I came so close to not finishing this pathetic lament from someone who has been lied, gaslighted and manipulated to the edge of madness. I’m not going to even bother to read Prof. Appiah’s answer: I thought he had finally stopped picking crazy Trump Derangement inquiries for his weekly column to pander to the Grey Lady’s warped reader base, but he’s back at it with this one.
She wrote, [Gift link! Merry Christmas!]
I finished a seven hour deposition late yesterday (the lawyer grilling me was a Red Sox fan, so it was okay), and from here until after New Year’s Day, I have nothing on my calendar…no, not even Christmas. I am giving gifts to the two families on my cul de sac, my long-time neighbors the Wests who have been so supportive this year, and the absurdly perfect young couple next door with their three adorable children, who warm my cold heart every time I see them riding bikes together, creating adventures, and generally making me feel like I was a crummy father. Unfortunately, the season is reminding me both of wonderful times long gone and last year’s grim, painful holidays, so everything is causing me crippling cognitive dissonance. I can’t wait for it all to be over on January 2.
Nevertheless, I am going to read “A Christmas Carol” to Spuds out loud, and of course watch at least two of the dramatic versions, the 1984 George C. Scott version, and, of course, “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.” I like all the “Christmas Carols” except the horrible musical starring Albert Finney and Patrick Stewart’s weak entry. No, I don’t count Bill Murray’s “Scooged,” but I do enjoy it if I’m in the right mood. I favor George’s version, first, because he was one of my favorite actors and I miss him, second, because the rest of the cast contains many of my other favorites like Edward Woodward and David Warner, and the creepiest Marley by far. I also admire the adaptation.
The entire text of “A Christmas Carol” is and has been for a long time listed under Inspirations on the Ethics Alarms homepage. I often wonder if anyone uses the Ethics Alarms links, which now reminds me that its time to cull, revise, and update the collection. I use them.
Last year I noted that the last time I directed a professional theatrical production that wasn’t my own, it was a staged reading of “A Christmas Carol.” I miss directing greatly, but if was my last hurrah, I can live with that. “A Christmas Carol” is, after all, the greatest ethics story of them all.
I worry that this Christmas the neighborhood is looking at me as Scrooge: mine is one of the few homes in the neighborhood with no lights, and no decorations, and I have been walking Spuds wearing a black Santa hat that reads “Bah Humbug.” It’s a joke, but maybe people think it’s my real attitude. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love Christmas; I always have and always will. This year, I hope for the last time, it doesn’t love me.
God bless us, every one.
by Curmie
[This is Jack: Yikes! I didn’t realize that EA had been Curmie-less for a full four months! The second Ethics Alarms featured columnist has been both busy and seeking respite from politics, which unfortunately has been disproportionately rampant here during the Presidential campaign drama and related horrors. I’m hoping Curmie can leads us out of the dark into the light. Welcome back, Curmie!]
I’m not sure if this is sufficiently ethics-related for this blog, but since Jack posted it, so be it.
I retired from full-time teaching in August of 2021. It was August instead of May because I was hoping—to no avail, as it turns out—to do one more iteration of a Study Abroad program in Ireland; the trip had already been postponed from the previous summer. I did teach one course per semester in the 2021-22 academic year, but then not at all for two years.
I assumed that I’d never be in a classroom again except for an occasional guest appearance to be, apparently, the local authority on absurdism. But then a colleague got a one-semester sabbatical to work on her book. It would be extremely unlikely to find someone who had both the ability to teach all the courses in question and the willingness to move to small-town East Texas for a one-semester gig at crappy pay. The powers-that-be then decided to try to staff those courses locally. I suspect I was the only available qualified person in a 75-mile radius, so I was asked if I’d teach Theatre History I and II this semester. I agreed.
There were a lot of changes for me, completely apart from the two-year hiatus. I’d taught both courses numerous times, but never in the same semester, and always on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule; this time it was Tuesday/Thursday. Back in the days when I was the only person teaching these courses I could insist that one of the research papers be on a certain type of topic; that’s no longer a requirement. And I ditched the expensive anthology I’d used for years, switching to things that were available online. This also allowed me to choose the plays I wanted to teach instead of necessarily the ones in the anthology: critics may agree that the The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov’s best play, for example, but there is absolutely no question that The Seagull is far more important to theatre history, so I used that.
