Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Ethics Quiz: Sympathy For Really Stupid Accident Victims

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

That’s a scene above from Quentin Tarntino’s “Death Proof,” and a dumber movie you are never likely to encounter. The clip is there not to celebrate the movie, originally half of a misconceived bomb called “Grind House,” but to illustrate the real and incredibly stupid phenomenon called “car surfing,” which has had a recent resurgence among teens thanks to social media.

15-year-old Cyprus High School (Utah) sophomore Ava Broadhead is now in a coma after she fell off the top of a moving car. She was car-surfing, and “unfortunately, pavement isn’t as forgiving and the victim hit their head,” a police officer told the news media. Ava suffered massive head injuries and faces a long recovery, with the chances of regaining her previous level of brain function slim.

A GoFundMe page seeks donations for Anna, stating, “Your generous donations will go directly toward her medical care and the resources needed to support her recovery. Any amount, no matter how small, will make a huge difference in Ava’s journey. If you are unable to contribute financially, we ask that you keep Ava in your prayers and share her story to raise awareness about the real dangers of car surfing.”

Who has have explained to them the dangers of riding on the outside of a moving car?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

How much compassion and sympathy, if any, is appropriate in response to someone harming themselves by engaging in such reckless behavior?

This kind of story always puts me in a quandary; I think I have posted about my dilemma before. My son nearly got himself killed or crippled a few times, although never doing anything quite as stupid as car-surfing. I note that the Go-Fund-Me page has raised only $6,000 so far, and I strongly suspect the weak response is because many have the same reflex reaction I do, which is that I’d rather give money to the victims of misfortunes they didn’t almost literally ask for. Anna’s story reminded me of the July Fourth accident this year when an idiot put fireworks on his head and set them off.

Of course Anna gets some points off her Darwin Awards score by virtue of her tender age…but how many? She devastated her own life while immersing her family in tragedy and the crushing burden of caring for her. It wasn’t intentional, but a drunk getting behind the wheel of a car isn’t intentionally trying to kill anyone, either.

I know that this self-inflicted tragedy will naturally cause many to blame social media. The suspicion lingers, however, that anyone foolish enough to try car-surfing is going to be disaster-prone one way or another.

Our Objective News Media: ‘Trump May Have Caused His Own Assassination Attempt’

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

That was USA Today’s reporting of the Trump assassination attempt yesterday. (I haven’t checked to see if it has been changed.)

The sub-head is a non-sequitur unless the reader is supposed to conclude that there is a causal connection between Trump’s Truth Social post, Vance’s provocative comments on Sunday Morning TV, and the later assassination attempt.

There is no defending such blatant partisan hackery from a news source. The fact that this nonsense could make it to the USA Today site without a sane professional putting a stop to it is damning. Are we supposed to conclude that the shooter was an offended Taylor Swift fan? USA Today might as well have written, “The incident occurred that same day that Trump had hush puppies for breakfast.”

Again, this is how you try rig an election, at least if you’re aiming at the moron vote—which is, sadly, considerable.

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Pointer: Willem Reese

Accountability, Please. If or When Trump Loses the 2024 Election And Says It Was Rigged, Ethics Villain ABC Will Join In The Chorus That His Claim Is “Baseless” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

During the (one hopes) final 2024 Presidential Debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump stated that “Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.” Since Democratic appointee Kamala Harris was indicating disagreement, ABC moderator David Muir rushed to her aid, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

As you know, Muir believed his role in the debate was to”factcheck” Trump while letting Harris declare outright falsehood if she chose to. This time, Trump tried to rebut Muir, saying “…the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

Well, as usual Trump misused the word “fraud,”the FBI didn’t issue the jobs report, and if you think he is Satan, or Hitler, or Godzilla, you are not inclined to believe anything he says, but Trump was right and Muir was wrong in addition to being a biased and unethical debate moderator. Newly released data from the Dept. of Justice this week backed Trump. Okay, the crime didn’t literally break through any roofs, so I’m sure that characterization by Trump goes into the Washington Post’s Trump lies database, but still… This was DOJ’s survey from Bureau of Justice statistics  that includes crimes that may not have been reported to police. The annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed total instances of reported violent crime — including rape, robbery and aggravated assault — is up from 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.

The highest recent rate of violent crime during the Biden years was in 2022, when the survey counted 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12 being victims, Rape increased from 1.2 incidents per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023. Robbery rose from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023. Aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023. As Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott tried to explain in a piece published after Muir’s deliberately misleading “factcheck,”

Here’s the full report, and like so many statistics, one can spin and arrange the numbers to make various points, some contradictory. What you can’t do with them, at least ethically, if you are an alleged journalist is interrupt a Presidential debate to make one candidate look dishonest in front of a national audience because you and your employers want his opponent to win the election.

Muir and ABC should suffer serious consequences for their conduct, but they won’t. At very least, both should correct the false impression left by Muir and apologize to the public, and not just in a quiet tweet. That won’t happen either.

ABC is biased, corrupt and untrustworthy.

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Source: Legal Insurrection

More Evidence That Winston Churchill’s Misquoted Statement About Democracy Is Right Even If He Didn’t Say It….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Winston Churchill is often quoted as as observing that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all others.” In truth he was not so cynical: what he really said in a speech to the House of Commons in 1947 was that “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”

If he were around today and watching recent developments in our depressing Presidential race, however, I think Winston might go with the misquoted version.

Item: MoveOn, a progressive public policy advocacy group that has been much-derided on Ethics Alarms over the years, is partnering with Ben & Jerry’s radical Left co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield to release a special Kamala Harris-inspired ice cream flavor. (Send in related joke suggestions, by all means.) Limited edition pints of “Kamala’s Coconut Jubilee”are being released in a limited edition; it is a coconut flavored ice cream layered with caramel and topped with red, white and blue star sprinkles. Why coconut? This, apparently. (Winston is starting to roll already.)

