Month: March 2020

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/4/2020: Marching To Georgia Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Hello, I must be going…

Desperately trying to get this post out before the walls close in. I’m doing a program for an always receptive BigLaw firm in Atlanta, and its a program I know well, and I’m still anxious about it. It doesn’t help that I have some kind of cold, but the show must go on…

1. Super Tuesday musings…

  • Last night, I stumbled on  a Fox News panel discussing the Julie Principle at length regarding Joe Biden’s brain farts and Trump’s Tweets! They didn’t use that term, of course, but it would have helped explicate what they were trying to say, which was that once you’ve decided to accept the flaws of a candidate, more evidence of those flaws won’t change your support.
  • Speaking of… Joe Biden got his sister and his wife mixed up during his victory speech. If there was ever a question of how much the country doesn’t want socialism, the fact that so many Democrats preferred to vote for this sad husk than capitulate to Bernie should answer it.
  • How proud I am of my home state, which told the world that even voters who know  best, and presumably support to some extent, Elizabeth Warren don’t think she should be President. Thus they validated Abe Lincoln’s rule: you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Warren was the 2020 field’s worst demagogue and biggest hypocrite, as well as one of the most shameless liars. As I write this, she hasn’t dropped out yet, perhaps because she doesn’t want to help Sanders, whom she still resents for saying that a women couldn’t be elected President. Well, he was right as far as she is concerned. Good.

Warren was easily my least favorite of the Democratic contenders from an ethics standpoint. After I posted on Facebook about one of her many deceptions, a friend, apparently seriously, commented that I seemed to have a real bias against her. It reminded me of one of Martin Short’s brilliant improvs as idiot celebrity interviewer “Jiminy Glick,” when he cracked up Mel Brooks by asking, “Now what is it that you have against Hitler?”

2. Wait, he did WHAT??? Cedric Sunray, a college recruiter from Oklahoma Christian University,  visited Harding Charter Preparatory High School in Oklahoma City last month and met with 110 juniors and four teachers in the gymnasium to talk about opportunities at the college. He then asked the students to line up from darkest to lightest skin complexion, and then line up from “nappiest” to straightest hair.  As the students lined up, some of the teachers left to report the request to school administrators, who intervened. Sunray was quickly fired.

Sunray later wrote that the exercise was meant to be an “icebreaker” and that he has made the same presentation dozens of times at other institutions. Really? And nobody complained?

The president of Oklahoma Christian University, John deSteiguer, visited the prep school to apologize to students and staff members. Too late, I’d say. Any school that would let someone like Sunray represent it is too inept to be trusted. Continue reading →

Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 96 Comments

We haven’t had an open forum for a while, and today I’m frantically preparing for a seminar in Atlanta, and the necessary travel to get there. Depending on how things go, I may get some posts up, but I’m eager to see what the commentariat comes up with.

You know the rules: keep both the topis and the discourse ethical, please.

 

How Do People Get These Crazy Ideas About Right And Wrong?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I always review the “Social Qs” advice column on Sundays, and frequently have a disagreement with the advice offered by columnist Philip Gallanes. (He’s pretty good, though.) This time, however, his column bothered me from a different perspective, namely, “What the hell is the matter with these people?” I found Gallanes’ advice reasonable and ethical throughout, but in three of the four letters, the conduct described was so obviously wrong that I found myself once again feeling that my insignificant efforts to try to promote good ethics decision-making skills (a task that takes up about three hours a day, seven days a week, 365 ,  366 this year, days a year—Do NOT tell my business partner!—are an irresponsible waste of time that I will want back when I am dying  of COVID-19.

First, a college freshman wrote that her boyfriend had given her  a 50 dollar gift certificate for Panera on Valentine’s Day. When she told the guy, whom she said was “great,” that his gift was terrible, he replied, “Well, at least I got you a gift.” Continue reading →

Real Life Imitates Fiction, In This Case, “The Firm”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Remember how, in the film adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Firm,” the young lawyer Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise)who is  trapped in a mob-owned law firm wiggles out of his dilemma in part by proving that the firm’s lawyers were routinely over-billing clients?