Anyway… what caught my attention?
Really, that Washington Post headline from yesterday is impressive. It has just 13 words, and yet there are six separate pieces of misinformation in it. Bravo!
1. and 2. Elon Musk didn’t “force” anything.
3. The Trump Presidency hasn’t started yet. If it had started, that would be a Constitutional crisis, and Milloy as well as the Washington Post are among those responsible for it, since they deliberately ignored the scandal of a diminished capacity White House resident for almost four years.
4. Uh, there was no shutdown, and only an idiot would have thought there would be.
5. A Presidency that hasn’t begun can’t collapse by definition.
6. Chaos is what the Biden Presidency is in now.
Details aside, it is also an excellent example of the fake news category I call “future news.” When what is happening doesn’t supply sufficient fodder for reports and pundits to attack Republicans and their favorite ideology’s opponents, attack those you want to hold responsible for what might happen.
It is hard to choose among Milbank, the despicable Phillip Bump, the deluded E.J. Dionne, dim bulb Ruth Marcus, old hack Eugene Robinson, boringly predictable Kathleen Parker and the certifiably bonkers Jennifer Rubin (all of whom have damning EA dossiers) as the most egregious partisan propaganda agent on this rapidly declining newspaper. Milbank would certainly be a worthy choice. Despite Jeff Bezos’s intermittent efforts to drag the once esteemed paper back from the brink, its staff is obviously so biased and lacking diversity of thought that the task seems impossible.
I keep my digital subscription to the Post because I need to check it for Ethics Alarms issues, because it’s my local paper, and mostly because it reminds me that the New York Times could be worse. But I do believe that bias has made the Post too stupid to survive: I wonder if it will last the next four years.
Why wouldn’t any sane and ethical editor tell Milbank, “Dana, I love ya, but that column makes you look like an apoplectic old fool and this paper look ridiculous. Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, go write something that won’t cause spit-takes all over America”?
It’s no excuse and only moral luck, but I am now glad that I have waited so long to conclude the Ethics Alarms inquiry into who was the worst American President. (That final post on the topic is coming this weekend, I promise.)
For important new data is coming in: The Wall Street Journal issued a report based on extensive interviews with White House insiders and Biden aides that indicates there was a years-long cover-up of the degree of cognitive decline Biden had experienced since he was Vice-President. Both the Journal’s reporting and recent New York Times articles indicate what should be treated as a national scandal but probably won’t be.
His party knew that Biden was infirm mentally and physically before he was nominated to run against then-President Trump in 2020. Once he was nominated, Joe’ true condition was hidden from the inattentive public. I knew that Biden was sinking into dementia as early as 2019; it wasn’t hard to see, and I told many friends and associates that. The ones who hated Donald Trump didn’t car. Biden’s successful 2020 campaign was constrained by the (stupid) Wuhan virus lockdown and a complicit news media oddly incurious about a Constitutional crisis materializing right before their eyes.
Once Biden was elected, the cover-up continued. Top cabinet members were unable to meet with him or even speak with him. Biden held only nine Cabinet meetings in four years! Staff regularly stood in for him at official events. Other staff were assigned to keep him from wandering off. Biden couldn’t hold morning meetings because he was “not at his best” early in the day, and he seldom was up to working past 4pm unless he had spent the day gathering his strength and what was left of his wits. Biden cancelled important national security meetings, with his aides explaining to attendees that the President had “bad days and good days.”
…by making stuff up and publishing it!
From the BBC: “The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione. The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not. Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.”
This must make human journalists shiver in their boots! If an AI bot can create fake news stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop being just Russian information, the U.S. economy doing great, President Joe Biden being sharp as a tack and Donald Trump emulating Nazis by holding a rally in Madison Square Garden,” who needs live lying reporters to mislead the public and generate fake news?
Reporters Without Borders, also known as RSF,sadit was was “very concerned by the risks posed to media outlets” by AI tools like Apple’s. See? They see the threat!
The group also said the BBC incident proves that “generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public.” But hat proof evident long before this incident: Remember “Hunter de Butts?” Michael Cohen’s AI fiasco?