The new flavor will be the center of the “Scoop the Vote” free ice cream truck tour that kicks off next week. Cohen and Greenfield will be on board while the truck makes 20 stops in the so-called battleground states as part of a push to register voters. Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, told USA TODAY that the tour aims to inspire voters to register and cast their votes for Harris in the 2024 presidential election, noting that even non-political activities like getting free ice cream have an impact on the election.

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I Know, I Know: “The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants.” Tough. Grow Up.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Norfolk Southern’s board has fired CEO Alan Shaw after an investigation found that he has been “engaging in a consensual relationship with the company’s chief legal officer,” the colorfully named Nabanita Nag. She was also canned from her positions as executive vice president corporate affairs, chief legal officer and corporate secretary.

Those are the lovebirds above.

Because this is a firing for cause, Shaw might have lost millions of dollars in what otherwise would be a “golden parachute.” This kind of vertical messing around is always stupid and unethical (but so romantic!), but it is particularly reckless for a CEO who is on metaphorical thin ice already, for then the “King’s Pass” is not going to be in play.

His two-year tenure included bitter labor negotiations that nearly resulted in an economy-crippling strike and the horrific derailment in East Palestine, Ohio that released tank cars full of toxic materials. This was not a good time for the company’s chief executive to go all Woody Allen.

But there is never a good time. When Cupid’s dart strikes, the only professional, ethical decision is to suck it up and resist, or play Edward the Eighth and abdicate “for the woman you love.”

The fact that Shaw was married to someone else should have giving him a strong hint that his ethics alarms should be ringing.

Ethics Villain: CNN

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The announcement that the shamelessly biased and wildly incompetent “media expert” Brian Stelter is returning to CNN and that the network is resurrecting “Reliable Sources,” the once legitimate media watchdog show that Howard Kurtz ably and fairly hosted until it was corrupted by Stelter, proves one thing. CNN, after a brief (and only partial) attack of conscience, is fully committed to being a metaphorical whore for the Left again. After all, it has to help save democracy! Here’s Stelter’s announcement:

This revolting development means that Stelter, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, CNN’s most flaming propagandists and untrustworthy talking heads who were fired for disgracing even what is now laughingly called broadcast journalism, have found gainful employment, not at Hardee’s where they belong, but again in the field that they sullied by their presence. Continue reading →

Ugh! Ethics Dunce—AGAIN—: University of Houston Law Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

This is an example of why I am disgusted with my field and chosen profession. Just last month I designated Jefferson, a legal ethics professor among other things, as an ethics dunce for her blatantly partisan and biased commentary. This time, it’s personal.

Seeking to find a reliable, trustworthy, accurate source of legal ethics news and developments (since the demise of the excellent legal Ethics Forum, I am reduced to the scattershot, overwhelmingly left-biased commentary on the APRL listserv), I subscribed to the professor’s substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, taking seriously her promise that it would supply a “Monday morning tour of all things related to lawyer and judicial ethics.” But the Legal Ethics Roundup I received this morning, like all its predecessors this month, cheerfully informed me that “For the month of August, the Legal Ethics Roundup is on pause.”

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Bad Celebrity Ethics: David Copperfield’s Penthouse Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Trust me on this: almost all magicians are weird. I strongly suspect that they tend to be on the “neurodivergent” spectrum (that’s the new politically correct term for autistic: you know my views on linguisitic rebranding), but they have other problems as well, including the tendency to slide into more destructive unethical behavior after building their lives around deceiving people for fun.

Alakazam! Here’s David Copperfield to demonstrate how it’s done!

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Obvious Ethical Breach Wednesday Continues With The Saga Of The Lost Skull

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I don’t set out to connect these posts; sometimes it just happens.

If you thought the board-poisoning chess player was obviously unethical, how about a hospital losing a piece of a patient’s skull?

Fernando Cluster was admitted to Emory University Hospital Midtown on September 30, 2022. He was diagnosed with an intracerebral hemorrhage, a type of stroke that causes bleeding in the brain. He needed a decompressive hemicraniectomy, which meant a 12 centimeter by 15 centimeter piece of his skull would be removed to allow his brain the space it needed to swell and heal during surgery.

The “bone flap” as it is called was supposed to be reattached during a procedure called a cranioplasty. But when the operation was scheduled to proceed on November 11, 2022, Fernando’s bone flap was missing. It must bve been around here somewhere; I swear I just saw it…boy, don’t you hate it when that happens? Once, my wife lost our tickets for a Paul McCartney concert…You know, this kind of thing can happen to anybody.

Continue reading →

In Utah, How To Raise An Ethics Dunce

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Police in Brigham City, Utah responded to complaints that a young boy was selling beer at a roadside stand. Sure enough, the kid had a sign at his makeshift stand that said “ICE COLD BEER.” But upon closer examination, the police found that “root” was in tiny print in front of the beer. The admiring police posted on Facebook, “He’s selling beer … ROOT BEER, that is. His marketing strategy has resulted in several calls to the BCPD, but apparently it’s paid off as business has been good.” Indeed. Business is booming, the boy told the fawning news media. “We had to buy another cooler.”

So the child has learned that bait-and-switch along with deceptive advertising not only works, but that he will be praised for it. I’m sure he can make the connection that deceit is also a useful and profitable strategy, and find lots of ways to exploit people’s trust to deceive them for his own benefit.

Yup, his family has the makings of a real little con artist there, and they’ll have the police and the news media to thank. Maybe he’ll end up in jail, or in Congress.

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Pointer: JutGory