Month: October 2021

Morning Ethics Catch-Up, 10/7/2021: Idiots, Crooks, Crazies…And Judges

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Ketchup

I have at least 57 posts languishing…

1 Now this is “shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowed theater!” Christopher Perez, 40, is heading to prison for falsely telling his social media followers that in 2020 he had paid someone infected with the Wuhan virus to lick food products at multiple grocery stores in Texas. His motive was to “scare people away from visiting the stores,” the Justice Department said in a news release.

The FBI launched an investigation that ultimately determined the claims were a hoax; Perez did not pay anyone, and nobody licked any groceries at his behest. A jury found him guilty of violating a federal law that criminalizes false information and hoaxes related to biological weapons. He was sentenced this week to 15 months in prison and was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine. His defense lawyers argue that the sentence is too harsh. Perez shook and trembled and wept in court, shouting, “I am not a terrorist!”

No, you’re an idiot, but you behaved like a terrorist, and under the law, that makes you a terrorist. The sentence is completely appropriate.

2. And while we are on the topic of criminals…We might be turning the ethical corner on looted antiquities from other lands. Nancy Weiner, the owner of a prominent Manhattan noted for its expertise in ancient Asian artifacts, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and possession of stolen property in connection with the trafficking of looted treasures from India and Southeast Asia. She sold items to major museums in Australia and Singapore, and others were auctioned off by Christie’s and Sotheby’s. The items ranged in value from $100,000 to $1.5 million, and they were stolen. But Weiner had created fake documents stating that they had all been purchased from private collections. Her rationalization: it was standard practice. “Everybody Does It.” “For decades I conducted business in a market where buying and selling antiquities with vague or even no provenance was the norm,” she said during her appearance in Manhattan Supreme Court. “Obfuscation and silence were accepted responses to questions concerning the source from which an object had been obtained. In short, it was a conspiracy of the willing.” Right. That doesn’t mean you had to join in, but we understand: $$$$$$.

The Times quotes Clinton Howell, a New York-based antiques dealer and president of the Art and Antique Dealers League of America, as stating that the tactics used by Wiener and others in past years “are not pardonable,” but that “the dealer of today is not the dealer of 40 years ago — there’s a very different attitude now.” We shall see. Most professions with unethical cultures just devise new ways to accomplish the same ends.

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Ethics Quiz: The Dying Patient’s Denial

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Let’s start off today’s ethics adventures with a quiz…

The New York Times this morning has an odd choice for its placeholder in the spot typically reserved for editorials: an essay by Dr. Daniela J. Lamas, a pulmonary and critical-care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The piece endorses lying to patients “for their own good.” The op-ed—that’s not what the times calls such essays any more, but that’s what it is and they are—is fine, raising a legitimate ethics issue for readers to ponder, hence the use of it here as an ethics quiz. The placement and timing is suspicious, however.

This could be called a “conspiracy theory,” I suppose, but such theories are germinated by a genuine and deserved development of distrust. Since I do not the trust the Times to report the news objectively and ethically, but believe with good reason that it manipulates its reporting and choice of opinion pieces to advance a progressive and usually partisan agenda, I suspect that this op-ed was given such prominent placement to plant the idea that doctors—like You Know Who—and health care “experts” are justified in using incomplete facts, false certainty and disinformation when communicating to the public regarding the pandemic, vaccines, masks and the rest for “the Greater Good.”

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Communication Ethics: The American Bar Association’s Impossible Formal Ethics Opinion 500

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

difficult-client-yelling-at-lawyer

The duty of communication is both a fiduciary duty and, for lawyers, a professional one. American Bar Association Model Rule 1.4, one rule that every jurisdiction has adopted nearly verbatim, holds that

(a) A lawyer shall:

(1) promptly inform the client of any decision or circumstance with respect to which the client’s informed consent, as defined in Rule 1.0(e), is required by these Rules;

(2) reasonably consult with the client about the means by which the client’s objectives are to be accomplished;

(3) keep the client reasonably informed about the status of the matter;

(4) promptly comply with reasonable requests for information; and

(5) consult with the client about any relevant limitation on the lawyer’s conduct when the lawyer knows that the client expects assistance not permitted by the Rules of Professional Conduct or other law.

(b) A lawyer shall explain a matter to the extent reasonably necessary to permit the client to make informed decisions regarding the representation.

