Post-Zoom Hangover Ethics, 3-31-21….

People, even lawyers, just do not interact much in remote seminars. It makes a three-hour session far more tiring, even though I’m sitting down, rather than stalking through the space. Thus I am blotto now, after a legal ethics session earlier today.

1. And THIS is the best paper in the U.S…Two headlines on the New York Times front page this morning my high school paper faculty advisor would have rejected…and he would have been right:

  • “Gaetz Said To Face Inquiry Over Sex With Underage Girl” The fact someone says it is not news. Is he “facing an inquiry” or isn’t he? “Three people briefed on the matter” isn’t a source: we’ve seen how accurate the Times anonymous sources are, especially when the subject is a Republican, a conservative, and a Trump supporter. Why the front page for a rumor? Slow news day? Hey, I’ve got an idea: How about an article about how Joe Biden called Georgia “sick” based on a complete misrepresentation?
  • “Taliban Believes The War’s Over And They Won.” This is psychic news again, my favorite fake news form. How does the Times know what the Taliban “thinks”? Who cares what it “thinks”?

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Ethics Villain: GoFundMe…As The Shackles Tighten

Scott Mineo founded “Parents Against Critical Theory” to fight the suddenly surging anti-white and racist “Critical Race Theory” inclusion in the curriculum of Loudon County (Va.) public schools. Then members of an Orwellian-named Facebook group, “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County,” launched a campaign against his and other parent groups seeking not to have their children subjected to racial demagoguery. The aspiring community totalitarians compiled lists of parents opposing the indoctrination effort, their spouses and their employers, and rallied their members to try to shut down the non-submissive websites. Mineo’s page raised nearly $4,000 by March 22 until a former Loudoun County School Board Equity Committee member, Charlotte McConnell, urged current committee members and the school board to report the page as objectionable.

Three days later, GoFundMe informed Mineo that his fundraising appeal was taken down because it constituted “prohibited conduct.”

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Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21: “Hey, Everybody! Free Gym Memberships!”

Peeps

1. Speaking of useless awards shows: Here are the winners of the NAACP Image Awards, presented by Black Entertainment Television, which raises questions all by itself. Now someone explain to me how such awards are helpful, productive, and justified in the United States of America in 2021. As hard as I try, I cannot think of any words but hypocrisy, apartheid, and double standards.

I’d really appreciate an argument from an African-American reader.

2. An ethical firing at USA Today. After Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa shot up a supermarket in Boulder, Hemal Jehaveri, who held the Orwellian post of “Race and Inclusion Editor,” proved her qualifications by tweeting “It’s always an angry white man, always.” This did not go over well, for several reasons.

Race tweet

First, “it” isn’t “always” a white man. Second, this particular shooting appears to be based on religious and ethnic hate, not race. Third, for a “race and inclusion” editor to announce racial bias of her own on social media would seem to be immediately disqualifying. Fourth, as a journalist, she needs to be trusted, and not tweet out false information on a whim.

Fifth, she’s a biased idiot.

She was fired. Good. Now she’s claiming that her firing was race-based:

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The Entertainment Awards Catch-22

They never had any integrity, but before the Great Stupid, they could at least pretend. That was good enough to serve the real purpose of such awards and their televised ceremonies. Now, since they can’t even pretend, the awards have no purpose, and increasingly, no audiences.

The Grammys were the latest televised awards show debacle. That show’s rating hit an all-time low, following similar results for the Golden Globes, the Emmys, the Academy Awards (with this year’s new low on the horizon), and nobody ever watched the Tonys anyway. This result was preordained as soon as the organizations sponsoring and running the various awards competitions, enthusiastically applauded by the woke news media, decided to make honoring minority , especially black, performers a new mission.

By doing so, the organizations were admitting that the awards were never objective assessments of quality in the first place. Of course they weren’t, but the contrary illusion was crucial to the commercial mission of such awards: to promote the product and its creators. Movies that win Oscars used to get a big bump in ticket sales. Songs that win Grammys are downloaded more. The individual artists gain prestige that helps their careers. All of this is dependent on consumers buying the myth that the awards, any of them, are reliable measures of quality, and especially superior quality.

