I resist the temptation to emulate the less labor- (and thought) intensive blog formats of Instapundit and, much of the time, Althouse, which consist of posting a link and a brief comment, along with a substantial quote, followed by “Read it all.”
However, this is one of those weeks when I doubt my life choices that emphasized creativity and windmill-jousting over financial gain, because boy it would be great if I could devote full time to Ethics Alarms without ending up living in a cardboard box…
So while, as usual, the ethics issues battled out here on the Friday Forum are up to you, here are some links to content that might inspire you:
1. This op ed in the Times made my head explode, and it was so dishonest and partisan that an ethical newspaper would be obligated to reject. But this is the New York Times. Typical quote: “As Mr. Trump has pushed for partisan gerrymanders and a voter-suppression law like the SAVE America Act, we’ve seen strong voter turnout in races across the country.” Right. Trump’s at fault for the “partisan gerrymanders.” And partisan hacks like the author regard suppressing illegal voters as “voter-suppression”…
2. Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who resigned in April, was not just engaging in inappropriate conduct with her staff (and one male member of her security detail in particular), but such flagrant violations of policy, rules and ethics that one has to question her mental stability. I wrote one post referencing her at the time, but the Axis news media soft-pedaled the story, probably because the scumbag in question was a Hispanic female. Three of the women appointed to Trump’s Cabinet had to resign in disgrace. The Inspector General’s report came out yesterday [Gift Link] Yikes. Typical quote from the Times piece:
“During a personal trip to Oregon, the report said, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer asked her driver to take her and the agent to a strip club. She also had the driver go inside with them and asked him to drop money from her purse onto a partially naked performer. When the driver hesitated, the senior agent told him to follow the secretary’s instructions; later, he told the driver not to tell anybody about the incident.”
Read it all.
3. The End is Near for the American Bar Association, writes conservative law professor Josh Blackman. Anyone who watched the disgraceful performance of the ABA’s DEI president being eviscerated by Rep. Gill for her evasive and disingenuous answers while testifying before Congress in July shouldn’t doubt Blackman’s analysis for a second. His article reports that the group is in full ideological capture by the Mad Left, and, as a result, is about to be stripped of its ability to confer accreditation on law schools.
Now do the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers….
There. That’s enough to get you going…
Ethics Alarms 
Hunting Ethics 101:
Don’t hand a firearm to a 3-year old.
https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/in-your-community/racine-county/racine-county-deputy-charged-after-3-year-old-daughter-shoots-man-and-child-during-turkey-hunt
-Jut
Darn tootin’, he’d better be charged. What kind of irresponsible behavior is that to give a three-year old child a gun? What part of his head was not working that day?
I think we need to stop assuming that someone knows how to properly and safely handle a firearm just because they are a police officer or they have served in the military. I made this mistake by taking a friend of my wife’s family to a shooting match. He had served in the military for over a dozen years before being discharged. He brought his own firearm. He was disqualified within 2 minutes for reckless firearms handling.
I remember Las Vegas had 3 officers shoot out the seat and floorboard of their police cruisers in just 1 month because they memorized the ‘unload, fire, reload’ sequence without understand why. If you do ‘unload, reload, fire’, it goes ‘bang’. The officers were directed to point the muzzle at the front passenger seat of their cruiser while doing this because no one is ever supposed to sit there. Locally, we had a child killed when an officer fired his pistol at a snake in a tree (over his head) in a subdivision. The bullet struck and killed the child over 1/2 mile away.
Police officer with military experience does not equal good judgement on firearm usage. This is why there are still those calling for a return to revolvers for police officers. NYC tracked firearms usage of their officers for years. In the era of 5 and 6 shot revolvers, the stats were as below.
2 shots before the officer hit the suspect (average)
5.5 shots/engagment (average)
In other words, they always shot the gun until it went ‘click’. They only kept figures for 2 years into the semiauto era. You can see why.
9 shots before the officer hit the suspect
16.8 shots average (17 shot handgun)
They still shot the gun until it ran dry. However, that is a lot more stray bullets flying into a crowded city.
Criminals are also better armed than revolvers now.
If your goal is to stop a violent criminal in a situation justifying lethal force, once you’ve confirmed the area behind a target is free of collateral, I’m hard pressed to see a problem with a “mag dump”.
Holy buckets – look at that mullet!
It’s very difficult to appropriately protect the hearing of a three-year old from a shotgun discharge. Similarly, it’s very difficult to keep turkeys from being alarmed by the trpical activities of a three-year old.
Deputy stated himself that he was inexperienced, believed he had identified a turkey as a target, and fully in control of the firearm’s direction of fire. He’s being afforded some forms of Kings Pass on other irregularities due to his position and prior service.
I seriously doubt the daughter pulled the trigger. He’s proved untrustworthiness in other aspects, this smells like additional blame shifting.
This is why we should not be letting celebrities teach us history:
https://notthebee.com/article/ryan-reynolds-says-the-80s-were-traumatic-because-of-events-like-the-cuban-missile-crisis
To be clear, Reynolds did not say that the Cuban Missle Crisis occurred in the 80s as some news sites are reporting or implying. He did indicate that people were still feeling the weight of it. What does that mean?
My parents were boomers who were kids during the Cuban Missle Crisis. They weren’t feeling the weight of that in 1985. They had five kids, a mortgage and my dad was an auto worker who kept being laid off.
I certainly wasn’t thinking about the Cuban Missle Crisis. I was going to school, learning the clarinet and watching too much television.