Well, the Boston-based Thornton Law Firm and the Labaton Sucharow law firm in New York were caught inflating their billings on a similar scale.

Judge Mark L. Wolf concluded that the two firms double-billed  for their attorneys’ work on a class-action lawsuit involving State Street Bank, and even billed for the work of other attorneys not employed at either firm. Thornton’s managing partner, Garrett Bradley,  listed his brother as an attorney on the case and charged $200,000 for his time even though Michael Bradley was barely involved. Uncovering this scandal was another triumph of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, the investigative reporting division that uncovered Boston’s predator priest cover-up in 2002. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/3/2020: Super Tuesday Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Excited?

1. The Super Tuesday tragedy. I can’t find it online, but this supposedly crucial day in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race yanked out of my mental archives a cartoon in the old National Lampoon that ran in 1972. It showed Richard Nixon saying, “Vote for me! I’ll make Southeast Asia look like the bottom of a used Shake ‘n’ Bake bag!”, and on the other side, showed George McGovern saying, “Vote for me! I have a spine like a wet bed of kelp!” That was the first election in which I could vote, and I refused to do so as a matter of principle. I had good friends who were passionate about McGovern, and I felt sorry for them. He was decent man, but so obviously not a rational choice for President of the United States.

All four of the Democrats (sort of…two of them are pretending to be Democrats) still in the race today are just awful options for anyone with their eyes open and not overcome with hatred of Donald Trump, which, it is clear, a distressing number of once-intelligent people are.  In the end, the Democratic Party is accountable for allowing things to come to this, just as the Republican Party was accountable for allowing itself to be swamped by Donald Trump, a real estate mogul who began his campaign as just one more branding opportunity, and hit the jackpot. How can any Democrat defend a vote for Michael Bloomberg, when part of the “resistance’s”  hate for President Trump is based on his alleged autocratic ways and threat to a free press, and they know that the former New York mayor has ordered his own news agency not to criticize him and is betting that his money alone will give him the White House? How can any Democrat defend a vote for Joe Biden, after that  party has claimed for three years that President Trump is mentally unfit and sexist,  and hearing Joe Biden sound more and more like Grandpa before he was put in a home, and seeing  photo after photo of women and girls wincing as Joe exploited a photo op to kiss, hug, grope or sniff them? How can any American defend a vote for Bernie Sanders ( and if I have to elaborate, you’re hopeless)? Finally, how can any Democrats filled with hate for  the President because of his lies, real or imagined, vote for Elizabeth Warren, whose career and campaign have been built on a foundation of lies?

Continue reading →

Women’s History Month Ethics: Should We Remember Hanna Reitsch? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Note: the photo originally included in this post was not Hanna Reitch. Thanks for the correction is due to author Clare Mulley, whose book, “The Women Who Flew For Hitler,” is well worth reading.

If Women’s History Month is truly intended to honor remarkable women whose stories have been neglected over time, shouldn’t we spend a bit of it learning about Hanna Reitsch?

Born in 1912, she was intrepid, irrepressible, bold and brave, and few women—indeed, few men— of her generation could claim the kind of exploits she had completed by the time of her death in 1979. Yet I’ll wager you never heard of her.

There was one teeny little problem with Hanna, though. She was a Nazi.

Hanna Reitsch was the first female test pilot in world history. She left medical school  in Germany to take up flying full time, and quickly became superb glider pilot. The Germans built gliders because they  fit through a loophole in the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade the defeated nation from  building “war planes.” Reitsch also did stunt flying in movies. At the age of 21 she broke the world’s flying altitude record for women (9,184 feet). More records and firsts were to follow after she became a test pilot in 1935: the women’s gliding distance record, the first woman in the world to be promoted to flight captain,  the first woman to fly a helicopter, the  world distance record in a helicopter, the first pilot  to fly a helicopter inside an enclosed space, and the women’s world record in gliding for point-to-point flight, among others.

