Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Ethics Dunce: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (and Further Observations on the Oval Office Fiasco) [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 80 Comments

I worked for many years for a fascinating man, a brilliant negotiation specialist and consultant, Richard Halpern. My first thought yesterday after watching the astounding argument that broke out among the President, Vice-President Vance and Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was, “Boy, I wish Rich was still here to analyze what went wrong.” Rich died in 2009, but I learned enough about the art of negotiation from working with and observing him to be confident in how he would have reacted to what occurred on live television yesterday. My thoughts also reached back across the decades to the seminar I took on negotiation in law school with Adrian Fisher, then Dean of Georgetown Law Center after a career as a top arms control negotiator for the United States.

Both Richard Halpern and Adrian Fisher would have agreed that Zelenskyy was incompetent. I would add that he behaved like a deluded fool who had come to believe his fawning press notices.

First, Zelenskyy did not sufficiently research his negotiation partners, their preferences, their character, and their “hot buttons” that should never be pressed without sound reasons. Second, he did not properly prepare to insulate his own hot buttons from making him behave against his country’s best interests. Third, he did not comprehend why he was in the Oval office and what was expected of him.

Finally, he did not understand that as a supplicant nation seeking critical aid from the United States, he was not on a level playing field, particularly since he was in the U.S., on the President’s home turf. His job was to be respectful, compliant and non-confrontational no matter what occurred or was said.

The previous press conference with a foreign leader that President Trump had completed just the day before should have served as a guide. Keir Starmer was content to stay in the background and barely speak while the President rambled on in his inimitable fashion, and Great Britain has accumulated far more credits and greater good will with the U.S. than Ukraine. One commenter said that yesterday Zelenskyy failed to “read the room.” It was far worse than that: he failed to read the room, whom he was talking to, why he was there, and what he had to accomplish.

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?

I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.

Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”

But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.

And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.

Here is AM Golden’s illuminating Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”…

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Today’s Unpleasant Ethics Question: How Can We Justify Trusting Today’s Scholars and Academics To Train Our Rising Generations?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I want to state at the outset that the ridiculous research paper I’m about to make fun of is only one horrifying example of institutional insanity, and it would be unfair to use it to characterize the entire higher education complex. However, I do believe that a healthy and functioning scholarly sector must have a way to reject, condemn and shun such abuses of position and authority.

I’ll have more to say on this matter after revealing the head-exploding product of University of San Diego professors Diane Marie Keeling and Bethany O’Shea.

These scholars have published a study titled “Conceptualizing Black Humanity Through Geopoetic Intimacy and Resistance: Memory Making-with Geologic Materials” Here is the abstract:

Amplifying the importance of geologic processes in subject formation, the study asserts that geological time is important for understanding memory and memorials. In the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Projects and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, materials of geologic composition like soil, and those made from earth materials, such as steel and bricks, are employed to trope the bodies of lynching victims and weather racist geologic formations of subjecthood. The holding and eroding of violent memories crafts an intimate and resistant geopoetics of Black humanity.

Oh. What???

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Behold! A Fascinating Visit To The Mind of a Trump Derangement Sufferer

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This was just reposted by a very astute and generally learned lawyer friend (who, I should mention, is a retired USAID employee who never returned to the land of her birth except for visits and who has lived abroad for decades). I could write about this screed for pages, but I’ll leave it to you.

I will only observe that Ethics Alarms commented critically on many of the incidents and statements listed when they occurred, while others are framed according to Axis media narratives (look at the sources) or are the kind of exaggerations and hyperboles that Trump critics call “lies” when he engages in the same techniques.

I will also observe that making this statement without considering who and what this admittedly flawed leader is opposing and the demonstrated values and conduct of the alternative is hypocritical, deliberately misleading, or, ironically, stupid.

Municipal Government Ethics Follies [Clarified]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you think the Federal and state governments have major ethics culture problems? Municipal governments say “Hold my beer!”

1. The city with the deadest ethics alarms in the U.S.? It might be Quincy, Florida…

Quincy hired Robert Nixon as its city manager. Now Quincy Commissioner Beverly Nash has called on the city commission to terminate Nixon, alleging the city violated its own guidelines and possibly state law by hiring him. Why, you well may ask?