I was an eleven-year-old living in Miami, Florida in 1962 among the first wave of refugees from that workers’ paradise. It was mostly something we watched on television, although there were photos of some sort of missiles arrayed in farm fields in Homestead. I’m not sure we ever saw any in person. 1985? The Cuban Missile Crisis was not top of mind.
And I just realized I misspelled Missile repeatedly in my post. I’m glad the crisis wasn’t on your mind in 1985, Bill, but I’m sure glad your present spelling is better than mine. 🙂
I though the prolific commenters would be talking about the Clancy trial in today’s open forum. The judge has officially declared a mistrial and it appears there was one jurist who sided with the prosecution. Clancy’s lawyer tried to have this jurist removed but was unsuccessful.
For me, I’m in disbelief that 11 of the 12 jurors where leaning towards acquittal or not guilty by reason of insanity. But, I didn’t hear the testimony and have no real basis for deciding either way. But it would be quite difficult to convince me that she’s not guilty of murder.
I want to know how the defense attorney knew that it was one holding out against his side? If the jury wasn’t leaking anything, the lawyer shouldn’t have known.
I hope the judge is just as curious in the answer to that question.
I have tried to think this through.
the foreperson said the juror was not following the law on reasonable doubt.
it gets complicated because the jury is weighing in on an insanity defense.
My understanding is that, when a defense is asserted, the defense has a prima facie burden to prove the defense by a preponderance of the evidence, forcing the state to disprove the defense beyond a reasonable doubt.
if I have stated the burdens correctly, it may really confuse someone about which way the doubts run.
allow me to demonstrate:
so, the one juror either thought that the state had met its burden of showing her insanity beyond a reasonable doubt and the other 11 were convinced she was guilty and not insane.
however, there were some statement to the effect that the juror had doubts.
that suggests all the jurors had reasonable doubts about her sanity, but one juror would not convict even though the juror had “doubts.”
or the one juror had doubts about her sanity, so he would not vote to convict even though all the others thought the state disproved the defense beyond a reasonable doubt.
however, the question is not whether a juror has doubts, but whether they have “reasonable doubts.”
if all 12 jurors had reasonable doubts about her sanity, the verdict should be not guilty.
however if the one juror had doubts about whether she was insane, that might mean that, while the juror had some doubts about her insanity, the juror thought the State had proven she was not insane.
given all of that, the simplest understanding is that everyone was leaning toward the defense, but the one juror had doubts about whether she was not guilty by reason of insanity.
the easiest explanation of the complicated scenario would be 11 not guilty and 1 guilty. It is hard for the average person to comprehend
the 11 guilty and 1 not guilty vote.
-Jut
The defense lawyer is trying to muddy the waters as much as he can.
There’s a reason for this.
The reason can only be that the lone hold out had valid reasons to hold out.
All the commentators I’ve read and heard so far have said Massachusets happens to be very favorable to the insanity defense. Not only does the prosecution have to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, when the defense invokes the insanity plea they don’t have to prove the defendant was insane, the prosecution has to prove the defendant is SANE.
I though the prolific commenters would be talking about the Clancy trial in today’s open forum.
My impression is that in criminal cases the presumption should be that the jury has it correct. Judges and appeals courts do not like to overturn jury verdicts. So that is why I am hesitant to comment on decisions made by jurors.
Do juries get it wrong sometimes? Yes, of course. I believe the OJ Simpson trial jury got it wrong; they engaged in jury nullification to make a point about Rodney King and racially motivated police violence against blacks. And of course during the Jim Crow era you could not get anybody convicted for all the lynching that took place.
So unless there is a clear case of jury nullification (which can sometimes be defensible or even necessary), or outright juror misconduct, I see little reason to weigh in on a jury verdict at an ethics blog.
Does the nation of Canada represent the greatest example of TDS yet? They just had national elections, and the winning issue for the liberals was: We’ll hate Trump harder.
The only problem is Canada lacks any lever to hurt America that doesn’t hurt themselves even harder. The largest export from Canada, by far, is petroleum products. BC has managed to block any export to the Pacific; Quebec has blocked any export to the Atlantic, leaving the US as the only destination for their products. They don’t even have the ability to feed the oil consumed by the bulk of their population without sending it East via Michigan.
Economists are utterly shocked at the rejection of the US trade deal. Canada will either be back begging for a deal, arguing with Trump from a place of weakness, or they’re facing economic ruin.
Was the PM’s meme comment a joke? It had to be, didn’t it? The conservative blogs are all acting as if he was serious.
I don’t think Carney meant it as a joke. He seems serious about it, and the Canadians are taking it that way. Look how the Canadians are reporting on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ocCPjE3KxA
It has turned into a massive backfire. When someone is needling you as a negotiation tactic, the last thing you should do is telegraph that it is working.
In case anybody is interested, Steve Sailer has a nice little essay about standardized testing at his substack.
“It’s time to get serious about testing”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-214380774
Alas, the last half is paywalled. I pay to get past his paywall.
Many people won’t admit to reading him because the progressive left finds him odious. I Some of my right thinking friends are appalled that I would read such a person. In addition, his sarcastic tendencies offend some readers. For me, he’s worth it. And that ‘s despite the fact that I read far less of his new material than previously.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
I know Jack always wants more people to comment here but it’s tough for me to figure out where my comments actually add any value, and “opportunity cost” keeps me away also. But I appreciate you, Jack!
charles w abbott
rochester NY