Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Catch-Up, 6/10/2021 (But I Keep Falling Further Behind!)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Hamster wheel

That’s not me, by the way. I would never wear a shirt like that…

1. Not substantiated, but worth mentioning: Fulton County, Georgia, poll manager Suzi Voyles says that when she sorted through a stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed strange uniformity in the markings on ballots favoring Joe. Biden. All the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden, except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white space inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they had been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil. All of these ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the 2020 Presidential election, and none were folded or creased, as mail-in ballots usually are. To her, the Biden votes looked like they’d been duplicated by a copying machine. At least three other poll workers observed the same thing in stacks of absentee ballots for Biden they handled, have joined Voyles in swearing under penalty of perjury that they something was—is—seriously amiss. A state judge has ordered that all of the 147,000 mail-in ballots counted in Fulton be unsealed to allow a closer inspection of the Biden ballots for evidence of counterfeiting. Observations:

  • Why is this only happening now, rather than before the results were certified?
  • Even if the audit show that Trump “won” Georgia, indeed even if similar audits show that he should have won the election, nothing will change as far as the current government is concerned. You can’t unring that bell. Congratulate the Democrats: it worked!
  • Even the Georgia audit alone, if it turned up sufficient counterfeit ballots, would still force some accountability on the news media and progressive pundits, who have rather too vigorously insisted that the election was as pure as the driven snow.
  • So far, the mainstream media has ignored this story, and will continue to if it comes to nothing. Right now, it’s officially just more conservative conspiracy theory.
  • I am certain that there are many in authority who believe that even if there was widespread fraud in 2020, it shouldn’t be revealed because that knowledge would cause civil unrest. I almost feel that way myself, except that Democrats and news media have been shouting from the rafters that complaints about the loose controls on mail-in ballots are fanciful, and that Trump is “lying” when he says the election was stolen. Now the truth has to be determined, so that highly dubious narrative doesn’t prevent essential reforms.
  • If the Xeroxed ballot accusation turns out to be legitimate, things will get ugly. At that point, maybe they have to.

2. Accountability Ethics, Baseball Division. The last two nights, the Houston Astros were booed lustily in Boston by fans indignant about that team’s cheating in 2017, including during a close play-off series with the Red Sox on the way to the Astros’ World Championship. There’s a disconnect here: the primary villain in the cheating scandal is the current Red Sox manager, Alex Cora, who engineered the sign-stealing scheme the team used to help it’s hitters all season. Cora, of course, hasn’t bee jeered at all. Alex said that the booing of his former team made him uncomfortable. Good! He told the press after the game in part,

“Tough to hear it. Because at the end, I was part of that. I was part of the 2017 Astros, and I was part of the whole sign-stealing situation and them being booed and screamed at … I was part of that, too. I know there’s a lot of people in this town who are fans of the Boston Red Sox that don’t agree that I’m the manager [Note: Like me…] There’s others that yeah, they’re OK with it and others, they’re just happy that we have this [winning] record. But that was something I was wondering for a while — how people were going to treat them — because at the end, we were part of it. [Clarification: Not “part of it,” Alex. You were the instigator of it.] Me and [current Red Sox player] Marwin [Gonzalez] were part of that, and it was a tough one last night. When I got home, I thought about it. I was like, ‘Wow.’ It was tough. It was a tough night.”

Not tough enough. I also liked how he threw his own player under the metaphorical bus. Most Boston fans had forgotten that Gonzales, now with the Sox , was one of the Astros’ sign-stealing cheats. I’m sure he was happy to hear his manager remind everyone in his new city.

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Ethics Hero: Private School Teacher Dana Stangel-Plowe

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

protesting teacher

Dana Stangel-Plowe, a teacher at the Dwight-Englewood School in Bergen County, New Jersey, resigned from the private school in a damning resignation letter subsequently published by the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. FAIR is an organization created to oppose the teaching of Critical Race Theory teachings in schools. Among her other accusations in the letter, Stangel-Plowe wrote that the head of Dwight-Englewood, Rodney De Jarnett, told the faculty that he would fire everyone if he could to replace them with non-white teachers. She also revealed that $52,000 a-year school segregated its teachers by skin color and asked students to segregate themselves “within the oppressor or oppressed group.’

Upon reading the letter, John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, called the news media’s attention to her protest by tweeting his support, writing,

“All hail Dana Stangel-Plowe, who has resigned from the Dwight-Englewood School, which teaches students “antiracism” that sees life as nothing but abuse of power, and teaches that cringing, hostile group identity against oppression is the essence of a self,” and added,

MacWhorter tweet

The entire resignation letter is below.