Reitsch was made an honorary flight captain by Adolf Hitler, and  in 1937 she became a test pilot for the Luftwaffe, as she completely embraced National Socialism.  She  flew  German troops along the Maginot Line  during the Germans’ 1940 invasion of France; later in the war, she earned  an Iron Cross, Second Class, for risking her life trying to cut British barrage-balloon cables. Among the warplanes she tested was the Messerschmitt 163, a rocket-powered interceptor that she flew at 500 mph. Hitler awarded her an Iron Cross, First Class, after she crashed while testing the ME 163 and managed to record everything that had happened before she passed out. Continue reading →

Amy’s Exit, Joe’s Door-Hanger [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

1. Senator Klobuchar eliminated the “none of the above” option from Democratic primary voters by dropping out today. This makes little sense: she’s dropping out because Biden won in South Carolina, where he was expected to win all along? Then she endorsed Joe Biden, which is irresponsible. Biden is a slowly devolving wreck, and every member of the Democratic Party has an obligation to at least try to present a mentally capable candidate for the public to consider. At his current rate of decline (let’s see, not to complain, just to be up-to-date, what did he say today? Nope, nothing, He must have been resting),

UPDATE! Joe wasn’t resting, so he did have brain synapse issues. From the Washington Examiner (Pointer:  77Zoomie):

2020 Democrat Joe Biden stumbled over his words as he attempted to recite the Declaration of Independence ahead of Super Tuesday. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the former vice president said during a campaign event in Texas on Monday. “All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing”….he also accidentally referred to Super Tuesday as “Super Thursday” before correcting himself.

Joe will be a walking, babbling appeal to the 25th Amendment before November rolls around.

Ah-HA! Could that be why Amy endorsed him? Biden’s Vice-President choice will be scrutinized more carefully than any #2 since Richard Nixon in 1956 when Ike was running for a second term following a heart attack. (My wife asked today what Mrs. Biden was like, referencing Mrs. Wilson secretly taking over for Woodrow after his devastating stroke. Biden presumably has to pick an African American or a woman as his running mate.

Her choice is also a betrayal by the sisterhood of Elizabeth Warren, who is still hanging around, hoping for intervention from The Great Spirit, or something. Biden is a serial sexual harasser and assault master. The feminist, #MeToo wing of the Democratic Party  are as hypocritical in its support of Joe as the NAACP is in its support of Michael Jackson imitator Gov. Ralph Northam. In all the debates, neither Warren, nor Klobuchar, nor Kamala Harris, nor even pariah Tulsi Gabbard had the guts and integrity to confront Biden on his dirty old uncle routine. No Democratic woman should endorse Biden; it’s as unethical as cheering Bill Clinton. Oh, right…

The consensus among pundits right now is that Klobuchar’s endorsement signals that the Democratic establishment is desperate to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. That Joe Biden is their “firewall” tells us just how spectacularly the party has failed its job of finding a competent and trustworthy candidate, just as both parties failed in 2016.

2. Klobuchar’s withdrawal won’t have as much impact on tomorrow’s primaries because so many states allow early voting. This is one more reason early voting is wrong, and should be banned. It deceives voters into making a crucial decision without all the data is in, sometimes rendering votes null and virtuously void.

3. The party of women, minorities and the young somehow has managed to reach the nomination’s final laps with four white candidates, with Senator Warren being the only woman and the relative whippersnapper at 70. Of the remaining three men, one isn’t a Democrat (Sanders), one served in his only significant elected position as a Republican, and the other is relying on his connection to the inexplicably popular Barack Obama, whose failure to endorse him is a neon indictment.

Yikes. Good job, everybody! Continue reading →

Monday Morning Warm-Up, 3/2/2020: Idling, Stigmatizing, Lying

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

Good Monday!

1. Totalitarianism watch.  Idling one’s car for longer than three minutes, or more than one minute while adjacent to a school, is illegal in New York City. There have been anti-idling laws since 1972, but they were previously examples of the law being used to encourage conduct rather than enforce it. Now, with socialist Bill de Blasio at the city’s helm, the laws are being enforced with a vengeance.

The city is offering bounties to  citizens who report their neighbors, for example. “If you witness a vehicle idling illegally, you can potentially receive a reward for your enforcement efforts through our Citizens Air Complaint Program” says a city website.

Nice.

