Ethics Case Study: “Old Blue Eyes” vs “The Godfather of Soul”

I’ve checked this story out to the extent that it is possible. It could be apocryphal; that “photo” above is clearly A.I. But the tale fits what is known about the characters of the two superstars, and it’s a useful parable whether the story is strictly true or not. “Print the legend,” as the old newspaperman says at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Frank Sinatra is a complex figure, to say the least. He had mob connections and used them (even though “The Godfather” horse-head-in-the-bed story is almost certainly fiction), and had a reputation for dropping loyal friends like hot rocks when they displeased him. He is also credited with integrating Las Vegas hotels, refusing to perform anywhere that relegated black performers to second class status.

James Brown was one of those black performers who benefited from Frank’s stand, and he was appearing at the Sands Hotel in 1968. Brown had a one-week engagement at the Sands, where Sinatra was always treated as its main attraction. Brown, like Frank a seasoned pro who kept tight control over all aspects of his act, had arrived to find requested dressing-room features like mirrors, lighting, space to warm up and more absent despite his making his needs clear to management. Brown threatened to pull the show unless he got what he expected, while the Sands told him he risked forfeiting his fee and being sued.

Brown ultimately agreed to perform, but said he would not cut his set to 60 minutes as management told him Sinatra had directed. Then Brown went on stage opening night like his hair was on fire, and had the audience cheering well past the supposed one hour deadline. The next day, management again relayed Sinatra’s orders: keep the performance to the contracted 60 minutes. Brown defiantly extended his set again.

The New York Times Is Shocked—SHOCKED!—That Anyone Would Think It Discriminates Against White Males!

A white male New York ‘Times’ employee has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging the paper had discriminated against him by not giving him a promotion despite his superior qualifications, because he is a white male. Yesterday the EEOC filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the ‘Times’ arguing that the paper’s pledge to satisfy its DEI goals are being translated into “unlawful employment practices.”

Which, of course, they are, if the color of one’s skin and one’s pronouns are considered as crucial in determining promotions.

The Times was first to break the news of the suit but did not name the employee who made the complaint. “Reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee’s identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press,” says New York Magazine.

Really! So the Times feels that loyal Times workers should support “good discrimination” and allow the paper to skirt the law, even when they are the victims of illegal employment practices, because to do otherwise is to support the Evil Trump administration.

In World War Eleven such people were called “Good Germans.”

This is one sick culture at the New York Times.

Nikita Stewart — the Times’ then-real-estate editor who has since been promoted to metro editor — “deviated from normal hiring protocol” in January 2025 to hire someone without experience editing real-estate coverage to work as her deputy, the suit alleges. The white man who was bypassed had “considerable experience with real estate news,” a requirement included on the public job listing for the position.

Wow. A female editor named Nikita is at the center of his “to each according to their needs” tale! You can’t make this stuff up.

In 2021 the Times announced a “Call To Action,” which stated that “people of color—and particularly women of color—remain notably underrepresented in its leadership,” the suit claims. A company can address that perceived imbalance by recruitment efforts, but—and I speak from experience—placing a racial and gender thumbs on the metaphorical scales is virtually unavoidable.

Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha called the suit “politically motivated.” Gee, what a surprise. “Our employment practices are merit-based and focused on recruiting and promoting the best talent in the world,’’ Ha said in a statement. “We will defend ourselves vigorously.”

You know…like Harvard denied that admitting black students with lower grades and test scores than Asian applicants was discriminatory.

Does anyone believe that the woke, left-biased, victim-mongering, knee-jerk Democratic New York Times, after declaring that its staff was “too white” and “too male” has not been systematically discriminating against whites and men?

Take Mark Zuckerberg, Add A.I., and the Result…[Link Fixed]

Unethical conduct, of course!

Lawyer-novelist Scott Turow has joined publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage in a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and founder. The complaint, filed this week in in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that Meta and Zuckerberg illegally appropriated millions of copyrighted works to train Meta’s A.I. bot “Llama,” while removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.

The lawsuit is hardly the first of its kind. Writers have brought lawsuits against other tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI for the same illegal and unethical process. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion last year to writers whose books it had used, without permission or payment, to train its A.I. program.

Amusingly, one star witness for the plaintiffs is Llama itself. Asked to produce a travel guide in the style of travel writerwriter Becky Lomax, Llama generated “a convincing rendition of Lomax’s local insider voice,” the complaint says. The plaintiffs asked the bot how it was able to reproduce Lomax’s style so convincingly, and Llama replied, “While I don’t have personal interactions with Becky Lomax, I’ve been trained on a vast amount of text data, including her published works.”

Well thank you for your candor, Llama. A whistleblower bot! What will they think of next?

A.I. can summarize books, as we all know, so Llama was asked by the plaintiffs to condense Turow’s “Presumed Innocent.” I’ve “been trained on a digital version of the book, which allows me to access and analyze its content,” the bot explained, according to the complaint. The suit alleges that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”

They should ask Llama about that too.