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“Trump Lost, Didn’t He?” One More Piece Of Damaging Anti-Trump Fake News Is Proven False

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

When President Trump claims the election was stolen, this is the kind of thing he should focus on.

The U.S. Department of Interior’s Office of the Inspector General released its findings after investigating law enforcement’s actions on June 1 of 2020, when police removed protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., ahead of President Donald Trump walk to St. John’s Church, after “peaceful protesters” had set it aflame. The authorities made the decision to clear out the park in order to install fencing amid ongoing rioting in the area following the death of George Floyd, the investigation determined, and not for to give Trump a photo op, as the news media furiously reported. Inspector General Mark Lee Greenblatt’s thorough and detailed report concludes,

“We found that the USPP had the authority and discretion to clear Lafayette Park and the surrounding areas on June 1. The evidence we obtained did not support a finding that the USPP cleared the park to allow the President to survey the damage and walk to St. John’s Church.”

Oh! That’s funny…at the time, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos reported that “The administration asked police to clear peaceful protesters from the park across the White House so that the President could stage a photo op.” “Reported” means it’s factual, right? ABC checked it out, it didn’t just follow what protesters said and the DNC told them to say, right? Just like NPR‘s headline “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op” had to be based on solid facts and objective reporting, or it would have said “allegedly” or “some say,” correct? The New York Times–you know, the best of the best?—would never have printed “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church” if it wasn’t true, isn’t that how the “paper of record” is supposed to work? In a widely circulated video, a man interviewed on the scene said, “To me, the way our military and police have behaved toward the protesters at the instruction of President Trump has almost been Nazi-like.” Perfect!

Then, handed a false narrative, another Big Lie to run with, Democrats didn’t disappoint. Here’s Joe Biden or his ventriloquist:

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Comment Of The Day: “The Ethics Dilemma That Has No Solution: We Can’t Trust Police, But We Have To”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

charlottesville-police-response-20170812

Well, I expected this one: Jim Hodgson, a frequent commenter, has an extensive background in law enforcement. Ethics Alarms is fortunate to have the benefit of his perspective, and I am grateful for it.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “The Ethics Dilemma That Has No Solution: We Can’t Trust Police, But We Have To”:

***

The scope of thought provoked by this post could fill volumes. I will try to be brief.

Some corrupt organizational cultures are so big and so corrupt that they seem to defy correction. This seems to be the case with big agencies like NYPD, Chicago PD, and perhaps Boston PD as well as others. Some of these agencies seem to have major corruption scandals every ten or fifteen years, which likely means there is some omnipresent level of corruption just below the surface. It boggles the mind (mine, anyway) to contemplate what would have to be done to set a large erring agency on the right path.

In the agencies I worked for, (200 – 250 employees max) just one incident involving one officer was a scandal. Yet, I can only comment accurately from my own experience. I entered law enforcement in 1974, at what I call “the end of the knuckle-dragging era,” when the first steps to upgrade police selection, training and supervision were just taking hold. My first agency required two years of college as a prerequisite to employment, and required us to remain enrolled in college until the completion of a baccalaureate or higher degree, pursuing the goal that the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice established in 1967, “that all police personnel with general enforcement powers have baccalaureate degrees.” This was, of course, presented by the Commission as “an ultimate” goal, but it was being actively pursued by some agencies.

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Good Ethics News! It Is Fair To Say That Vice-President Harris Will Never Be Elected President

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Holt and Harris

There is no question about it: fraudulent personalities and con artists have been elected President of the United States in the past. However, that challenge isn’t easy, and being able to fool the public most of the time isn’t the only skill required to pull it off.

Kamala Harris is one of those truly awful politicians who radiates phoniness and opportunism. She has no true principles other than dedication to her own ambition and narcissism, and it is fair to conclude that if she ever had access to the power of the Presidency, she would create a bipartisan disaster.

Fortunately, Harris can’t fool anyone, at least not enough. She isn’t smart or dexterous. Her insincerity glows like an LED bulb. This is why she was such a spectacularly unpopular Presidential candidate when she ran in the Democratic primaries. The Vice-Presidency was handed to her based on nothing unique or admirable about Harris, just her color and her chromosomes. This provided her with a second chance to make a good first impression, but she just can’t do it.

Good.

This episode is in itself minor, but it features such a spectacularly dishonest and bumbling performance by Harris that it should erase any fears that anything short of Joe Biden’s demise will put her in the Oval Office.

During an interview with NBC News yesterday, Harris, who has been criticized for not visiting the U.S.-Mexico border despite being delegated the job of overseeing the mess there, was asked whether she had any plans to do so.

Harris: I – at some point – you know – we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole – this whole – this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.

