I really am hoping I don’t have to go through another holiday season like this one has been, both here at home and around the ethics world. It hasn’t quite reached the gloomy depths of the Christmas of 2010, the second one after my father had died on my birthday on December 1, 2009, with the hospital my mother was in for an infection that another hospital had given her trying to dump her on Christmas Eve, only to have me realize while wheeling her out to the car that she was desperately sick still, turning around and getting her readmitted, as Mom kept insisting tearfully that she was okay and wanted to be home for Christmas. Ah, those wonderful holiday memories! (The infection killed her in February.)
Well, not having any Christmas decorations up and with nobody opening gifts, clean-up this season has been a breeze. I did get some mordant good news: the law firm I was recruited into as an ethics partner along with a distinguished group of successful lawyers five years ago (that subsequently failed to meet its funding goals after debuting with a dazzling business plan and has been slowly shedding its initial cases as it winds down) finally sent me my first check from the enterprise. It was for $64.52.
Happy New Year!
1. The rest of the story: you recall that earlier this month I wrote that the lawyer representing Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s now disbarred sleazeball lawyer in his pre-White House days, had submitted a court document with three fictional cases cited. Well, guess who found those fantasy cases? Yes it was Trump’s old legal eagle himself. Cohen said in court papers unsealed this week that he had mistakenly given his lawyer bogus legal citations generated by the artificial intelligence program Google Bard. Cohen explained that he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.” Of course, the fact that Cohen’s lawyer accepted the research done by a disbarred lawyer who was never reliable to begin with means that he is still responsible for the botch, and could be sanctioned.
One of Donald Trump’s greatest weaknesses is his fondness for lawyers of questionable character. Many forget that young Donald was taken under the wing of Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s diabolical, if brilliant, legal ally. Way back in July of 2015, as Trump was just emerging as a twinkle in the eye of the GOP, I wrote a post about Cohen titled, “What A Surprise: Donald Trump Has An Unethical Lawyer!”
2. I present for your reading pleasure the current issue of the Harvard Alumni Magazine. It has many sources of amusement, among them reminding us that last issue’s story about newly installed Harvard President Claudine Gay, the serial plagiarist, was titled “A Scholar’s Scholar.” Perhaps the best place for belly laughs is the letters section, where, for example, one alum writes in part…
“…President Gay joins a group of other Black women who are now making their marks on America: Leticia James as New York’s attorney general; Stacey Abrams leading the fight for civil rights; U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan; Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis. And, dare I say it, perhaps saving America, at least our democratic system of representative government, from fascist forces? I can’t help but ponder the human resources we’ve squandered over the past two and one-half centuries denying women and minorities equal opportunities.
Congratulations to Dr. Gay and to Harvard for moving us forward.
3. The season for year-end lists is upon us-— and, as usual, my ability to get up all the 2023 Best of.. and Worst of… ethics awards is in doubt. But NewsBusters has been reminding me of some stunners, including a few that I missed. #1 on its list of “‘The View’s’ 9 Most Anti-American Moments of 2023” was this:
“Moderator Whoopi Goldberg was interviewing failed Democratic politician Beto O’Rourke and admitted she wanted other countries to take over America’s southern border and administer our immigration policies:
“I’m hoping that Amnesty International and all these groups that are outside of us, who are watching, are going to step in also because we are very quick to step in when other countries are not doing the right thing. I want someone to step — I want outside countries to step in and say, “Hey, listen, we listen when you’re talking to us, we’re telling you now this doesn’t work for the world.”
What a great idea: put foreign nations in charge of the U.S. borders! Yes, these women—and Whoopi is one of the smarter ones— are allowed on the air by ABC News (that’s Disney!) to confuse and make stupider millions of Americans.
4. Completely predictable, but California did it anyway…California raised the minimum wage for fast-food employees from $16 to $20 per hour, and now Pizza Hut is going to lay off more than 1,200 delivery drivers because it is cheaper to use DoorDash or GrubHub. All increases in the minimum wage cost low-skilled workers jobs. All of them.