Maybe the bot should be re-named “Rat.”

“A.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesman said. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The plaintiffs say that Meta’s A.I. program threatens the livelihoods of writers and publishers. The technology can quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books. Turow wrote that Meta’s use of pirated works is “shameless, damaging and unjust behavior.” “I find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style,” Turow wrote.

Stay tuned.

Stop Making Me Defend Harvard!

Not that I find the latest controversial course offering at Harvard ennobling or likely to prompt me remove my diploma from its place of shame—front to the wall, on the floor— in the hallway to my office, but it is defensible, which is not the same as calling it “good.”

Harvard University hosted OnlyFans drool-object Ari Kytsya….

….(she’s another “influencer”) at a business class discussion on the adult entertainment industry. Kytsya spoke at Harvard about her career on the adult live porn site and the business of being an online peep show entrepreneur. During the lecture, Kytsya discussed the nuances of profiting from making “adult content” and shared anecdotes from her work. For example, once she was paid to “shit in a box for 10K.” Nice. She also emphasized how important it is to enjoy one’s work.

Harvard is being criticized for hosting the lecture, the complaint being that the school is debasing elite education by elevating sexually explicit content and adult entertainers to the status of legitimate topics for academic study.

The criticism is, I think, unfair. OnlyFans was a creative use of new technology when it was conceived; it is also a model that allows individuals to build a brand and a business. I can certainly see how there are valuable business lessons to be learned from the OnlyFans phenomenon that can be applied to other, more traditional businesses.

Nor are dubious courses anything new at Harvard. When I was at the college, there was an infamous “gut”—Harvardese for a shamelessly easy course—nicknamed “Ships.” The semester course, taught by an amiable and ancient professor, covered the history of sea vessels, and if you couldn’t get an A in that course, you were probably dead. There was nothing useful in “Ships” unless one was considering landing on Plymouth Rock. The OnlyFans discussion, in contrast, could have practical applications.

Ethics Alarms recently relayed the news that has-been B list actress Shannon Elizabeth, well past her wet T-shirt pull date, was displaying her wares on the site. It was reported last month that the 52-year-old earned $1 million in her first week. Now, business courses are not the only academic settings where the porn site is worthy of study; sociology, American culture and psychology students, as well as technology scholars, should heed the phenomenon. Back in 2021, law professor Catherine McKinnon called out OnlyFans as a toxic influence on the culture, contributing to societal approval of pornography and sex work, and described the platform as a cyber-pimp.

She may be right. But that would make the case that OnlyFans is a valid topic for academic inquiry stronger.

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Res Ipsa Loquitur: Reuters’ Unethical Headline

“Spirit Airlines shuts down, industry’s first Iran war casualty”

Today I was a guest on The Steven Speirer Show, talking about ethics. In the final minutes, Steven, a California lawyer, asked me what I regarded as the greatest ethics issue facing the U.S. today. Without hesitation, I named the corruption of journalism and the collapse of ethics in the journalism profession. Readers here are familiar with that conclusion and why I am confident that it is correct. A republic cannot function with out an informed populace. “Advocacy journalism,” the elevation of the profit motive over integrity, responsibility and honesty, and the increasing intrusion of the techniques of “fake news” into reporting has transformed journalism into a toxic combination of propaganda and indoctrination.

“Professions earn that label by being trustworthy,” I told Steve. “Our news media today cannot be trusted, and those who do trust it are uninformed or misinformed.” My host said that he wished he could disagree, but in good conscience could not.

Then I checked my emails after the session, and saw the link to the Reuters headline above, re-posted on Yahoo! Finance. (Arthur in Maine gets the pointer for the link; my apologies for misidentifying the source in the original version of this post). It’s a classic, typical of how journalism operates today. A story about a company bankruptcy that was long in the works is framed as an indictment of the Iran War, and by extension President Trump.

Why Do People Suddenly Snap And Start Shooting People? Things Like This:

Further evidence that there is a conspiracy to drive me crazy…

Alex Renew, the Alexandria wastewater service, just sent me an emergency email beginning with “Your scheduled payment did not go through.” You can see the email above. I was directed to click on a “Pay Now” button. That took me to my invoice, which stated that my balance was “0.” See?

I called AlexRenew and finally reached a manager, who checked my account. She confirmed that I don’t owe anything. She confirmed that my last payment went through.

“So why did I get this alert?” I asked.

“Honestly, sir, I have no idea.” was the answer.

Stop Making Me Defend Jeff Bezos To Totalitarian Progressives! [Updated!]

UPDATE: I had multiple sources for this post, none of which, apparently, were accurate. Plus, the announcement above appears to be false. At this link, the paperback version of the book is indeed available at Amazon. I’m going to wait a bit, and leave this post up until I am confident that the whole thing is a hoax, or figure out what is going.

I apologize for the confusion. Right now I hate everybody and everything.