The last part is, much of the time, a fictional standard. I have been hammering at this in my recent ethics seminars, much to attendees alarm: clients often, perhaps even most of the time, don’t comprehend what’s going on on many levels.

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Comment Of The Day: “The Facebook Whistleblower Thinks That The U.S. Needs More Censorship”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Little introduction is needed for this typically well-reasoned and clearly expressed Comment of the Day on the post, “The Facebook “Whistleblower” Thinks That The U.S. Needs More Censorship” by Extradimensional Cephalopod, except “Here you go…”

***

“So… it seems the Progressives have decided that Facebook needs to do something, and they’re basing everything on that. They’re not looking at all their options.

“The problem as they have described it is, “kids on social media are exposed to information which harms their mental well-being,” but they are only looking at options that involve putting rules and responsibilities on the social media companies.

“What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it ignores the responsibilities of the parent, the child, and the people who put harmful content on the internet in the first place. It ignores the question of how we can fill social media with edifying content instead (because that content is out there–there’s people on Instagram trying to help with body image problems), and the question of how the parent and child can work together to find that content (or just build a life outside of social media) while rejecting harmful content.

“The fundamental liability involved here is stagnation: known motivational limits. People build habits and addictions to things on the internet, because the internet is a source of instant gratification. This phenomenon is a manifestation of decadence: underregulated stagnation.

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Mid-Day Ethics Survey, 10/6/21: Enterprise Lies, And Shooting Capt. Kirk Back Into Space

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

I missed the warm-up yesterday, as life, deadlines and the Red Sox-Yankee one game play-off interfered. Now I’m horribly backed up.

Yesterday was an important ethics date in our history, and an especially bad one for Native Americans. On October 5 in 1813, during the War of 1812, a combined army of British and Native American forces were defeated by General William Harrison’s American army at the Battle of the Thames in Ontario, Canada. The leader of the Indian warriors was Tecumseh, the powerful Shawnee chief who organized inter-tribal resistance to white settlers on Native lands. He was killed in the fighting, spelling doom for Native American resistance east of the Mississippi. The defeated tribes soon moved west, which bought them time but no peace. Sixty-five years later, on the anniversary of Tecumseh’s defeat, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribes surrendered to U.S. General Nelson A. Miles in the Bear Paw mountains of Montana. Joseph was another remarkable Native American leader: after the U.S. government broke a land treaty with the Nez Perce that forced them out of their homeland. The area in Idaho they were ordered to move to was unacceptable, so over three months, Chief Joseph led about 300 Nez Perce to the Canadian border, a 1,000 mile trek, as they fled and fought 2,000 pursuing U.S. soldiers. Only 40 miles short of the Canadian border, Chief Joseph’s group was trapped by the U.S. Army, and escorted to a barren reservation. His famous quote expresses the futility and sadness of the entire, cruel but inevitable destruction of the Native American tribes and the appropriation of their territory by white settlers.

Is something that experience teaches us cannot be avoided still unethical? I believe so, but that conclusion leads to the slippery slope of “life is unfair” and what can or should be done about it.

1. ‘Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?’ Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren is resigning from office after accepting a plea deal regarding charges of financial misappropriation. She joins a long list of black, female mayors in major cities—San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C. and Baltimore, which has had a succession—that have embarrassed their cities, parties and supporters by proving utterly untrustworthy and incompetent, if not outright corrupt. This doesn’t help. If the idea is to increase the number of female, black officials, it is important that all of these ‘firsts” actually be good leaders. Having one spectacularly awful black, female mayor after another is how biases take hold. Of course the fact that so many black, female mayors of recent vintage have been unqualified, obnoxious fools shouldn’t reflect negatively on future mayoral candidates who are deserving of support and trust, but inevitably it will. This is why parties and voters can’t adopt the Kamala Harris Standard that the Democrats imposed on us: “gender and color is qualification enough.” No, they aren’t. They aren’t qualifications at all.

2. Sometimes I think Biden isn’t even trying. Banks and their trade groups, including the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America, are almost certainly going to oppose Biden’s choice to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Why? Oh, not much, just that her past writing suggest that she’s a communist. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Omarova wants to adopt a Soviet-style banking system, which isn’t too surprising since “she graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.”