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Introducing The Ethics Alarms “Weenie Of The Week”! The First Recipient: Jay Leno

edible dogs

“The Weenie of the Week” will recognize those who enable censors, political correctness mobs, totalitarians, cancel culture terrorists and the rising fascist tide in America by prostrating themselves and groveling for forgiveness when in truth they have done nothing wrong.

Although the term “weenie” is light-hearted in its terminology, the conduct earning the title is serious and despicable. These are not only pathetic cowards, though they are certainly that. They are the modern, domestic versions of “good Germans,” who, for their own self-interests and nothing more, are willing to reject our nation’s core rights and liberties, weaken them, and indeed join the increasingly ominous effort to suffocate free expression, dissent, creativity and humor.

Comedian and former “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno begins what I fear will be a long line.

Yesterday he issued an apology for making jokes in the past about Koreans eating dog meat after a 15-year campaign by the activist group Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA).

“At the time I did those jokes, I genuinely thought them to be harmless,” Leno said in a joint press release with MANAA leader Guy Aoki: “I was making fun of our enemy North Korea, and like most jokes, there was a ring of truth to them.”

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Just Bake The Damn Cake, Jack!

trans cake

Jack Phillips, the stubborn Christian baker who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, is being sued again, this time because he refused to make a custom cake celebrating a clients’ gender transition. In 2012, the baker refused to bake a custom cake for a same-sex wedding and was accused of unlawful discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 for Phillips overturning the decision of the Commission on the grounds that it was obviously biased against him as well as devout Christians. One commissioner even compared Phillips’s invocation of his Christian beliefs to justify rejecting the cake design to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. Yeah, I remember that the Nazis were really unreasonable about cakes. SCOTUS never reached the constitutional question of whether the government can compel people to create speech or artistic expressions they object to on religious grounds or otherwise.

If a custom cake design is art, then I think the answer to this is easy: no. Similarly wedding photographs, though if you used what we got from our wedding photographer, calling them “art” is a stretch.

With a conservative Supreme Court, the baker wins. And yet…

The first time around, after finally getting all the facts, I held that both Phillips and the gay couple who obviously targeted him to bend him to their will were being jerks. My position hasn’t changed a bit. I wrote here,

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Comment Of The Day: “Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/23/2021: Shots” [Item #1: McDonald’s]

mcdonalds drive-thru

I have been at war periodically with our two local McDonald’s, one of which I have permanently boycotted since a manager there insisted that when my son’s friend ordered a “cheeseburger with nothing on it,” it was reasonable to omit the cheese. The other one is notorious for non-English speaking drive-up order-takers, long delays, and, as in this instance, botched orders. I wish I had prompted Michael R’s Comment of the Day on Item #1 of today’s warm-up years ago.

Here it is, a cautionary tale to be sure…

Why is McDonald’s messed up? I can tell you why, because I lived through it.. McDonald’s used to be pretty fast and efficient. McDonald’s stores were a mix of franchisees and Corporate-owned stores. The McDonald’s Corporation provided training and support for franchisees and their key staff, but franchisees ran their own stores and had some latitude in how that was done.

In the early 1990’s, the Corporation found that their most profitable stores were ALL owned by franchisees. They couldn’t understand it. The Corporation was staffed by highly-trained experts and professionals. The franchisees were just Joe-blow off the street hiring their relatives for managers. How could average people out-perform the EXPERTS? They decided that the franchisees must have lucked into ALL the good locations. So, they proceeded to buy up all the best-performing McDonald’s in the country. These were ‘fast stores’, averaging over $20,000 in sales/day at the time. After a year of corporate ownership, however, these stores had all become ‘slow’ stores, with well under $10,000/day in sales. The McDonald’s Corporation even sued several of the former franchisees, claiming that their sales figures must have been faked, because the ‘experts’ couldn’t replicate the success.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/23/2021: Shots

This morning served as a perfect example of how the news is now automatically politicized and prioritized for partisan ends. On CNN, a panel was discussing the mass shooting in Boulder. Colorado, and instantly transforming the segment into gun-control mass rant. On Fox, the crisis of the day was the chaos at the border, where the virtual open-borders policies everyone—including those planning to be illegal immigrants—knew would come in along with the Biden administration is having the predictable effects. That segment was a diatribe against the wink-wink, nudge-nudge Democratic enabling of uncontrolled immigration.

