Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: ‘Catching Up: Professional Ethics And The Challenger Disaster’”
Business & Commercial
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/5/2022 (Cont.): Part 2, Rogan, Roker, “Reacher” And “More”
1. There is hope! The new Amazon Prime Jack Reacher series, “Reacher,” has no mixed race couples in it whatsoever. I was amazed, and wonder if this means the thing was made in 2019, before Hollywood decided that the accidental killing in Minnesota of a black perp by a brutal white cop in an incident having nothing to do with race meant that the world film and TV present to America must be one where nearly 100% of all married and unmarried relationships consist of two races. Isn’t it amazing that a casting feature that was once not only routine but accurate seems remarkable by its absence, and it was completely benign then and would still be accurate now?
2. Just for curiosity, I’m going to keep getting these Harvard alerts. The unethical though famous institution I graduated from once is marking this big reunion year with special online events for participants. The first one, not surprisingly, deals with…climate change! You would think that such a university, with all the subjects it covers and all of the departments available, could put together a schedule that didn’t consist of partisan obsessions, wouldn’t you?
But no. I fully expect subsequent programs to include, “Systemic Racism,” “Protecting the Right to Choose,” “The January 6 Insurrection” and “Mainstream Media Conservative Bias.”
I’m getting enough propaganda on climate change, thanks. Today I learned that “Once considered comic relief to anchors, television meteorologists are making it clear to viewers that they are covering a crisis in real time.” The “news story” headline begins, “As Storms Intensify…” Intensify based on what? There is no proof that storms are “intensifying” that justifies stating this as fact.
But you can’t deny that Al Roker is an “expert” on climate science though! After all, he attended the State University of New York at Oswego where he received a BA in communications in 1976….
The Jeff Zucker Scandal’s Emerging Details Confirm The Long-Time Ethics Alarms Verdict: This Is And Has Been A Corrupt, Untrustworthy News Organization
And it, meaning its unethical and unprofessional leadership, management and employees, was allowed to manipulate public opinion, national politics, and the nation. Think about that.
We didn’t need more to know CNN President Jeff Zucker was a slimy, ruthless hypocrite—his network was proof enough— but the unfolding scandal has certainly provided spectacular confirmation. You need to thoroughly update yourself at the links, but here are some basics:
- CNN’s President Jeff Zucker announced on February 2, 2022, that he was resigning from the company, over his illicit affair with subordinate Allison Gollust. The spin on this includes calling her a “colleague.” No, she worked for Zucker. That makes the relationship toxic, not just “inappropriate.” Both Gollust and Zucker left their marriages during the affair.
Who knows what employees, or female or minority employees, were passed over so Zucker could advance his lover’s career? That’s a major reason why the boss having affairs with subordinates is always wrong, always destructive, and must be addressed.
- CNN talking heads and execs are making excuses for Zucker. One CNN executive told The Daily Beast, “People are pissed. No one thinks the punishment fits the crime.” And that proves how thoroughly ethics brain-dead Zucker has left CNN. When the head of any organization is caught violating that organizations rules and policies, he or she must resign of be fired.
The punishment does fit the crime. Continue reading
The Duty To Warn: As Will Surprise No One Who Is Familiar With This Blog, I See A Serious Ethics Issue Related To My Recent Visit To The Emergency Room
I’m going to have to cover this topic with one metaphorical hand tied behind my metaphorical back, because some of the important details land in the realm of confidentiality.
Last week, one of my loved ones had a frightening experience, slowly becoming disoriented and confused regarding time, place and language, hallucinating, falling down an unlit staircase and only missing serious injury by pure luck, speaking nonsense, then gibberish, and finally being unable to speak at all. By the time the EMTs were summoned, I was worried that I was witnessing a stroke in progress, which is what the paramedics thought when they arrived.
But it wasn’t a stroke. In fact, the ER doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on. By then the patient was trembling, thrashing around (so much that an MRI was impossible), frightened, angry, aggressive, and talking incessantly but incomprehensibly. They thought it might be a tumor, or an infection, or bleeding, or an interaction of many factors. It was like a “House” episode.