She’s tweeted about the deficiencies of the free market in terms of guaranteeing gender equity—why should any economic system generate gender equity? She also doesn’t like the idea of supply and demand determining the salaries and product prices; she wants these set by the government. Yeah, if there is one thing banking organizations want, it’s a Commie setting their regulations. Does the Biden administration vet these people at all? Or is the fact that she’s a minority female—another potential first!–automatically mean she’s a great choice in the eyes of the White House gang.

“The core of all of this and the source of our most significant concerns is we look at everything that she has said or written publicly, there are bold ideas that essentially look at eliminating the banking system as we know it today,” said Rebeca Romero Rainey, the president of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

If this is mistaken, wouldn’t you think the supporters of Comrade Omarova would have a rebuttal ready? So far, no comment.

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The Facebook “Whistleblower” Thinks That The U.S. Needs More Censorship

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I have to admit, Frances Haugen has played this beautifully. Like many so-called whistleblowers (not all), she picked an ideal moment to betray her previous employer, in this case Facebook, leak proprietary documents, turn herself into an instant media star, guarantee books deals, speaking tours and TV stardom, and be praised to the skies by gullible, grandstanding and cynical politicians.

“I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” the former Facebook product manager said before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday. Perfect. I wonder if her media advisor helped her draft it.

Here is all you need to know about Haugan: According to her own website, Haugen was a member of Facebook’s internal  Civic Integrity team in 2020. That means she was part of the team that made the decision to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post from Facebook in October 2020. Facebook, and its evil twin Twitter, refused to allow circulation of the story, accepting without evidence the defensive Democratic talking point that the laptop was a plant was tied to Russian intelligence. Those claims were disinformation, we now know, and the laptop really did belong to Hunter Biden. Facebook’s partisan embargo on the truth might have determined the election. Is blocking a story that might defeat Joe Biden what the whistleblower considers avoiding division and protecting democracy?

It’s a rebuttable presumption. I don’t trust Haugan, her motives, or her message.

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Ethics Dunce: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

biden dummy

Great. Now the United States of America has had two Presidents in a row who couldn’t tell an ethics principle from beef stroganoff. This is obviously not a good thing, since our leaders inevitably bolster or short-cicuitour culture’s ethics alarms. In Joe Biden’s case, of course, this should come as no surprise, just as Trump’s ethics void couldn’t have surprised even the previous President’s most fervent supporters. Still, it would be hard to invent a more phosphorescent example of ethics ignorance than Joe’s comments on the harassment of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va)., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, (D-Ariz.) because they refuse to accede to the Democrats’ insane $3.5 trillion infrastructure-plus-socialism wish-list spending scheme, “Build Back Better,’

Last week, several protesters affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy and other groups showed up in kayaks at the Potomac River dock in Washington, D.C., where Manchin keeps his houseboat. That was relatively mild compared to what Sinema endured over the weekend, when illegal immigration activists from Living United for Change in Arizona confronted Sinema in a building at Arizona State University, eventually following her into the bathroom.

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And Yet ANOTHER Progressive Hero Is Ambushed With Tough Questioning By A Mainstream Media Journalist! This Time, It’s Dr. Fauci…

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Breakthru q

Good.

Nobody deserves this more.

On CNBC’s “Closing Bell,” host Sara Eisen confronted Fauci about the inconvenient phenomenon of breakthrough cases of the Wuhan virus, where fully vaccinated people get sick anyway, with some requiring hospitalization. She asked if the government is being “too casual about the limitations of the vaccine.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped tracking breakthrough cases in May. It has kept track of the vaccinated who have been hospitalized or died: as of Sept. 27, the CDC reported 22,115 such patients. However, as Eisen insisted, that’s just part of the story.

There’s nothing like personal experience to prompt a journalist to start paying attention: she was i9nfected despite being fully vaccinated, and claimed that the virus had recently spread through her “entire family.” Fauci’s answer was evasive: he cited data indicating that unvaccinated people still remain most vulnerable to hospitalization or death from COVID, and the vaccination protects most people from a severe outcome if they so get the Wuhan virus. He told Eisen she should not “confuse” the “overwhelming benefits of the protection of vaccines” with occurrences of breakthrough cases. That, however, wasn’t what she asked. What she asked was how the CDC can be so confident about the effectiveness of the vaccine if it doesn’t record how many vaccinated people still get infected.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? The CDC doesn’t want to have to deal with vaccine skeptics using the data to justify not getting vaccinated. As has been a recurring phenomenon during the pandemic, the government in general and Fauci in particular refuse to provide information when they think the public will refuse to follow their directives if they get the facts. In response to Fauci’s huminahumina dodge, Eisen asked, “How do we know that [breakthrough cases are] happening to a small proportion and how do we know that they are tending to be mild?”

