Character

KABOOM! Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Is a Worse Plagiarist Than Even Claudine Gay!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And there goes my head. I just painted the ceiling of my office, too.

Unbelievable! The Washington Free Beacon, in an exclusive (hey, you wouldn’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe of “Spotlight” fame to do any investigative journalism that might embarrass a black, female DEI officer at Harvard, would you?), revealed that Harvard University’s Sherri Ann Charleston appears to have “plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks” and even taking credit for a study done by her own husband according to a complaint filed with the university yesterday. Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first chief diversity officer—you know, because the negligent death of an overdosing career crook in Minnesota meant that Harvard had to launch a new bureaucracy. And what to you know? Charleston contributed to the fateful selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!

Charleston’s Harvard bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity,” whatever that means. Oh wait…it means that she’s aces at “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”

The allegations against Charleston look irrefutable and damning. From the Free Beacon report:

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Well You Know, God DOES Work in Mysterious Ways…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Denver, Colorado pastor Eli Regalado announced in a YouTube video last April that he would be selling cryptocurrency. The pastor said he was “setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.” Regalado and his wife then began selling cryptocurrency, dubbed INDXcoin, to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area using his “the “Kingdom Wealth Exchange,” an online cryptocurrency marketplace he set up for the purpose. They peddled the holy investment with prayers, quotes from the Bible, and entreaties to have faith in their product. Sure enough, the plan was a godsend, at least for the pastor and his wife: the Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors.

Unfortunately, the INDXcoin was worthless, except for the purpose of making the pastor and his wife rich. The Regalados used around $1.3 million of the supposedly “investment funds” on a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and vacations, while renovating their Denver home. Hallelujah!

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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Rep. Omar?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was actually going to begin this post with a parody of the cheery song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,” but decided against it for two reasons. First, no English words rhyme with “Omar,” so you’re stuck with fake sort-of rhymes like “home are” and “sonar,” and second, this is too serious a problem to cover in a song parody.

Among Donald Trump’s myriad offensive, stupid and gratuitously inflammatory comments while President was when he said in 2019 that the members of “the Squad” should “go back to where they came from.” This was particularly inept since most of that group of radical, socialist, anti-Semitic and or dumb-as-bricks Democrats are “from” the good ol’ USA, but in the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at least, Trump may have had a valid point that he, as usual, chose the worst possible way to express.

In 2019, Omar declared as part of the anti-Semitic theme much of the Squad vocally embraces, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says that it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Her message was that a lot of U.S. officials—you know, Jews— allowed a conflicting fealty to Israel to blunt their duty to pursue what is in the best interest of the United States. But yesterday, a video surfaced on Twitter/X showing Omar rousing a Somali-American crowd in her district by saying in part,

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From the “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files…Ethics Dunces: Parents Who Allow Their Daughters To Be Subjected to THIS

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s Henry Hanlon, apparently a male basketball player who “identifies” as female. Clearly, it’s good for his ego. (Can’t tell who I’m talking about in the photo? Guess!)

The San Francisco Waldorf high school girls basketball team is on a roll, thanks to its court domination by team captain Henry Hanlon. No, he doesn’t even bother to carry a female name. California’s Interscholastic Federation (CIF) established “Gender Identity Participation” rule in 2013, and it is bats.“All students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF athletics and/or activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity,” the policy states. As CIF’s Associate Executive Director Brian Seymour explains, “All of our athletes, all the eligible athletes, are afforded the opportunity to compete with the gender they feel most comfortable with.” Oh. I can see where a high school athlete might be “most comfortable” with a fanciful gender ID that allows him to feel like the Harlem Globetrotters playing against their eternal patsies, the Washington Generals.

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Look! Here’s a Performing Ethics Dunce Who’s Even More Unprofessional Than Madonna!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ethics Alarms commented on Madonna’s inexcusable two-hour tardy appearance at her concert (item #4) without realizing that The Grand Ol’ Opry could have said “Hold my beer!” The Nashville shrine to Country Music officially apologized to fans and audience members after four-time Grammy Award nominee Elle King disgraced the venue and herself with a vulgar and drunken performance on an evening last week that was supposed to honor Dolly Parton. “We deeply regret and apologize for the language that was used during last night’s second Opry performance,” the Opry wrote on X/Twitter over the weekend. That was an understatement of what happened.

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Ethics Quiz: Presidential Immunity

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is there anybody out there who wants to argue that complete Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution is a safe, necessary, responsible and civically practical policy? Hello?

I’m not even going to ask the question in the usual quiz form, other than to wonder who would agree Trump’s theory this other than a former President facing multiple partisan prosecutions of varying legitimacy designed to take him out of the next election, or an aspiring leader who endorses near dictatorial powers in a republic.

George Washington made it quite clear that the U.S. President isn’t a king; indeed, this may have been George’s most important among his many precedent-setting and self-imposed embellishments on the office. There have been Presidents who believed in treading carefully within a carefully moderated set of powers; there have been others, like Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and Nixon, who took the office in the other direction, sometimes to the point of defying laws as well as exploiting areas of Constitutional ambiguity.