Or as Ralph Kramden would say, “Huminahuminahumina…”

When Lester Holt protested that despite her use of “we,” she had not, in fact, been to the border, her lightening-fast retort was…

Harris: “I – and I haven’t been to Europe! And I mean, I don’t – I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”

That’s it! That’s proof positive that Harris is too dim to hide her own dishonesty even to fool some of the people some of the time, or to get past a mildly challenging question from a Democratic ally like Holt. After trying deceit to duck the point Holt was making (“We’ve been to the boarder”—see, it depends on what the meaning of “we” is!), she resorted to a grade school level deflection (‘I haven’t been to lots of places! What’s your point?‘) The point is that her job doesn’t require her to go to Europe, but the boarder crisis does mandate that she go there and learn something. As she knows. And the best she can do is a virtual Jumbo, as in ‘I have no idea what you are referring to!’

This is Kamala Harris. She’s not just inept, she’s an inept phony. She may fool a few people with cognitive disabilities or who don’t give a damn, but most Americans will see through someone who talks like that, and they don’t want such empty suits as their leaders no matter what their political affiliations are.

She’s never going to be President.

Isn’t that nice?

The Ethics Dilemma That Has No Solution: We Can’t Trust Police, But We Have To

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ellis arrest

A Netflix documentary that debuted last year crystallized my conclusions about the current attack on police, policing, and the justice system as a part of “white supremacy,” and the so far successful effort by Black Lives Matter and its allies among progressives and the Democratic Party to unravel the core values of American society as part of the “solution.”

The documentary is “Trial 4,” and it tells the disturbing story of how a black Boston teenager named Sean Ellis was railroaded into serving 22 years in prison for the 1993 execution-style murder of a Boston cop. Yes, it’s a documentary, so it is hardly objective, but it is even-handed for the genre, and to this long-time Boston native, it rings true in most respects. It also brought back memories of my U.S. race relations course in college, taught by the estimable Thomas Pettigrew, which convinced me that the plight of the black community in the U.S. was probably beyond repairing.

Ellis was finally exonerated just last month, as all of his convictions were either reversed or thrown out, with prosecutors (finally) deciding not to pursue any further action against him. Presumably he will get a large settlement from the city. He deserves one.

The details of the story are best followed by seeing the program, but key points are these;

  • The murdered officer, a white, Irish veteran officer, was a corrupt cop who was known on the force to be corrupt, but he was nonetheless honored in death as a paradigm of law enforcement virtue. Thousands of police officers, even from other states, came to his public funeral. The determination by his peers to find and punished the assassin who shot him five times in the face was intense.
  • The law-abiding police who knew the truth about the deceased officer, John Mulligan, never made any official complaints, hewing to the so-called “blue line.” In this they mirror all professional groups: doctors, lawyers, politicians, elected officials, and of course the clergy are all reluctant to blow the whistle even though basic ethical values require it.
  • Two of Mulligan’s fellow officers were running a series of illegal activities that Mulligan either was involved in or knew about, including overtime scams, planting evidence, arresting innocent black citizens and pressuring them into giving false evidence, and stealing drug money in legal and illegal searches.
  • These same officers (they flank Ellis in the photo above) took control of the investigation of Mulligan’s murder, and one of them manipulated his own relative to falsely identify Ellis as being at the scene of the murder. They also intimidated Ellis’s uncle, who was on parole and was threatened with being sent back to prison, to implicate his nephew.
  • Despite what looks in hindsight like huge, neon-flashing signs reading “Frame up! Frame up!,” the justice system lined up against Ellis and with the cops, even a supposedly reform-minded black District Attorney (who insisted of retrying the murder charges against Ellis after two hung juries mostly favoring acquittal) and the African American judge in the trials.

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Tuesday Afternoon Ethics Tunes, 6/8/21: The Mean Fundraiser, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Quite a while ago—I’m afraid to check—I asked readers to submit nominees for popular songs with an ethics theme or lesson. Lorne Greene’s one hit recording ( his vocal version of the “Bonanza” song did not fly off the shelves) was “Ringo,” a pretty blatant rip-off of Jimmy Dean’s “Big John,” was one of the first on the list. I received quite a few suggested songs but events overtook me, and I never finished the project. It is in a growing list of promised future content that I have yet to deliver, including missing parts to multi-part posts. I apologize to readers for all of them, but I also intend to make good on all of them, though the ethics songs compilation is understandably low priority. I was happy to finally finish the Ethics Guide to “Miracle on 34th Street” after it languished for a year. The top priorities on the catch-up list right now are Part II of Three Ethics Metaphors: The Rise, The Presidency And The Fall Of Donald J. Trump—that will be on the “Animal House” parade plot metaphor for Trump’s election—and, of course, the long-delayed Part III of The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear.

