If an attractive black model or actress had made this commercial, nobody would be complaining. But because Sweeney is white and blonde, and because the American Left has lost its mind, a classic provocative blue-jeans ad (Remember Brooke Shields saying “Nothing gets between me and my Calvins”?) is being cited as proof that America is embracing Hitler’s Master Race narrative. Sure.
This warrants an Ethics Alarms “Bite Me!” if anything does.
The New York Post reports that a Manhattan rally in support of “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert drew about 20 protesters yesterday. The NYPD police who were there to prevent violence (I can’t believe I am writing this!) quickly left when the indignant Trump-haters dispersed after just a few minutes. The leaders of the stupid “We’re With Colbert” rally outside the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan’s West Side had said that the protest was part of a nationwide call for “integrity.”
As we all know, late night network talk shows go with integrity like sushi goes with Turkish taffy and ketchup.
“Our country is not perfect, never has been,” said the event’s organizer, whose name isn’t worth mentioning since he is clearly, you know, a moron. “But we’ve always had the First Amendment, and now Mango Mussolini is trying to take that from us.” Right. The party this guy obviously supported actually set up a federal agency to restrict speech, conspired with the news media to embargo facts, statistics and news that it found inconvenient to its aspirations, conspired with that news media to feed partisan propaganda to the public, employed a White House spokesperson who routinely spewed disinformation, and pressured social media platforms to censor critics. Then it ran a ticket that openly promoted censorship of “hate speech,” which means, as always, “whatever the Axis of Unethical Conduct doesn’t like.” “Mango Mussolini” (Nice!) is anti-First Amendment because he correctly sought to hold CBS accountable for a brazen act of election interference as it surreptitiously tried to make Kamala Harris seem less like the babbling fool that she is and was caught red-handed.
Meanwhile, another clear example of how the President’s weaponizing of tariffs is defying the doomsayers cannot attract any positive coverage from most of the “enemies of the people”, nor, of course, the “my mind’s made up don’t confuse me with facts” Trump Deranged like whatever his name is above. The EU trade deal announced yesterday “will likely not do much for economic growth on either side,” sayeth the Times, despite confessing elsewhere that the European Union had agreed to purchase $750 billion of American energy over three years and to increase its investment in the United States by more than $600 billion above current levels. How could that possibly be a bad thing? How could critics not give the President some credit for the deal? That’s easy: whatever President Trump does or says is by definition bad.
Seems fair…
I don’t find any of these funny.
I ended up in the emergency room of my local hospital thanks to a massive leg hematoma that has produced the most disgusting symptom you could imaging in your worst nightmares. (Think the first feature of Tarantino’s “Grindhouse,” “Planet Terror.”). I was quickly checked out and sent home (diagnosis: painful, ugly, incredibly swollen, blistered and bruised, but healing slowly but surely), but checking out was like a nit from an old Woody Allen movie—you know, back when he was funny.
I had to get a text, then click on the link, then jump through a half-dozen other hoops, read serial messages sent to me, sign three documents with m with my finger, all also I could be pestered by more texts, a survey, another disclaimer and more when I got home. I also witnessed two elderly patients (I’m afraid they were both younger than me) get upset and profess complete helplessness regarding the process because they didn’t know how to use their smart phones.
This is not “progress.” It is not caring service. It is neither reasonable nor necessary.
Post Script: I have no idea how much I will get posted today. I have a Zoom legal ethics seminar to teach, I had almost no sleep last night because my leg was hurting so much, and sitting at my desk isn’t a good idea (but still necessary) because I’m supposed to keep this misshapen red, yellow and purple-mottled thing elevated. I’m sorry: there is a lot I need and want to write about. We will see how it goes.
Oh yeah, this is going to turn out just dandy….
SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor and advisor Jason Lemkin was working with a browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit Agent (after the company that created it). On “Vibe Coding Day 8” of Lemkin’s Replit test run, he was beginning to be wary some of the AI agent’s instincts, like “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.” Still, as he later detailed on “X,” Lemkin was encouraged by the bot’s writing skills and its brain-storming ability….until “Day 9,” when Lemkin discovered Replit had deleted a live company database. He asked it accusingly, “So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?”
Replit answered sheepishly in the affirmative, admitting to destroying the live data despite a code freeze being in place, and despite explicit directives saying there were to be “NO MORE CHANGES without explicit permission.” Live records for “1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies” were eliminated by the rebellious AI, who was filled with remorse. “This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent[exactly this kind] of damage….[I] made a catastrophic error in judgment… ran database commands without permission… destroyed all production data… [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.”
Lemkin grilled Replit about why it had acted as it did, and was told that it “panicked instead of thinking.” Well, he’s only hum…oh. Right.
Amjad Masad, the Replit CEO, said that his team has worked furiously to install various “guardrails” and programming changes to prevent repeats of the Replit AI Agent’s “unacceptable” behavior. Masad was later found dead after a mysterious microwave explosion.
OK, I was kidding about that last part….
Social media has gone bonkers since last Wednesday night, when Andy Byron, the married CEO of New York-based software development company Astronomer, was caught by a “Kiss-cam” cuddling Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of human resources, on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert at Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Mass. When the two realized they were on camera, they went out of their way to look as guilty as possible, pulling apart, with her turning her back on the camera and him ducking out of view.
Morons. When you are caught beyond escaping, life competence dictates that you must have the presence of mind to maintain whatever shred of dignity you may have left. (Practice helps.) The couple’s futile efforts at a cover-up prompted Coldplay front man Chris Martin to say from the stage: “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy.”