***

See, all you Jeff Bezos haters and Amazon boycotters? There wasn’t anything to get upset about after all. Jeff still cares about your values and the Democratic party, and Amazon is on the right side of the angels after all!

Amazon just censored “Camp of the Saints,” first published in 1973,that portends the destruction of the West as a result of third-world mass migration. Yes, it’s apparently a “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory book.

Never heard of it. However, for Amazon, the most popular and easily accessed book merchant, to refuse to sell a book like “Camp of the Saints” is undeniably viewpoint censorship. Yes, yes, I know, the First Amendment only applies to government censorship. That’s been the go-to rationalization by progressives to control the distribution of ideas they don’t like and find “dangerous” on social media, at college campuses and in the news media for a long time now. But freedom of speech, communication and thought is a core value in this country, or is supposed to be.

All my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends who announced they were boycotting Amazon, and the Washington Post staffers who resigned in protest when Bezos, the owner of the D.C.-based Democratic Party propaganda mouthpiece, refused to endorse Kamala Harris for President, should beg his forgiveness. Bezos is part of their club: he just didn’t want a paper he publishes to look ridiculous by endorsing an idiot.

By the way, I find Kamala’s ghost-written memoir of her run for President to be “offensive content.”

One wag writes on X: “I’m sure all the people who whine about ‘book bans’ when a school board prevents 6-year-olds from reading about gay sex” will be just as upset about this development. Funny, but I doubt it.

This also looks like an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to the unschooled how the Streisand Effect works. As I just noted, I never heard of the book, and wouldn’t have read it I had been aware of it. However, for the real defenders of democracy and our individual rights as Americans, making this book, whatever it says, into a runaway best seller now might teach the totalitarian Left a lesson. Here is what it looks like:

Nah, what am I thinking? The totalitarian Left hasn’t learned anything since it memorized Big Brother’s mottos—you know, like “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,” which explains the state of both our educational institutions and our journalism.

Ethics Quiz: AI Jesus

We all knew this was coming, as sure as God made little green idiots. Nonetheless, it poses an ethics conundrum. Several, in fact.

First, though: “What’s going on here?” What’s going on is that once again, someone has figured out a way to profit from human desperation, sadness, and gullibility, or, as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” P.T. was being conservative in his estimate.

For just $1.99 per minute, or $49.99 for 45 minutes (what a deal!) anyone can have a spiritual conversation with a digital avatar of Jesus Christ, whose appearance is modeled on actor Jonathon Roumie’s portrayal on the TV show “The Chosen.” This courtesy of the Just Like Me website, which explains, “Jesus AI is an artificial intelligence tool designed to offer comfort, encouragement, and timeless wisdom inspired by teachings of love, compassion, forgiveness, and personal growth. It is not Jesus Christ himself, nor does it possess divine authority.”

We can cross off dishonesty from the list of possible ethics breaches, I guess. But historians and anthropologists believe that Jesus probably looked like this…

I still have questions, however.

Confronting My Biases #28: Shannon Elizabeth

I know this particular bias is probably indefensible. I know how I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t. A little help here?

Remember Shannon Elizabeth? I’d place her in the same category as Andrea Dromm, Michelle Johnson and Pam Austin, three earlier sexy, attractive starlets who had brief moments of B-level film success before they were pushed into obscurity by younger Hollywood “It” girls. It’s a cruel business, and especially cruel for young women whose main assets are their assets and not the potential to play Medea.

Shannon Elizabeth gained 10 minutes of stardom playing the sex kitten in the raunchy hit “American Pie”: that was her peak. “America Pie II” is where that photo above comes from, and professionally it was all downhill after that…a few forgettable flops, a TV series that was cancelled in its first season, nothing since 2006. Her Wikipedia page describes her as an “activist,” a professional poker player, and an actress. Her major recent accomplishment seems to be being named “one of the leading celebrity poker players”20 years ago.

I find all this ineffably sad, but that’s not the topic today. It is this: at the age of 52, Shannon just filed for divorce and announced that she was opening an Only Fans account, where horny middle-aged men can pay to see her ta-tas, and presumably other things.

“I’ve spent my entire career working in Hollywood, where other people controlled the narrative and the outcome of my career. This new chapter is about changing that, showing off a more sexy side no one has seen, and being closer to my fans,” Elizabeth told PEOPLE . “I’m choosing OnlyFans because it allows me to connect directly with my audience, create on my own terms, and just be free. I really do think this is the future.”

Fans can subscribe to her page starting today. Let me translate what her statement says to me.

“I have never developed any special skills and have the intellectual life of a salmon. My career was based entirely on my looks, my marriage went to hell, and I couldn’t write a book or host a podcast on a bet. Yeah, I’ve got some money saved up, but I’m addicted to being looked at. I’ve slid all the way down the usual greased poll of fading B-level celebrity: reality shows, Dancing with the Stars, so now it’s come to this. I know forty and fifty year-old men will pay to see me naked because they liked ‘American Pie.’ At least that’s something.”