Nixon had pleaded guilty to charges of embezzling government funds and served 21 months in prison. The 2010 criminal case was brought after Nixon and an accomplice schemed to pocket $134,000 in federal Housing and Urban Development grant money meant for Tallahassee-area small businesses. Nixon was the director of Florida A&M University’s urban policy institute when he stole from a grant fund-holding account at Florida A&M Federal Credit Union, where his co-defendant was president. The two tried to disguise withdrawals as consulting and administrative fees. They got caught red-handed.

Quincy has a population of about 8,000 and is located at the center of Gadsden County. “Technically we have gone astray and violated our own policies and procedures,” Nash said during a city commission meeting. “When adherence to policy slowly erodes, what is left? Wrong becomes right. The lines and boundaries are missing and blurred.”

The controversy is bogged down in a technical debate over whether or not it is illegal for Quincy to hire a convicted felon who has not had his right to hold official office restored. You can read the details of that irrelevancy here. It doesn’t matter whether Quincy can hire someone who had embezzled government fund as its city manager. Whether the city can or not, it is incompetent, irresponsible and stupid to do so. This is signature significance on metaphorical steroids. Nixon, predictably, is full of talk about redemption and second chances. “I had a debt to society and I paid it. I think it’s important that there is a pathway forward for people with felonies who want a second chance,” Nixon says. Sure there is a pathway: that path begins somewhere the felon does not have opportunities to steal his employer’s money.

The reality is this: nobody who is trustworthy embezzles government funds once or ever. Maybe a city could justify hiring a contrite former embezzler as its city manager after every candidate in the country who has not embezzled cash perishes from some China-planted ethics plague. Absent that unlikely scenario, the hiring is indefensible.

Here’s my favorite part of this astounding story: The Quincy city attorney was one of Nixon’s defense lawyers in the embezzlement case.

2. Oh no, flags again…

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Gee, I Wonder Why Hooters Is Declaring Bankruptcy?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

BEFORE DEI HIRING…

AFTER…

and…

Huh. Well, I guess dining out habits in the U.S. have been evolving since the pandemic, as today’s news stories astutely observe…

Hooters, famous (or infamous) for a crude play on words and its mandatory attire for waitresses, is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing as it works with creditors on a plan to restructure its operations, according to Bloomberg News.

What a surprise.

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I LOVE This Unethical Quote of the Eon From LA Mayor Karen Bass!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“No one said you shouldn’t have gone on a trip.”

—Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in a local TV interview, explaining why she  flew to Ghana as the disastrous wildfires in her city had already started.

In addition to being a spectacularly desperate excuse for irresponsible and incompetent conduct, Mayor Bass’s statement is such a poor use of the English language that it is almost undecipherable. What she was trying to say is that nobody told her not to leave the city she is supposedly in charge of running to go on a junket to Africa as a life-and-death threat loomed.

Still, isn’t that statement great? First, it’s an easy Unethical Quote of—what, the month? The year? The millennium? Second, it is the equivalent of wearing a blinking neon sign that reads, “I am an incompetent!” as if the residents of her city that have two brain cells to rub together haven’t figured that out yet. Third, it’s a rationalization so desperate, impotent and moronic that one has to be about six to try it. (And yes, I must add “Bass’s Lament” to the list.) Let’s see:

Ken Lay, asked why he oversaw the Enron scam: “Nobody told me not to!”

Lance Armstrong, asked why he used banned doping techniques to win all those races: “Nobody told me not to!”

Richard Nixon, asked why he allowed the Watergate cover-up: “Nobody told me not to!”

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, asked why he organized the attack on Pearl Harbor: “Nobody told me not to!”

Bass’s excuse works for serial killers, rapists, cheating spouses, arsonists, and playground bullies. It’s so versatile!

The context of Bass’s instant classic was a recent interview on LA’s Fox 11 in which she explained Bass explained that the Biden administration asked her to go to the Ghana to represent the U.S. “It was going to be a very short trip – over a weekend and two business days.” Now, she told the outlet, she is mounting an investigation into why she was MIA when the city needed leadership most. We need to look at everything about the preparation and all of that for the fires… I think when we evaluate that, we will find that although there were warnings – that I frankly wasn’t aware of.” “I think our preparation wasn’t what it typically is,” the mayor continued, apparently unaware of the axiom, “When you are in a hole, stop digging.”  “That level of preparation really didn’t happen. If it had, I wouldn’t even have gone to San Diego, let alone leave the country…it didn’t reach that level to me.”

