A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.

This is why Trump’s nickname for Cruz, “Lyin’ Ted,” was crude but accurate.

Ethics Dunces Of The Year

All the social media users and others who ended Facebook friendships, genuine friendships and relationship over the 2016 election. Haven’t they ever seen “It’s A Wonderful Life”? Morons. Shame on all of them.

Weenies of the Year

The college students who demanded that exams be cancelled, therapists be available, safe spaces be found, puppies be summoned and cry-ins be organized because the awful candidate they supported in the Presidential election lost, as candidates often do.

How embarrassing.

Unethical University Of The Year

Liberty University. This is the most competitive of categories, with all the schools that railroaded male students based on questionable sexual assault claims while quailing in fear of the Dept. of Education’s “Dear Colleague Letter,” and all the schools that signaled that the results of a simple election justified PTSD treatment for their shattered charges, as well as making it clear to any students who dared to tilt Republican that they were persona non grata. Nonetheless, Liberty University takes the prize with its unique combination of greed, hypocrisy, and warped values. From the Ethics Alarms post:

Last week, with great fanfare, Liberty hired Ian McCaw as its new athletic director. “My vision for Liberty is to position it as a pre-eminent Christian athletic program in America,” McCaw said during a news conference.

This is his first paying assignment since May, when he left his job as the athletic director at Baylor, also a Christian university. His departure was made essential after a thorough investigation that found that those overseeing Baylor’s football team as well as the management of the athletic department—that is, McCaw— had been informed of multiple gang rapes and sexual assault by team members and had ignored it, as any good football-loving Christian would….especially when a star was involved.

Continue reading →

The Most Unethical 2017 Super Bowl Ad Is Yet To Be Revealed, But The Prize For The Most Shameless Is A Lock

February 4, 2017February 4, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6u10YPk_34

Of course, all Super Bowl TV ads by definition are horribly unethical, exploiting for commerce a professional blood sport that renders healthy young men brain-damaged for a drooling public’s coarse amusement. To Hell with all the ads I say. Still, some are worse than others.

History suggests that the obnoxious Audi commercial above won’t be the worst, but it nicks a wider range of ethical breaches than the typical Super Bowl ad. For that it deserves, at very least, a hardy Ethics Alarm Bronx cheer, or “raspberry”…

to wit…

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Esquire’s Ridiculous Book List Smear

February 4, 2017February 4, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

To paraphrase Michael Corleone, every time I think I’ve gotten away from having to comment on the extraordinary unethical performance of the national media toward the President, they puuuull me back in.

What is the correct and fair reaction to the latest media cheap shot on the President of the United States? This one would have been contemptible to inflict on a candidate before the election; now, almost three months after it, the feature is something to behold. Godwin’s Law is invoked far too often, but in this case, it tells the tale.

Esquire’s embarrassing article is called “20 Essential Books to Prepare You for What’s Next: A handy reading list featuring not-so-speculative dystopian fiction, political memoirs, and cautionary tales from Nazi Germany.” The point being made, of course, though already hackneyed, dishonest and thoroughly debunked, is that the President is Hitler. This contention requires ignorance of the United States culture and institutions, Germany, world history, Hitler and the President, but never mind: hate and fear is all the article is intended to generate, not perception or understanding. Taking it seriously requires blocking out the fact that it is the President’s opponents who are flirting with totalitarian methods, using violence to stifle dissent, trying to overthrow lawful elections, calling for coups, and co-opting the news media. The list is an insult without substantiation or justification; Esquire might just as well have published a full page reading: “The President of the United States is a Poopy-Face, and We Hate Him!” There is no substantive difference.

For anyone who has read the books and is not deranged regarding the President to the point of delusion, Esquire’s book list is kind of hilarious. “1984,” for example, is a vision of Soviet-style totalitarianism, with a news media that distorts facts to support a political party similar to the way our current news media manipulates it against the current administration, but previously did to bolster the Obama. Indeed, Esquire’s book list itself is Orwellian, using mass communication to control public opinion with deception, emotion and fear.

Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” was considered hysterical when it was written in the Thirties. Including “The Handmaiden’s Tale” as a guide to “what happens next” is about as silly an example of fearmongering as one could imagine: Continue reading →

Now THIS Is An Unethical Lawyer…In Fact An Unethical ETHICS Lawyer AND A Law Professor! [UPDATED]

February 3, 2017February 3, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

[ My apologies: when this was first posted, I had inadvertently pasted in an excerpt from the Justice press release when I thought I had inserted a link to the complaint. The result was gibberish, and I apologize profusely. Thanks to reader Neil Dorr for alerting me. No more posts composed on my netbook while watching the O.J. miniseries, I promise.]

Today the Justice Department announced a criminal complaint charging attorney Jack Vitayanon with conspiring to distribute 500 grams or more of methamphetamine. Incredibly, Vitayanon, who is under arrest, is an attorney with the Internal Revenue Service Office of Professional Responsibility in Washington, D.C. That’s the office that monitors IRS lawyers’ ethics. He’s also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where I got my law degree. I’m so proud.

Well, AMC needed a “Breaking Bad’ sequel.

The complaint says that Vitayanon conspired with others in Arizona and on Long Island to distribute methamphetamine for several years.He recently negotiated and competed the sales of distribution quantities of methamphetamine to undercover HSI special agents, and were recorded on internet-based video chats and text messages. Then the professor shipped the methamphetamine from his apartment in Washington D.C. to Long Island via Federal Express.

Vitayanon was also observed in his residence smoking methamphetamine from a glass pipe. A search of the defendant’s Washington D.C. apartment executed pursuant to a warrant led to the seizure of additional quantities of methamphetamine, drug paraphernalia, packaging materials and drug ledgers.

In other words, they’ve got him dead to rights.

The defendant graduated from Dartmouth, got his law degree at Columbia, and received his Masters in Taxation from NYU. A lawyer cannot be admitted to any bar without a showing of reliable and honest character. The system and the profession could not have failed more miserably.

Vitayanon is the criminal, but the legal profession and the IRS allowed the rot to get into works.

____________________

Facts:Washington Post

The Naked Teacher Principle, Ex-Porn Star Variation

February 3, 2017February 3, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

That's porn star Robyn (the blonde) on the left, in one of her online photos I can publish; and Resa, empowering teacher of young girls, on the left.

That’s former porn star Robyn (the blonde) on the left, in one of her online photos that I can publish; and Resa, empowering teacher of young girls, on the right.

It has been a while since the last Naked Teacher Principle episode. This one is pretty much standard, with the usual attendant lessons.

For the uninitiated, The Naked Teacher Principle (NTP), to which there are many sub-categories (my personal favorite is the “Naked Teacher Who Paints With His Butt While Wearing A Bag Over His Head Principle”), is this:

“A secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.”

The first formulation of the NTP can be found here. The annals of this endlessly diverse issue are here.

Now the saga of Resa Woodward, aka Robyn Foster. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Robert Reich

February 3, 2017February 3, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

“I was there for part of last night, and I know what I saw and those people were not Berkeley students. Those people were outside agitators. I have never seen them before.There’s rumors that they actually were right-wingers. They were a part of a kind of group that was organized and ready to create the kind of tumult and danger you saw that forced the police to cancel the event. So Donald Trump, when he says Berkeley doesn’t respect free speech rights, that’s a complete distortion of the truth.”

—-Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, spinning himself silly to allow his leftist-colleagues to duck accountability for the Berkeley rioting.

Nope, I don’t believe it.

Robert Reich isn’t a supposed to be a political hack. He’s a scholar and a former Cabinet member. Yet he felt it necessary to abandon all logic and honesty in order to try to shift blame for a leftist anti-Trump, anti-speech riot on a major college campus onto its targets. This might be good news: Reich is no fool, and maybe the Angry Left is beginning to realize that its tactics have backfired. So now it is just lying and blame-shifting. That’s an improvement. Sort of.

Reich’s statement is unbelievable on its face. He teaches at Berkeley, but does he really expect anyone to believe that in the middle of a night-time riot, he was in a position to recognize individual rioters and render an informed judgment regarding whether they were students? The school has more than 38,000 students! It is impossible for Reich to know all of them, and during the chaos of a riot at night, it is highly unlikely that he could even distinguish the students in his own classes. His unequivocal statement that none of the rioters were students is a false one: he cannot know that. He cannot know they were “outside agitators.” He cannot know that he had never seen them before, especially since many of them were wearing masks.