5. An Ethics Alarms “Nelson” ( Ha-ha!) goes to New York City, which is paying dearly for its virtue-signaling “sanctuary city” status that was considered wonderful as long as illegal immigrants were mostly staying down south. Now, however, tens of thousands of illegals (the Times calls them “migrants”) have been bussed to the city from Texas. New York City is required by a court order to provide shelter for those who ask, and has processed 161,500 asylum seekers since spring of 2022. From December. 18 to December 24, 3,400 people, about 500 a day, went through the system, and the situation is expected to get worse after the recent surge at the southern border. Adams told CNN today, , “We have reached the breaking point.”
Good!
6. Finally, regarding the buried deficits of revered Democratic Presidents, a book called “A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World War II” explains how FDR’s administration threatened, intimidated and muzzled the black press during World War II. Roosevelt’s status as one of our greatest Presidents is beyond denial, but the patrician New Yorker imprisoned Japanese-Americans, permitted an anti-Semitic State Department to look the other way while Jews were being exterminated, and pursued a policy targeting black publications and journalists to stifle criticism.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack,
I’m terribly sorry to hear that Christmas this year was such a dud. I hope things improve in this upcoming year. But as we are still in the octave of Christmas, I hope you have a Merry Christmas (for the two remaining days of the octave…), a Happy New Year, and a successful start to 2024.
2: It is difficult to wrap my mind around just how differently people see the world. My main concern is how irreconcilable those differences are. Where is the common ground between merit-based evaluations, and evaluations based solely on group representation and perpetual victimhood? (EC, if you have some specific tools in your toolbox for when two parties have completely disjoint worldviews, I’d love to hear what they are.)
3: I know some people dream of this great utopia stemming from a one-world government, but thinking that the UN or any of these other organizations out there have any ethical mandate behind them is pure fantasy. But I can see why progressives are attracted to those organizations: both want to tear down anyone who has more, plunder them, and divide the spoils.
4: I wonder how much longer California can keep pushing the craziness. At some point, the hemorrhaging of people and business will have to make some people realize why so many are fleeing from blue states to red states. Over all, it does make me wonder how long progressive cant will last. At some point, it will collapse, but will it be before it has dragged everyone else down and left no one to blame, and before its ending ushers in a prolonged Dark Age? Paging Harry Seldon…
Regarding comments getting relegated to spam, I’m glad, Jack, you were able to recover a couple of mine in a timely fashion. I’m not sure what’s going on, but at least in my experience there seems to be something at play between Windows 11, Mozilla Firefox, and AVG antivirus on my personal computer. When I comment from my work computer, which does not have that combination of software, the comments post without any issue at all.
The issue of bussing illegal immigrants to “sanctuary cities”, and the issue of people fleeing blue states, seem to be coverging in what I believe will become the Left’s next authoritarian cause célèbre, if they’re not brought back to sanity: internal migration controls. Chicago and its suburbs are already regulating buses carrying out-of-state passengers. Internal passports were always popular with oppressive communist regimes like the Soviet Union and China, I expect the American Left to fall in love with them eventually.
Prologue: The New Year is a time of hope that the next year will be better than the preceding one. I wish you and your family a much happier 2024.
1. I tried a Microsoft version of ChatGPT and asked it to write a Star Trek story about two of my favorite characters. It did. And it was the blandest thing ever. I can write better fan fiction than that. And have. I don’t get the appeal.
2. The lack of self-awareness it took to include such names in such an article is astounding.
3. And Whoopi’s the smart one on that show. Reminds me of when a group of idiots in Congress wanted to ask the U.N. to supervise the 2004 Presidential election.
4. You’ll never get people in these areas to see this. All they can think of are higher wages making stronger buying power and more money in tax coffers that can be misused by their governments. I’ve seen more than one headline denying that these types of downsizing are related to the higher minimum wage at all.
5. This is what pandering for political points does to you when you are forced to face the reality of your unrealistic aspirations. If NYC can’t handle a fraction of the number of border crossers, why do they think Texas border towns can?
6. I recently read about this issue in an excellent book called “Half-American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad” by Matthew F. Delmont. Thanks for the tip.
2. Whether you consider the article to be typically hagiographic (“Of course we picked the best of the best”) or, ‘depending on the context’, suitably ironic – the article is worth, at least, a skim:
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/08/features-president-claudine-gay
I found this description particularly humorous:
IIRC, the ‘heartfelt’ acknowledgement was actually plagiarized from *another* document. LOL!