The real reason for the symptoms was that the patient hadn’t filled a long-standing prescription for Levothyroxine, a very common drug ( also known as synthroid) used to treat an underactive thyroid. The weather had been bad and ice was everywhere, so the trip to the CVS was put off one day, then another, then another. An unremarkable few days off the drug, which had been taken regularly for decades with occasional short interruptions, stretched into a week. That, the doctors concluded, had caused it all. Once the drug was injected, complete recovery occurred overnight.
Comment Of The Day: “Catching Up: Professional Ethics And The Challenger Disaster”
I was very pleased to receive this Comment of the Day by Ryan Harkins on the post “Catching Up: Professional Ethics And The Challenger Disaster,” because it focuses on the ethics of risk, a great topic that EA hasn’t covered as well as it should.
I’ll have one brief note at the end.
***
I was 4 and in preschool when the Challenger exploded. We watched the launch on TV before I went to school that day, and apparently it really disturbed me, because I bit another student and then hid under a table for the rest of the day.
Working at the refinery now, we get to revisit the Challenger explosion frequently (along with the Bhopal Union Carbide gas leak, the Texas City tanker explosion, the Texas City ISOM explosion, and a host of others) when discussing process safety. Michael West is absolutely right in that it isn’t simply a calculation of what the worst consequence is, but also the likelihood of that occurring.
Part of the reason the engineers’ concerns were dismissed was because the problem with the O-rings had been known and discussed for quite some time, and there had been numerous launches prior to this one that had been perfectly successful. In other words, NASA had gotten away with using the faulty O-rings before, so they saw no reason to be overly concerned this time around. Furthermore, the launch had already been delayed multiple times, and they were under intense pressure to launch. Why should they listen to the doom-saying of engineers when empirical evidence said the worst-case scenario was not going happen?
It’s Come To This: A Culture War Battle Over Minnie Mouse
Let me stipulate up front: this is a stupid controversy, but not that stupid. I don’t care about Minnie Mouse and never did, I don’t care what she, or it, wears, and I am certain that most of the conservatives now complaining over Minnie Mouse’s “new look”—which isn’t permanent, comes to us from France’s Disneyland, and would probably go unnoticed absent the Streisand Effect triggered by the complaints—care about Minnie either.
However, one of the ways that the extreme Left got such a dangerous foothold in this nation is through ingenious incrementalism…little, teeny-tiny moves to radicalize the culture and indoctrinate rising generations that sane people just shrugged off as not worth making a big deal about until it was too late. Or almost—we shall see.
A Smoothie Incident In Connecticut
After the now viral video above made the rounds, James Iannazzo, 48, was arrested and charged with a hate crime following the outburst at Robeks in Fairfield, Conn. over the weekend. The Fairfield Police Department said that Iannazzo returned to the store after a smoothie he purchased caused his son, who is allergic to peanuts, to be rushed to the hospital from his home. Iannazzo apparently ordered the smoothie without peanut butter, but did not explain to employees that his son had an allergy.
The New York Post says he called a staff member a “fucking immigrant.” The Times says he called her an “immigrant loser.”
After the Merrill Lynch office where Iannazzo works was swamped in furious emails, he was fired from his job as an analyst. A spokesman for Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, told the New York Times in an email,
“Our company does not tolerate behavior of this kind. We immediately investigated and have taken action. This individual is no longer employed at our firm.”
“When faced with a dire situation for his son, Mr. Iannazzo’s parental instinct kicked in and he acted out of anger and fear,” the father’s lawyer said. “He is not a racist individual and deeply regrets his statements and actions during a moment of extreme emotional stress.”
There are many troubling aspects to the matter.
Ethics Observations:
Black Like Us
Confirming my own half-baked research, apparently African-American actors are indeed disproportionately represented in TV commercials now. American Thinker records,
In the United States today, the White population (not including Hispanics) is 57.8%….Blacks comprise 14% of the U.S. population but appear in 50% of commercials. White actors now appear to promote health insurance, gold, loans, and some medicines. Moreover, if a White person appears in a commercial, he/she is usually old, sick, a freak, or at the very least, an appendage to a Black partner. If there’s a doctor on the screen, he’s usually Black, while the patient is usually White. Caucasian young men appear in only 4% of the commercials! If some aliens began to study the population of Planet Earth through our TV commercials they would have a somewhat distorted picture of Americans, to put it mildly.