Then he says that there are rumors that they were “right-wingers,” and in the next sentence implies the truth of those rumors. You know, I’ve heard rumors for years that Robert Reich is really one of the Seven Dwarfs, escaped from the fairy tale, like in “Enchanted.” The smart money is on “Doc.” However, since there isn’t a shred of evidence that this rumor is true, and thus suggesting otherwise would be unfair and dishonest, I would never, never state that Reich is close associate of Snow White and Dopey. Reich, however, feels constrained by no such principles, being, apparently, a devotee of the false dialectic employed by leftists for a century or so.

Boy, did I get sick of arguing with people like him is college. Continue reading →

A Banner Day For Unfairness, Pettiness, Dishonesty, And Hypocrisy, Raising The Ethics Query: How Low Can Democrats And The News Media Go?

February 3, 2017February 3, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Actually, mudslinging would be an improvement…

…as well as the related queries..

1. How low do they think they can go without alienating every American with a conscience and a brain?

2. Does any leader with integrity, courage and influence exist in either journalism or the political left to call out this escalating madness?

Yesterday was a stinking garbage scow of unfiltered anti-Trump hate and public deception.

The Prayer Breakfast Freak-Out: I wondered if the Washington Post, which has made very clear its own attitude regarding prayer (and religion generally), would have the gall to criticize the President for not being sufficiently pious during yesterday’s Prayer Breakfast. Just two weeks ago, the Post mocked the Secretary of Agriculture nominee for once “praying for rain.” (The mocking headline has been scrubbed now) Sure enough, the Post did have such gall; so did MSNBC and other media outlets that regularly display contempt for the genuinely religious, a significant majority of whom are conservative and Republican.

The critics of the President’s comments care nothing about prayer, basically like me, but unlike Ethics Alarms they are willing to plow new ground in hypocrisy by using this superfluous event to launch more gratuitous outrage. The Prayer Breakfast has the same origins as the addition of God to the Pledge of Allegiance. It was an anti-Godless Communism grandstanding stunt by Fifties era Republicans at the height of their Red-Baiting mode. Now the same anti-religion liberals who routinely condescend to the faithful, and lobby for taking all references to “God” out of official documents, the same anti-religious zealots who have condemned Betsy DeVos for her support of Catholic schools, are deeply, deeply offended that the President joked about “The Apprentice” at a Prayer Breakfast.

The Frederick Douglas freakout: The President spoke of Douglas in the present tense in his random remarks about Black History Month on February first, prompting multiple cheap shots and despicable contrived insults. The Post wrote yesterday, Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “More Culturally Subversive TV Advertising: FarmersOnly.Com’s Bigotry”

February 2, 2017February 2, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Shutup, in contrast, DOES get it, whatever it is…

A delightfully articulate and analytical reader with the intriguing name“Shutup” sent along today’s Comment of the Day, on the post on the Farmers Only.Com ads, which encourage the bigotry and divisiveness we are increasingly seeing in our country. In his trenchant commentary, reminiscent of Shaw or Mencken, he interestingly labels your humble host a “libtard,” and perhaps as a result, seems to misunderstand the purpose of an ethics blog. For Ethics Alarms never tells anyone what to do; it just explains what one’s ethics are when one does it, and why it may not be wise.

I also offer the comment, which is of the stripe that usually does not make it out of moderation, console disconsolate Hillary fans that the sightings of free range deplorables may be more than mere rumor after all.

Here is Shutup’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More Culturally Subversive TV Advertising: FarmersOnly.Com’s Bigotry”

We will not be hearing from him again.

And welcome to my world… Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On Berkeley’s Anti-Speech Riot

February 2, 2017February 2, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 139 Comments

From SF Gate:

A protest at UC Berkeley over a scheduled appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos turned fiery and violent Wednesday night, prompting police to cancel the event and hustle the Breitbart News editor off campus. But even after the event’s cancellation, hundreds of protesters spilled off campus into the city streets, where the violence continued as they confronted drivers, engaged in fights, smashed storefront windows and set fires.