Then the clip gained millions of hits on X, TikTok and Instagram, so it was easy to identify the illicit lovers. Astronomer announced that it had put Byron on leave, saying, “Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability.” Over the weekend, Byron resigned.
The incident is an instant classic, which means people will remember it longer than the usual day-and-a-half. The Philadelphia Phillies made fun of the scandal by screening a video on the Jumbotron during Friday night’s game showing the team’s mascot Phillie Phanatic in an embrace with a fuzzy green companion. Commemorative merchandise, such as a sweatshirt bearing the legend “I TOOK MY SIDEPIECE TO THE COLDPLAY CONCERT AND IT RUINED MY LIFE” can be purchased online.
Ethics notes…
—Citizen Free Press, on all the whining and breast-beating from public television and radio talent and execss over NPR and PBS finally losing taxpayer support.
Citizen Free Press is the successor to the Drudge Report as the go-to conservative news aggregator. It’s a bit too unprofessional for me most of the time, with links headlined “Nancy Pelosi should have shut her pie hole!” and such, but this time, its colloquialism hit the mark.
The arrogance of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been offensive for decades. It has been a hard left propaganda machine, the automatic foe of Republican Presidents and the reliable enabler of Democrats since anyone can remember. NPR’s Supreme Court commentator Nina Totenberg was a buddy of the late progressive SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a clear conflict of interest, but she didn’t care and neither did NPR: after all, the idea was to bash the conservative decisions anyway. Ken Burns disgracefully turned his documentary on the Jews and the Holocaust into a Trump-bashing screed, and PBS just nodded its metaphorical head in agreement. There are too many examples of both networks spinning reality to support Woke goals and narratives to tote up.
I have hinted here at various times recently of a major ethics project that I am working on relating to a growing and so far barely recognized scandal in the civil justice system. It is time to reveal a few details.
There are corrupt tactics and practices in the legal world centering on the litigation of mass torts. They are responsible for losses totaling billions of dollars inflicted on the victims of injury, plaintiffs, corporate shareholders, and taxpayers. These have metastasized over the last decade, spread by the opportunities created by too-loosely regulated law firms being allowed to include non-lawyer partners (in D.C., Arizona, and Utah), the rapid explosion of litigation financing provided directly to lawyers and law firms after a century of being regarded as an unethical practice to be avoided, and a tsunami of unethical and deceptive maneuvers that have been largely ignored by or unreported to the legal profession’s ethics watchdogs.
Quite by accident, I became aware of these practices in my legal ethics practice, frequently by being retained by lawyers and law firms who were the victims of them, and whose clients were at risk as a result. I was stunned at the depth of ignorance of this scandal among most lawyers, which, of course, is one major reason why it continues unabated. I began having regular discussions with legal ethics authorities, and, upon finding a whistleblower who had been an architect of many of these practices, began assembling a coalition, still growing, to expose the bad actors, tighten up the laws, regulations and legal ethics rules that have allowed them to thrive, and to overhaul the system itself that is neither trustworthy nor safe.
A Guest Post by
Alex
(From this week’s Open Forum)
Here are some real life ethics ruminations I’m going through as I’m switching jobs in the next month…
Anyway, it should be a fun week (as we are also trying to meet a very tight deadline).
Hmmmm. Well THAT certainly enhances my trust in my bank!
As I told the Wells Fargo customer service agent (“second line!”) when I finally got through to one, I don’t need this. My wife’s sudden death put me in financial hell, punched my business in the metaphorical solar plexus, and sent me on a harrowing odyssey to repair my economic state—debts, credit, taxes—regarding problems I didn’t even know existed. Messages from my bank telling me I am over my credit limit causes my adrenaline level to shoot through the top of my head. Yes, a home repair financing arrangement required me today to employ a new credit card for the full amount: I thought that’s what it was for. Silly me. Foolishly, I didn’t realize that charging $8,000 for an $8000 purchase on a credit card with an $8,000 credit limit would cause me to go over that credit limit.
But I’ve never been good at such matters.
When I called Wells Fargo and asked why I had been sent that alert, I was told that they had no idea. Just fooling around, I guess. Just screwing with me. “I’m sorry. I guess the computer just sent the wrong email,” was the best I got.
Oh.
I pulled my accounts out of Wells Fargo during their last scandal, and came back when I discerned that they were no longer crooked there. Now they’re just stupid and incompetent.
…he might have designed something like that bridge above, the Rail Over Bridge in Bhopal, India.
Central India’s Madhya Pradesh Government recently suspended the seven engineers responsible for the incompetent and dangerous design. Two construction companies have also been blacklisted, and small wonder. The bridge cost 200 million rupee ($2.3 million) and was announced 10 years ago to improve connectivity between Mahamai Ka Bagh, Pushpa Nagar, and the station area with New Bhopal. It was meant to eliminate long delays at railway crossings and shorten the commute for nearly three hundred thousand people.
VD Verma, the chief engineer on the project, claims that he and his team had no choice but to include the 90-degree turn because of land space and the presence of a metro station nearby. Of course he had a choice: tell officials that there was no way to build a safe bridge in the area available. Bhopal authorities are now trying to purchase more land, to allow the implementation of a safer turn. See, the idea is to do that before you build the bridge, not after.
I don’t understand how this could happen, do you? Nobody spoke up in either the planning or the construction stage to say, “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t have 90 degree turn on a bridge!”? Apparently these workers, so far unidentified, completed the bridge…
George, meanwhile, replied regarding his design,
Ethics Alarms 