Character

One For the Unethical Quote of the Month Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”

—–Liliya A. Medvedeva, Russian pensioner, quoted by the New York Times in “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History” about how many Russians regard the brutal dictator as a hero for his role in defeating Germany in World War II.

But Lily, everybody doesn’t make “mistakes” that result in the deaths or executions of between six and nine million people.

You idiot.

For the record, Lily’s rationalization is one of the most obnoxious on the list, #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!”

Hey Look! Harvard Did the Right Thing For Once….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Of course, they didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.

Francesca Gino is one of Harvard Business School’s best known professors. The behavioral scientist authored “Rebel Talent,” a 2018 book with the subtitle “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life.” Well, the expert on lying, cheating and dishonesty lied and cheated. She took administrative leave from the “B-School” after evidence surfaced that she had falsified her data…on cheating. Ironic, no? And stupid.

Gino, whose work has been widely cited, has been a professor of business administration at Harvard since 2014. She was first accused of fabricating data by the blog Data Colada in July of 2021 when the bloggers approached Harvard Business School with their allegations. The Dean negotiated a secret agreement with Data Colada to delay posting about their allegations until the Business School thoroughly investigated their claims.

An 18-month-long investigation by a three-person committee of former and current professors eventually concluded that the professor had indeed engaged in research misconduct. Gino insists that she is innocent and is suing for $25 million: she might as well, since an ethics professor and author of books about cheating caught cheating doesn’t exactly have a promising future. Of course, the ethical thing for an ethics expert to do in such a dilemma is to confess and apologize. But if she were an ethical ethics expert, she wouldn’t be in this mess.

In an article called “A Weird Research-Misconduct Scandal About Dishonesty Just Got Weirder,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Harvard’s inquiry had found that one of Gino’s studies contained even more fraudulent data than had been alleged. Then Data Colada weighed in with a four-part series examining data in four separate studies co-authored by Gino. The blog authors wrote, “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.”

This week, Harvard University stripped Professor Gino of her tenure at Harvard Business School. Her dismissal seems imminent.

Harvard might have tried to finesse the Gino affair were it not already shaken by the recent Claudine Gay scandal, when the university’s first black president had to resign because of scholarship plagiarism shortly after being appointed. In addition, the school is already on shaky ground in the terrain of public opinion, claiming financial distress as a defense against the Trump Administration’s assault despite Harvard having an endowment some nations would love to have as their their nest egg.

Professor Gino definitely picked the wrong time to embarrass Old Ivy.

The Atlantic’s Editor Tries Another Dishonest Excuse For The Axis News Media Covering Up Biden’s Dementia

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I am reaching my contempt overload limit from the excuses and spin the mainstream media enemies of the people are floating to slime out of their culpability for the Biden dementia cover-up.

Now Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of “The Atlantic,” among the worst of the Trump-Deranged, Democratic Party totalitarianism-enabling Axis media, tried gaslighting us with this one during an interview with CNN Ethics Villain Jake Tapper on PBS’s “Washington Week”: See, allegations that the news media covered for Biden show a “misunderstanding of journalism”! Reporters need “credible sources” to report anything, see, so without “insiders” admitting on the record that the alleged President was a shambling vegetable, reporters couldn’t report it.

Let me get this straight: what everyone could see and hear since 2019 and earlier couldn’t be reported, couldn’t be verified, and couldn’t be investigated even though it was self-evident that the “insiders” were lying, making excuses about “one bad night,” Joe’s “stutter” and “cheap fakes,” and even when a mountain of circumstantial evidence like the avoidance of interviews, Cabinet meetings and unscripted appearances was in plain sight?

Sure. Whatever you say, Jeff. The news media never reports unsubstantiated “facts” without iron-clad “verification.” Like, say, “Hand up, don’t shoot!,” right?

Former Ethics Alarms idol Ken White of Popehat works for this guy. Ken was once a truth-teller, someone whose integrity I admired and tried to emulate. How sad.

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Porto Alegre, Brazil City Councilman Ramiro Rosário

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A city in southern Brazil just enacted the country’s first legislation entirely written by AI bot ChatGPT. Normally the misadventures of a Brazilian local pol wouldn’t turn up on the EA radar, but you know—you know—that this story’s eqivilent is coming soon to our shores, if it isn’t here already

The Associated Press reports that Porto Alegre city councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted to having ChatGPT to write a proposed law aimed at preventing the city from forcing locals to pay for replacing stolen water consumption meters. He didn’t make a single change to the AI generated bill, and didn’t even tell the city council that he didn’t write it. “If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosarío told the AP. “It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence.”

It’s unfair to let the public know that they are being governed by machines, or that their elected officials are too lazy or dumb to compose their own bills. Got it.

Porto Alegre’s council president Hamilton Sossmeier extolled the new law on social media and was embarrassed when its true author was revealed. He then called letting bots write legislation a “dangerous precedent.” Ya think? Massachusetts state senator Barry Finegold says that he has used AI to draft bills, but that he wants “work that is ChatGPT generated to be watermarked….I’m in favor of people using ChatGPT to write bills as long as it’s clear.” I think he means “clear that a bot was involved.” It’s ambiguous language like Barry’s sentence that makes it seem like ChatGPT is an improvement over human public servants.

These AI bots continue to make stuff up, cite imaginary sources, and lie…you know, just like real politicians. For his part, Rosario sees nothing wrong with letting a bot do the work he was elected to do. “All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good,” he told the AP. “That’s why we have to show how it can be used for good.”

Secretly employing a machine to do your work and not disclosing that fact is called “cheating.” Somebody explain to the councilman that cheating is not “good.”