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Ethics Dunce, Life Competence and Workplace Division: Brittany Pietsch

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

My first reaction was to have sympathy for Brittany Pietsch, the Cloudfare account executive who somehow thought recording her Zoomed firing and posting it on social media would be a good idea. Then I learned she was 27. That’s much too old to behave like she did, much less to be self-righteous about it. Her experience ended up on every social media platform and was covered by media outlets from the New York Post to the The Wall Street Journal, and now she is the official “poster girl” for deluded and entitled young workers who don’t get the capitalist system and the competitive workplace.

You can see her nine-minute clip here. If you don’t wince through it, you may need a refresher course in workplace ethics yourself. An at-will employee, Brittany argues with the HR staff who were assigned to dismiss her. Here’s a typical exchange:

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Ethics Quiz: The Emmy-Winner’s Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Neicy Nash-Betts won an Emmy last night in”Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie”—love those Emmy categories— for playing Glenda Cleveland in Netflix’s “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” I didn’t see it: there are some topics too distasteful—no pun intended—even for me. Neicy’s acceptance speech is being cheered all across the news media as “inspirational,” ”powerful” (Huffington Post) “blazing” (The Times) and other superlatives.

“I’m a winner, baby! Thank you to the most high for this divine moment,” Nash-Betts said as she held her trophy. “Thank you, Ryan Murphy, for seeing me. Evan Peters, I love you. Netflix. Every single person who voted for me. Thank you. My better half, who picked me up when I was gutted from this work. Thank you.”

“I want to thank me, for believing in me and doing what they said I could not do,” she added. “I want to say to myself in front of all you beautiful people, ‘Go, girl, with your bad self. You did that!’ Finally, I accept this award on behalf of every Black and Brown woman who have gone unheard, yet overpoliced, like Glenda Cleveland, like Sandra Bland, like Breonna Taylor! As an artist, my job is to speak truth to power. And, baby, I’ma do it till the day I die.”

Personally, I hated the speech.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

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Nikki Haley’s Lodging: It Isn’t the Dishonesty So Much as the Stupidity.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I don’t understand how this happens, but it happens a lot. A candidate for office grandstands on an issue, daring the news media to check it. Reporters do, and they discover that the pol was lying. It’s ridiculous. The most infamous example was ex-Sen. Gary Hart, once a hot Presidential contender. Rumors had circulated that he had multiple sexual affairs (the rumors were true) and he responded to them by telling reporters, “Follow me around! I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.” So they did follow him around, discovered Donna Rice in his arms after a cruise on a yacht called “Monkey Business”[Ha-ha!] and that was the end for Gary Hart. “Why would a man who’s running for the presidency of the United States challenge a reporter to follow him to see if he was an adulterer, when he was an adulterer?” writer Gail Sheehy asked. “He had to get caught.”

The current episode involves Nikki Haley, the anointed favorite of the “We’ve got to find someone other than Donald Trump!” Republicans. It isn’t as amusing as Gary Hart’s scandal, but just as annoying. Her campaign has made an issue of her frugal and responsible ways with other people’s money, like donors and taxpayers. “As an accountant, Nikki Haley understands the importance of sticking to a budget,” Haley’s campaign told Fox News. “That’s what our campaign did, making smart decisions about staff size, TV spending and travel. The proof is in the pudding: This is now a two-person race with Nikki rising, Trump dropping and DeSantis fading fast after lighting $150 million on fire.” In emails to supporters and would-be supporters, the same theme has been echoed repeatedly. “We run a tight ship at Team Haley. Supporters like you contribute your hard-earned money to elect Nikki, and we make sure to spend that money wisely,” one email said.  “When Nikki and the team travel to New Hampshire and Iowa, they’re flying on a lot of Spirit and JetBlue flights. When they stay in hotels, they’re not staying in luxury suites, they’re staying at a lot of Residence Inns,” it added.

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Fani Willis’s Sermon

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is beginning to look like Fani Willis, Georgia’s African-American Democrat Fulton County prosecutor who pledged to “get” Donald Trump, really is involved in a serious conflict of interest involving the case and even criminal conduct. The mainstream media is taking notice, it is no longer a “right wing conspiracy theory,” and most interestingly, Willis has not denied the allegations, which appeared in a court filing.

The New York Times published a story headlined “Atlanta D.A. Defends Qualifications of Outside Lawyer She Hired for Trump Case/At a historic Black church, Fani T. Willis pushed back against an accusation that Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she brought on, was unqualified for the job” in which we learn that Willis spoke yesterday before the congregation of one of the oldest Black churches in Atlanta, which had invited her to be the keynote speaker for a service dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She did not mention the details of allegations that she is in an intimate relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired in 2021 for the Trump-getting, and has earned more than $650,000 in the job to date with some of the lucre benefiting her directly. Instead, she said in part,

“Wait a minute, God! You did not tell me,” she added, “as a woman of color it would not matter what I did — my motive, my talent, my ability and my character would be constantly attacked….A divorced single mom who doesn’t belong to the right social groups, who doesn’t necessarily come from the right family, doesn’t have the right pedigree — the assignment was just too high for lowly me. All I brought to the table, God, is my mind, my heart, my work ethic, my undying love for people and the community.”

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