If you are wondering whether there is any chance that voters in single-party California will reconsider their knee-jerk political affiliations after the horrible performance of Bass, considered a star on the Democratic Party’s representatives of-color Congressional team (she was on Biden’s short list to be Vice-President), the answer is probably not, in part because Bass’s apparent unawareness of the concept of “accountability” is barely being publicized. I had to learn of it from the British tabloid “The Daily Mail.”

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Pointer: Old Bill

Factcheck Ethics: It Is High Time We Decide Factcheckers Are So Biased and Stupid That They Should Be Ignored

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

A social media jokester used AI to create the “painting” on the left, and implied on “X” that it was an eerie premonition of the Trump administration, writing “This 1721 painting by Deitz Nuützen predicted the Trump-Elon-RFK McDonalds dinner.”

How dumb and gullible would someone have to be not to instantly realize that this was a gag? If the whole thing weren’t enough, there’s the name of the artist, “Deitz Nuützen,” as in “Deez Nutz,” web slang for testicles. Never mind, though. The Axis media is so wary of anything that might enhance the image of Trump and his team that even an obvious silly joke had to be factchecked.

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So Apparently “Dick” Is The Newly Approved Axis Term For Trump Allies. Interesting!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Democrats are apparently seeking the youth vote by talking like vulgar teenagers. Hey, it might work!

I noted that Anderson Cooper, without any serious objection from his employers, CNN, called guest Chris Sununu a “dick” on live TV. Now Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Ca.) has escalated by calling Elon Musk a “dick” during a House hearing on DOGE, aka. the Department of Government Efficiency. Then he went on CNN to smugly defend his uncivil conduct with a string of rationalizations. (Incidentally: talk about “punchable faces!”)

During the hearing, Garcia noted that the subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had displayed Hunter Biden’s “dick pics” at a July 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing: “I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Greene, is in charge of running this committee. Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in our oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well.”

Garcia showed a photo of Musk in a tuxedo. Musk is a dick, get it? Then he launched into the current ad hominem talking points the Axis is using to denigrate Trump’s waste, fraud and abuse delegate.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Pope Francis [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Pope has issued a letter (It’s in larger type at the link than what you’ll see below) to the “Bishops of the United States of America.”

Ethics verdicts: Abuse of position, abuse of authority, grandstanding, hypocrisy, breach of responsibility and intellectual dishonesty.

Nice job, Your Holiness.

Because you are likely to be semi-conscious or have your brains splattered on the ceiling from serial head-explosions after reading this thing, I’ll make my other ethics observations now:

1. I’ll pay attention to the Pope’s dictates about how my country handles illegal immigration when the Vatican lets anyone who feels like it move into Vatican City because it will give them “a better life.” Instead of sending the “worst of the worst” to Guantanamo, let’s send them right to the Pope. Based on this screed, I’m sure he’ll welcome them with open arms in the spirit of recognizing the inherent human rights of “the most fragile and marginalized.”

2. Anyone who uses the migration practices that existed in the Middle East over 2,000 years ago as an analogy to 21st century policy issues in the United States of America is either a con artist, a liar or an idiot. The same goes for comparing Jesus to fentanyl smugglers. Fans of the Pope can take their pick. It’s an indefensible, insulting, reductive argument. Nobody should make such comparisons who are over the age of six; for a major world figure revered by millions to stoop to it is signature significance for demagoguery.

3. The Pope admonishes Americans not to equate illegal conduct with criminal conduct. Funny, I just looked up “criminal conduct” and the definitions all boil down to “Criminal conduct is an unlawful act that breaks the law.” Call me a nit-picker, but it sure seems that  breaking our laws to come into and stay in the U.S. is the equivalent of a criminal act.

Maybe it’s a language thing. Does “not criminal” in Italian mean “lawbreaking that the Pope regards as excusable if one is ‘poor and marginalized’? Continue reading →