Back to Lorne: I met him once, on a Santa Monica beach. He was in swimming trunks, and with his family, extremely friendly, tanned and wearing his hairpiece, which was fantastic. Like several other stars I have met in person, Greene was so strikingly attractive that he would make anyone turn their heads on a street even if you had no idea who he was. Unlike most of the others, he appeared to be a genuinely nice guy.

1. Proud to be off Twitter, Reason #569: After Twitter received notice of its noncompliance with India’s information technology laws, demanding that the company remove content critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic and about farmers’ protests, including tweets by journalists, activists and politicians, Twitter pulled itself up to its full metaphorical height, puffed itself up like blowfish, and protested in part, “We are concerned by recent events regarding our employees in India and the potential threat to freedom of expression for the people we serve.”

Twitter actually said that it cares about freedom of expression! Then, last week, after Nigeria blocked Twitter, it had the gall to tweet…

Twitter Nigeria

This, from the platform that censored the Hunter Biden laptop story and banned President Trump. The Hanlon’s Razor question of whether these are bad people or just stupid people now becomes irrelevant. It’s unethical to operate a powerful communications platform when you are so stupid.

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Dead Ethics Alarms Tales: The Cotton-Picking Assignment

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

How brain-dead and ethically inert does a teacher have to be to give two black students an assignment to pick cotton? The mind boggles, but this really happened, and at the cringingly politically correctly-named Sacajawea Middle School in Spokane Washington no less.

ABC News tells us that Emzayia and Zyeshauwne Feazell reported to their mother that their social studies teacher handed out cotton and told them and other students to “pick it” in a race to see who could do so it the fastest. The assignment was supposed to be a reminder that blacks were once enslaved and forced to pick cotton on Southern plantations, because nobody else is reminding black children of that fact daily and perhaps hourly.

A furious Brandi Feazell told the network regarding the incident,

“For you to pass out cotton and to my children [and tell them] that essentially, they’re going to pick the cotton clean and it’s a race of who can get it clean first, that was extremely bothersome to me and my children. Under no circumstance … do they need to be taught what it’s like to be a slave or what it’s like to be Black.”

Nor is that a valid topic for study, except in a race-obsessed culture where making certain that blacks are resentful and…wait. Right. I wasn’t thinking…

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Dear Red Sox: That Was An Unethical Banner, But You Asked For It

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

trump-won-banner-fenway-park

During yesterday’s late afternoon game Red Sox game against the Miami Marlins in Fenway Park, some fans unfurled a huge “Trump won — Save America” banner over the centerfield wall during the fourth inning. The banner was confiscated and the fans ejected from the game. Some of the players and quite a few spectators were amused. Similar messages appeared on banners unfurled during Mets and Yankees games in recent weeks.

The Red Sox have long had a policy prohibiting large signs and banners in the park, though I have seen some appear without the park staff taking action. Political signs have always been taboo. In 2017, this sign…

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Ethics Madness On The Golf Course

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I saw this story four days ago, and talked myself out of posting about it because I decided there had to be something I was missing and I didn’t feel like spending time researching pro golf, since I find golf so boring.But I couldn’t help myself, and kept reading articles, and now I’m convinced. This was wrong. And it was nuts. (Yeah, I’m pretty sick of the “Madness!” clip from the last seconds of “The Bridge Over The River Kwai” too—that’s James Donald, incidentally. I’m more sick of the apparently endless stream of incidents in The Great Stupid that prompt it.)

Golf pro Jon Rahm crushing the field in the PGA’s Memorial Tournament; indeed, he was on the way to a possible course record He had a six-stroke lead, and was 18 under par. Only golf legend Ben Hogan has done as well on that course in the tournament’s history. I had never heard of Rahm (though I will now know him as “that poor bastard), but he’s apparently the #3 ranked golfer in the world. That rating would have risen, and as would his bank account, when he won the nearly 1.7 million dollar prize money.

Right in the end of a round, however, on international TV, Rahm was told that he had been disqualified. The tournament’s medical adviser walked up to himafter he had played his final shot and gave him the news that he had tested positive for the Wuhan virus. Rahm had been undergoing daily tests after discovering before the tournament that he had come into close contact with someone who had tested positive.  Each of his previous tests had come back negative, but the positive test, once it was verified, was viewed as disqualifying. He took it, well, like a prole and a devotee of Vox. He tweeted,

“I’m very disappointed in having to withdraw from the Memorial Tournament. This is one of those things that happens in life, one of those moments where how we respond to a setback defines us as people. I’m very thankful that my family and I are all OK. I will take all of the necessary precautions to be safe and healthy, and I look forward to returning to the golf course as soon as possible.”

I might have defined myself by tweeting (if I hadn’t banned Twitter from my life),

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