The answer is “You don’t.” Maybe the accurate answer from Fauci would be , “That’s for me to know and you to find out!” But this is what he said:

“So, in answer to your very appropriate question about if you get vaccinated and you get infected, is there less of a chance that you will be transmitting it to someone who is unvaccinated or someone who is vulnerable? The chances of doing that are diminished by being vaccinated and even further diminished, according to preliminary data we’ll wait to see the real fundamental core of the data, but it looks like that extra added of protection from a boost will be very valuable.”

Her question was indeed very appropriate, but that’s not what she asked! Even his evasive answer wasn’t accurate. The CDC has not said the chances of people transmitting the virus have “diminished” if you are fully vaccinated. The CDC says the opposite of that: fully vaccinated people can transmit the virus as readily as unvaccinated people, though not for as long a period.

Only sarcasm will suffice. I just can’t imagine why so many Americans refuse to trust the directives of health officials regarding vaccinations. What have they ever done to make us doubt them?

_________________________

Source: CNBC

From The “O What A Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practise To Deceive” Files: Matthew Dowd, Double Agent

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Dowd gotcha

Mainstream media has long relished the unethical tactic of employing alleged Republicans and conservatives as “balance” on their biased panels, when the individuals are really integrity-free chameleons, ready to change colors for a buck. It’s a particularly odious trick: the audience is led to believe that because the particular talking head is criticizing his or her own “side,” the typical majority of partisan Democrats and progressive shills in the discussion must be “right.” CNN’s dim-bulb anti-Trump hack Ana Navarro is one of these double agents (but she’s Hispanic and female, so her obvious deficits don’t matter); Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post columnist who is now MSNBC’s go-to guest when character assassination of a GOP leader is required, is another. Kellyanne Conway’s husband George also is on the list.

Matthew Dowd is in a special category. He was a ruthless Bush political operative who found a lucrative new gig by playing the “Once Evil Republican Who Has Seen The Light,” usually on ABC. Recognizing the power of the cognitive dissonance scale as W’s popularity declined, Dowd became the alleged conservative voice on TV policy panels that somehow always agreed—anti-Bush, pro-Obama, anti-Trump.

Now he’s announced himself as a candidate for lieutenant governor of Texas…what’s this? As a Democrat? But…but… all these years we’ve been told that Dowd was a Republican! That’s how we knew his criticism of other Republicans was sincere! What’s going on here?

Dowd expected a friendly softball interview when he went on CNN’s “New Day” yesterday to discuss his candidacy. After all, he’s a Democrat. To his shock and awe, co-host Brianna Keilar used the opportunity to out the opportunist. It had been reported that Dowd, no fool he, had deleted 270 thousand messages on Twitter before announcing his party flip-flop and quest for office. Gee, why would he do that? It’s a mystery! So Keilar decided to press him on it…

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Recalling The Day I Realized My Ethical Priorities

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Dent homerun

Tonight, at 8:00 pm, the American League Wild Card game will commence featuring the New York Yankees playing the home town Boston Red Sox in Fenway Park. After a back and forth, up and down season for both teams, they ended up with exactly the same record, 92-70. The two top non-division winning teams in both MLB leagues have to play one game elimination contests to gain admission to the Divisional Playoffs regardless of their records, but in this case, the game is also a tie-breaker.

For me, and based on the sports columns, for a lot of people, tonight’s game brings back a flood of memories. Almost exactly 43 years ago, on October 2, 1978, light-hitting Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent (that’s Bucky Fucking Dent in Boston, and forever) hit a cheap, pop-up three-run homer over Fenway Park’s Green Monster in the seventh inning, giving NY a lead against the Red Sox that they never relinquished despite several more twists of fate. Now, once again, the two long-time rivals—Boston sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees, you know—have a one-game date with destiny. But this is an ethics blog, so the topic is not my PTSD flashbacks over that game, but the ethical significance of the conflict I faced on October 2.

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