CNN wins in the closely contested dubious ethics category by having “contributor” Andrew McCabe on the panel. McCabe epitomized the FBI’s corrupt and partisan efforts to injure the Trump Administration from within; he leaked information to the media and lied about it; he was fired, and deserved to be. McCabe’s high-profile anti-Trump conduct was sufficient to get him a gig on CNN, where being part of “the resistance” is all one needs to endear oneself to the Trump Deranged.

McCabe should have lost his law license, as any attorney who leaks confidential information should, and personally, I wouldn’t trust him to walk my dog.

1. You want to be paid $15 an hour for doing a job this poorly? This morning, having been forced to get up and move my car at 7 am, I decided to drive to the local McDoanld’s for my favorite guilty morning pleasure, a sausage biscuit and some hash browns. For once I could understand the heavily accented woman on the intercom, and I made a clear and distinct order. But given false security by this unusual development, for the first time in a long while I didn’t check the bag—this McDonald’s bats about .500 in getting orders right—and sure enough, when I arrived home, I found an Egg McMuffin instead of a sausage biscuit. I hate Egg McMuffins.

This isn’t brain surgery. I know it’s a crummy job, but it is what they are being paid for. Don’t tell me someone who is that inattentive deserves “a living wage.” Pay them for not working, if you foolishly want to treat them as charity cases; at least then they aren’t getting rewarded for doing a job badly.

2. Why can’t McDonald’s work this efficiently? My experience getting my first Wuhan virus vaccination (in Alexandria, Virginia) was excellent. The elaborate process, staged at a middle school about five minutes from my home, was well-planned, cheerful, and quick, even on a Saturday with long lines. I must have personally thanked ten volunteers.

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Perhaps The Strangest Unethical Prosecutor Story Yet

doordash

I have written about over-zealous prosecutors and incompetent prosecutors. I have written about a prosecutor who moonlighted as a dominatrix and another who moonlighted as an NFL cheerleader; a prosecutor who helped his drug-dealing prepare nickel bags, and a prosecutor who faked sleeping during trials to distract the jury from a defense attorney’s closing argument. However, I never thought I would see this.

Greg Shore, the first assistant district attorney in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, not only moonlighted as a delivery driver for the online food ordering company DoorDash, he did so during his work hours as a prosecutor. As in, “I’m sorry, I can’t work on my closing argument right now, I have to get this Chinese food order across town, stat.” Or “Hey, thanks for the barbecue delivery–wait! Aren’t you the guy prosecuting the man who raped my wife?

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Sunday Evening Ethical Thoughts, 3/21/21: IIPTDXTTNMIAFB, And More

watergate-sunset

I attended my first Zoom memorial service today. Ethics tip, if you are considering doing this for a loved one: set an end time and stick to it, for God’s sake. This event today was to honor a great presence in my childhood and a friend of both my parents, and I was grateful for the chance to pay my respects. I don’t even begrudge the fact that her one child who has a serious stutter carried the duty of the eulogy, But as we got to the dreaded open mic for the assembled to share memories of the departed, one ancient attendee after another droned on with no discipline or relevance, often just trading niceties with others present and generally repeating what had already been said.

One more tip: if you had never even met the person being memorialized, shut up. One guy went on and on about how he always hoped to meet her, “but we were never invited to her house.”

I bailed when we hit the one hour, 15 minute mark and I saw no sign of a conclusion.

1. I don’t understand this at all. The Biden administration is restricting press access to the mess at the boarder. How can the news media allow it to get away with that? Is there anything the Democrats dishonestly accused the Trump administration of doing that they aren’t happily attempting to do themselves? I just know I’m going to get sick of the mantra, “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden…”—in fact, I’m sick of it all ready,

Until I get a better suggestion, I’m just going to abbreviate it as IIPTDXTTNMIAFB. It has a ring to it…

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