The theory is that forcing people into not idling their car will mitigate climate change, just like forcing people to ride bicycles and to stop having children when the Left gains sufficient power and the Green New Deal is within reach. Cars idling for no reason is a pet peeve of mine, particularly when they idle in a parking space with cars waiting while the driver checks his or her messages on a cell phone. There are, however, good reasons for idling. I have idled while recharging a dead battery for example. I have idled in sub-freezing weather to keep the car warm while my wife, who had a cold, ran into a 7-11 to buy some cough medicine. The blunt boot of the law does not belong in this matter, like many matters that today’s progressives and socialists want to turn into government edicts.

Oh—the PR geniuses in de Blasio-land decided that the ideal spokesperson for the anti-idling campaign is washed up rocker Billy Idol. Continue reading →

Elizabeth Warren, The Presidency, And The Female Leadership Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for President is reportedly running out of money, and the other woman in the race for the Democratic nomination is counting on prevailing as the “none of the above” candidate, a long-shot at best. Meanwhile, the party that pronounced itself “the party of women” in 2012—with Bill Clinton as its star convention speaker!—now seems to be looking at a battle among three white men in their late seventies. This is not where progressives thought they would be at this point in the giddy summer of 2016.

Naturally, feminists and the news media are determined to explain this as the result of plain old, typical, anti-female bigotry.  The explanation is simpleminded, hypocritical and incoherent. From the Times:

[I]n dozens of interviews with Democrats over the past several months, at events for Ms. Warren, debate watch parties and polling places, many professional, college-educated women say they have been enraged by the obsession with electability in the 2020 race. These are women who see themselves in Ms. Warren and argue that simply by asking whether a woman can be elected, pundits and voters who fancy themselves as such, are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. For mothers, this moment includes the difficulty of speaking about gender to school-age girls who do not care about the finer points of policy details, but are happy to declare, “I want a woman president.”

Let’s look at the components of that statement, from a piece about how women allegedly feel that her gender has kept Elizabeth Warren from being a strong contender for the nomination.

  • It is the Democrats and progressives, specifically the “resistance,” who have made “electability” the primary factor in choosing the blue party’s nominee in 2020. Such minor items as policy, experience and character have been thrown aside by constant repetition of the myth that anyone, literally anyone, would be preferable to having President Voldemort in the White House. The members of the Facebook Borg constantly say that they will vote for whoever the Democratic Party nominates, which means that they have surrendered any discretion regarding qualifications for leadership. All they care about is winning. In that context, of course electability is essential.

Saying so isn’t sexist. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On Recent Developments In The Democratic Nomination Race

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

  • From CBS News: “Congregants at the historic Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, silently protested 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg as he delivered remarks there Sunday, standing and turning their backs on the former New York City mayor. Bloomberg addressed the congregation at Brown Chapel AME Church during a church service in which he discussed voter suppression and the fight for civil rights. But roughly 10 minutes into his remarks, several in attendance rose from their seats and silently turned away from him.The churchgoers remained standing through the end of Bloomberg’s remarks.”

Comment: Go ahead, Mike, spend your way out of this.

I had so many annoying discussions with Facebook Trump-haters who were  pinning their desperate hopes on Bloomberg to take the Democratic nomination and defeat Trump in November. Their logic: he would spend however much money it took. But people, even smart and experienced people, tend to wildly over-estimate the power of money, marketing, and advertising. People are lazy, gullible and often stupid, but they aren’t that lazy, gullible and stupid: no amount of hype and saturation advertising will persuade a market that a  self-evidently bad product is a good one.  Bloomberg is a bad product, at least for the Presidency. His record is wrong, his tools are inadequate, his character won’t be tolerated outside of the Big Apple. Hatred of Trump isn’t enough, and, as the Beatles sang, “Money can’t buy you love.”

  • Here’s the President of the United States doing a “Dorf” imitation to mock Bloomberg’s height.

Comment: I mention this because it’s funny. Wrong, but funny. Otherwise, I’m not going to complain about how un-presidential it is. This is how Trump is, and if he’s the President, this what Trump being President is and will be. Like it, tolerate it, or lump it.

The Julie Principle. Continue reading →