Protesters decried President Trump’s policies as much as they did the visit by Yiannopoulos, a gay conservative who has been making the rounds at college campuses across the country with his “Dangerous Faggot” talks, specializing in remarks meant to insult, offend and disgust liberals who disagree with his ideas.

Explain The Reasoning Process Of This School System, Please…

February 2, 2017February 2, 2017 / Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Hate speech. Sorry. The lesson has to be “Some states fought the Union over something or other, waiving a flag that we can’t show you because it’s dangerous.” Quiz tomorrow.

President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education is facing the closest Senate vote on any cabinet member ever, in part because two Republican Senators (what the Democrats say doesn’t matter, since they have decided not to cooperate in the governing process) question whether Betsy DeVos “understands the public schools.” In her defense, I don’t see how anyone could understand public schools, especially when they behave like this one…

In Folsom, California, the family of an African American 8th grader filed a complaint against Sutter Middle School history teacher Woody Hart. Tyrie McIntyre’s son had asked Hart for a definition of equality during a discussion of the U.S. Constitution. The teacher allegedly told his eighth-grade class, “When you hang one black person, you have to hang them all. That is equality.” At least that is what Tyler McIntyre, 13, thought Hart said. Tyler, one of only a handful of black students in the class and school, felt embarrassed.

Hart, 70, didn’t deny his student’s account, but explained in an interview that he made the comparison because he was trying to make the discussion “interesting” and “express something that would catch students’ attention.”

“Here’s what I said: ‘If you hang black people in the South, that means that you hang any black person who comes from outside the state. ”

Hart also said that he has spent much of the year teaching his students about racial equality. If that’s the clarity, logic and accuracy with which he taught it, a remedial course, indeed several, may be required.

After the complaint, Principal Keri Phillips interviewed six students chosen at random, all of whom heard Hart give “hanging all blacks” as an example of how states treated individuals under the Constitution. She said that Hart has been told to henceforward use examples “at a level that eighth graders can understand,” avoid stereotypes or culturally insensitive language, and must rely on “very simple analogies that do not focus on the controversy” during lessons involving challenging material.

McIntyre said that this doesn’t address his concerns. “My issue wasn’t the context,” he said. “It was the content. There was no way to justify the statement that he made.”

That’s exactly right, because the statement that “If you hang black people in the South, that means that you hang any black person who comes from outside the state” isn’t insensitive or “too complex” for an 8th grader. It’s stone-cold stupid, bad logic, bad history, and bad teaching. An example that is “at a level that an 8th grader can’t understand”? I’m worried about anyone who thinks he does understand Hart’s example. That the teacher thinks it makes sense tells me that it is an unacceptable risk to allow Hart to teach any subject to anyone.

Nonetheless, Woody Hart was allowed to keep teaching, because public schools. Ah, but last month, he really crossed the line, or whatever it is that causes schools to ding teachers. Teaching the students about the Civil Way, Hart showed them…

A CONFEDERATE FLAG!!!

Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms

An ethics commentary blog on current events and issues

Month: February 2017

The Most Unethical 2017 Super Bowl Ad Is Yet To Be Revealed, But The Prize For The Most Shameless Is A Lock

Esquire’s Ridiculous Book List Smear

Now THIS Is An Unethical Lawyer…In Fact An Unethical ETHICS Lawyer AND A Law Professor! [UPDATED]

The Naked Teacher Principle, Ex-Porn Star Variation

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Robert Reich

A Banner Day For Unfairness, Pettiness, Dishonesty, And Hypocrisy, Raising The Ethics Query: How Low Can Democrats And The News Media Go?

Comment Of The Day: “More Culturally Subversive TV Advertising: FarmersOnly.Com’s Bigotry”

Explain The Reasoning Process Of This School System, Please…

A CONFEDERATE FLAG!!!

Unethical Government Fiasco Of The Year

Scam of the Year

Ethics Dunces Of The Year

Weenies of the Year

Unethical University Of The Year

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A CONFEDERATE FLAG!!!

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