The Sequel to “Is It Ethical to Continue to Slam Former President Biden Now That It Has Been Revealed That He Has Metastatic Prostate Cancer?”— Unethical Quote of the Week: David Axelrod

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“I think those kinds of discussions are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s sort of struggling through this.”

—Former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod on CNN, speaking of the reporting on the cover-up of Joe Biden’s dementia for four years by Democrats and the news media

You have to say this for horrible human beings like Axelrod: at least they don’t do a very good job at hiding their cynicism, corruption, and shameless efforts to keep Americans from knowing just how little regard for democracy they have.

Many believe that the news of Biden’s rapidly advancing prostate cancer was released specifically to distract the public from the dawning realization that he was a puppet President and that persons unknown were operating the levers of power Americans thought they had elected Biden President to handle. There is substantial justification for such suspicion, as well as the belief that Democrats also withheld Biden’s cancer diagnosis in the hope that they could get him a second term so Kamala Harris would become President without having to be elected.

So Axelrod comes right out and says, “Please be distracted by the ‘Awww, poor Joe!’ strategy, and stop trying to find out who was really making decisions and policy in the White House!” Thanks, David! It’s good to remove any doubt about just how stupid your party thinks we are.

“Jake Tapper, Ethics Villain” Continues—Today’s Episode: “Jake Is Unethical, But He’s Not Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In a just released video, conservative scholar and commentator Victor Davis Hanson adds his perspective to the Jake Tapper scandal, a sub-scandal to the Biden Dementia cover-up conspiracy of which he was a part, itself a sub-scandal of the Democratic Party’s descent into aspiring totalitarianism. From the transcript…

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See How They Spin! One Axis Hack Interviews Another To Try To Rationalize Away The Media’s Complicity in the Biden Dementia Cover-up

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Axis hack #1…

Ezra Klein!

Axis hack #2…

Ethics Villain, CNN’s Jake Tapper!

Almost exactly a year ago, I excoriated the New York Times and Public Enemy Ezra Klein, the infamous “advocacy journalist” responsible for founding uber-Axis propaganda organ Vox, for a wildly unethical Klein disinformation piece titled, “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It).” Guess what Klein didn’t see as a reason Biden was behind in the polls. Somehow, the fact that the alleged President was obviously suffering from dementia escaped his notice. (Suuuure it did…). The closest Klein got to that flaming, throbbing, flashing red alarm was “Voters think Biden is too old.” Just voters, mind you! I wrote, “[Biden’s] obviously declining mentally, and any fool can see he’s too old to hold any job, much less the most difficult one in the country.” But Ezra Klein, who was not declining mentally (and couldn’t possibly decline ethically, except into negative numbers), actually argued that Biden should do more debates with Trump, not just two, and that “all Biden needs to do is persuade enough voters that he is more capable than the erratic criminal defendant across the stage, who turns 78 next month.” What Klein meant was that all the complicit partisan media hacks—like Klein—had to do was to hide Biden’s incapacity from voters until election day. And that’s what they tried to do, except that Biden couldn’t even get through one debate without making it plain that his brain was mush.

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Integrity Test For Climate Change Hysterics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Well waddya know! The U.S. is on the verge of setting records for all-time low temperatures in May. That’s funny. I thought humanity was doomed because the world is burning up.

Of course, I don’t think one unseasonally cold month has any more significance than one unseasonably cold day, but that’s not how the climate change cabal has been playing their game. No, every time the temperature seems especially high anywhere in the USA, the activists, most of whom know as much about climate science as I know about fixing a carburetor, start screaming, pointing, and crying out, “See? SEE?” They do the same thing with seasonal wildfires, hurricanes, floods and, at least on The View, earthquakes and eclipses. They get away with it too, because the unscrupulous politicians they elect and the dim-bulb progressive pundits and reporters who work for those politicians always endorse and rationalize the climate change hysterics’ propaganda, even after every prediction, every projection, every deadline to save humanity proves to be hooey.

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Ethics Hero: Hugo Monteiro

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Who is Hugo? He’s a 31-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Brazil who was arrested outside Cambridge District Court in Medford, Massachusetts last week. Four plainclothes officers approached him as he was leaving the courthouse, escorted him to a Jeep Cherokee and placed him in handcuffs. ” I was calm because I knew I didn’t do anything wrong,” Monteiro said later. “They were just, like, telling me I was under arrest, that I was in trouble. I was confused.”

So were they, as it turned out. When the officers tried to confirm that they had arrested the the right person, they discovered their mistake. “I showed them my ID, my passport and my picture, and they confirmed that it was not me,” Hugo said. So the officers returned Monteiro to the courthouse. The whole episode took less than 20 minutes.

Hugo didn’t scream police brutality or run to the press to condemn “people being scooped off the street and disappeared.” He said that he knew the officers were “doing their job” and supported their efforts.

“Unfortunately, they called the wrong person, but I still support whatever they’re doing,” Monteiro said. “I voted for Trump. There are a lot of bad people in this country, to be honest with you, [who] don’t deserve to be here. No hard feelings,” he added.

Spoken like a good citizen.

Ethics Quiz: Trump’s Banners

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This isn’t the quiz question, but are we entering Julie Principle territory here? Should I keep flagging this very Trumpian conduct as ethically dubious, or just resign myself to “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Trump’s gonna troll ’cause he likes to, that’s why”?

Those banners are currently hanging at the Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C. Naturally, my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends (and certainly the rest of that zombie herd that I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting), is triggered. “This is SHOCKING,” writes one of the TDS inflicted (whose posts I have noted before). “Authoritarian craziness is now on full display. What happened to DOGE? We now have Soviet style banners. POTUS is a very ill man.” A reply asserts, “Unfortunately, the ‘uneducated’ would never see this.”

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