Unethical Quote Of The Month: Golden State Warriors Owner Chamath Palihapitiya
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay. You bring it up because you care and I think it’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care. I’m just telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line.”
—–Golden State Warriors owner Chamath Palihapitiya, in an interview.
This statement, classic signature significance, neatly explains why the National Basketball Association remains metaphorically in bed with the brutal regime in China, why the Biden Administration refuses to hold the country responsible for its role as an international outlaw (and inflicting its virus on our population,economy and the world), and if you change just one word, why the United States allowed Hitler’s Final Solution to proceed as far as it did.
Give credit where it is due: at least Palihapitiya is being honest. As for his fellow owners, we can see that they feel exactly the same way through their conduct, but prefer not to say so out loud. It might cut down on the profits from souvenir NBA jerseys. Continue reading
Elon Musk Is Not A Nice Guy, And A Legal Ethics Controversy Proves It
The legal ethics world is all in a fluster over a recent controversy involving Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. This means that readers at Ethics Alarms should be flustering too.
This is the story: An SEC attorney had interviewed Musk during the agency’s investigation of the Tesla CEO’s 2018 tweet claiming to have secured funding to potentially take the electric-vehicle maker private. The claim proved to be false, resulting in a settlement that required Musk to resign and also to pay 20 million dollars in fines. In 2019, Musk’s personal lawyer called the managing partner at Cooley, LLP, and demanded that the firm fire the SEC lawyer, who had left the agency to become as associate at the large firm that handles Tesla’s business. The targeted lawyer had no connection to Tesla’s legal work at the firm; the sole reason for the demand was revenge. Musk wanted him to lose his job because he was angry about their interaction at the SEC. Continue reading
Matthew B. scored a Comment of the Day by raising an issue I had never thought about before: how the misapplication of PowerPoint leads to inadequate training and information dissemination within organizations and bureaucracies. He also references the reluctance of managers to know when to hand over decision-making to subordinates. That is something I have thought about, a great deal.
Two of my favorite movies illustrate how competent leaders and managers know when to delegate a crucial decision down. “Topsy-Turvy,” the superb 1999 film depicting the creation of “The Mikado” by Gilbert and Sullivan, accurately depicts the real incident when, after the final rehearsal, W.S. Gilbert told the “Mikado” cast that he was cutting “My Object All Sublime,” also known as “The Mikado’s Song.” Gilbert was a tyrannical director, and the cast was terrified of incurring his wrath. This time, however, they stood up to him. The cast as one told him that he was making a mistake. The soloist, Richard Temple, they told their shocked and steaming director who also had conceived of the song, should have the chance to perform it in front of an audience. His fellow cast members were certain it would be a hit. Gilbert, recognizing the certitude the cast must have had to risk his fury at being contradicted, decided that his performers might have a clearer understanding of the show even that he had, and relented. Temple would sing about letting “the punishment fit the crime” on opening night.
The song was an instant sensation, like “The Mikado” itself, and is still one of the most quoted of all G&S songs.
The other example is at the climax of “Hoosiers,” the great basketball film based on the true story of the miraculous Indiana state championship won by a tiny school from Milan, Ind. in 1954. During the last time-out before the team’s last chance to score, which would, if successful, give the team a one-point victory over their greatly favored competition in the championship game, the coach (Gene Hackman), who has led the ragtag group this far by emphasizing teamwork over individual achievement, lays out a play in which the team’s superstar, Jimmy Chitwood will be a decoy. He plans for another player to take the final shot, but the team doesn’t move. “What’s the matter with you?” he shouts as his players just stare, looking hesitant. “If I get the shot, I’ll make it,” Jimmy says, after a long pause. So the coach, who has insisted all season that his word was law, makes the same decision Gilbert did. When your subordinates are that sure, trust them. They know better than you.
Jimmy shoots and scores the winning basket as time runs out.
Here is Matthew B.’s Comment of the Day on “Comment Of The Day: ‘Catching Up: Professional Ethics And The Challenger Disaster’”:
Continue reading →