Vincent Berthier, the head of RSF’s technology and journalism desk, explained the obvious: “AIs are probability machines, and facts can’t be decided by a roll of the dice. RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature. The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs.”
Last night I was totally blotto and depressed, took myself to a favorite restaurant to dine alone (I was looking for “a place where everybody knows my name” because the owner and some of the staff knew me and Grace because we started going there the week it opened, but none of them were around. Or were avoiding me…). I even had a stiff drink, my third this year.
I didn’t help. When I returned home, I decided to watch a semi-Christmas movie, the 1942 Irving Berlin movie musical “Holiday Inn” with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire that I realized I hadn’t watched in decades, and never critically. The movie spawned several Irving Berlin classics, “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade” among them, as well as the movie “White Christmas,” which shares several ingredients with its predecessor—it’s a musical, it takes place at a resort inn in the country, Bing’s the star and sings his iconic Christmas song, he has an old friend and partner who dances, and there are two women who perform with them—but the movies have completely different plots.
And “White Christmas” has no blackface number….
One of the few moments I remembered from the film was Astaire’s number above, which is spectacular. In the movie he improvises it on the spot when his dancing partner doesn’t show up, which is of course impossible, even for Fred. In fact, the entire movie is so ridiculous and contrived that suspension of disbelief is out of the question: It makes “White Christmas” look like a documentary by comparison. Another realization: As well as Bing Crosby sang in the Fifties, his freak voice in the Forties was much better. Wow.
And yes, the movie was the inspiration for the founders of the motel chain to call it Holiday Inn. Apparently they didn’t pay Irving Berlin a penny, the cheap bastards.
“Holiday Inn” is definitely not about ethics, as it is completely mindless.
But you’re going to make your contributions to day about ethics, right?
It says something, I don’t know what, that Reason, the libertarian magazine and website would choose a non-lawyer to rail against Donald Trump’s lawsuits against news organizations. Jacob Sullum exposes his ignorance when he says, repeatedly, that the suits are “plainly” and “patently” frivolous. Whatever they are, frivolous they are not. A suit is not frivolous under the legal ethics rules (3.1) unless it cannot possibly prevail if the court accepts new theories of how the law should be interpreted. Many said that Trump’s lawsuit against ABC was frivolous. As Nelson Muntz would say, “Ha ha!”
Trump filed a suit against CBS in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on October 31 in response to “60 Minutes'” deceptive editing of its Kamala Harris interview, claiming it violated that state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act and cost him “at least” $10 billion in damages. Trump filed another suit against The Des Moines Register this week claiming that the newspaper publicizing of an inaccurate—let’s say wildly inaccurate presidential poll violated Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.
I think the Iowa suit is a stretch, and I don’t see how CBS’s “60 Minutes” cheat cost Trump $10 billion. But the Des Moines Register poll was incompetent and irresponsible (the veteran pollster responsible retired after the election) and the “60 Minutes” stunt was as blatant an example of a news organization slamming its fist on the metaphorical scale to get an election result it wanted as we have ever seen.
Metaphorically speaking of course.
Looking back, despite having a nightmarish year personally and in my business, Ethics Alarms has had an excellent year. The Fani Wallis scandal first broke early this year when it was revealed that she had hired her adulterous huggy-bear Nathan Wade as one of the prosecutors going after Donald Trump for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. This was a transparently a political prosecution that Willis had not been shy about trumpeting. She then went on a couple of junkets with Wade in which he paid for their enjoyment and entertainment. I immediately stated here that the this created a conflict of interest as well as the appearance of impropriety, and that both Willis and Wade needed to be separated from the case.
Back in May, I included the sordid tale in a CLE ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, noting also that Willis was incompetent by endangering a high profile prosecution by risking the backlash that in fact occurred when her relationship with Wade was revealed, and also breached her duty of communication by not consulting her client the County through its leadership, regarding her plans to employ a lawyer with no previous criminal law experience because he was sharing her bed. I told the class that the only way Willis or the County could extricate itself from this mess was by separating both Wade and Willis from the case. Eventually a judge ruled that Wade indeed had to go, after which he gave an interview that called into serious question not only his integrity but also his maturity and brain function.
Now this is an ethics conflict.
It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.
If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.
Ethics Alarms 