Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Alternate Realities in the Manhattan Trump Trial, Except Only One of Them Is Real…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump for 34 felonies that are exactly one misdemeanor on which the statute of limitations has run is not just an unethical case, it’s a revealing one. It should let the objective members of the public know, if they have the opportunity and inclination to pay attention, just how undemocratic and trustworthy the 21st Century mutation of the Democratic Party has become.

“Dangerous” is also an adjective that belongs in that sentence.

I’ve been beginning mornings lately jumping back and forth between the coverage of the trial on CNN and MSNBC—you know, the Pravda channels—and Fox News, which would be claiming that Trump was as innocent as the driven snow even if he were as guilty as O.J. It is astounding how completely divergent the impressions one is given from the Left and Right sources are—that, and horrifying. The public has no reliable way to get the information it needs to figure out “What’s going on here?” because all of the coverage is agenda-driven. Very few members of the public have the time (or education) to puzzle it out either.

Interestingly, Abe’s observation—the one that begins, “You can fool some of the people…“—again seems to be holding true, and God Bless America for that. A recent poll suggests that a majority of the the public regard Democrats and the Biden administration as the true existential peril to American liberties and freedom, and not Donald Trump. Might it be that the spectacle of four dubious prosecutions in Democratic Party strongholds by Democratic prosecutors all taking place in an election year and aimed at putting the likely GOP nominee and former President behind bars before an election the Democratic resident of the White House looks poised to lose suggests a slight totalitarian bent, mayhap? Perhaps? Ya think?

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The Strange Saga of “Father Justin”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The nonprofit website Catholic Answers launched an interactive AI chatbot christened “Father Justin” on April 23 “to provide users with faithful and educational answers to questions about Catholicism.”

Father Justin appeared as a pleasant white male in clerical attire, sitting with the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy’s Perugia province in the background. Catholic Answers said he was named for St. Justin Martyr, a second-century convert and Catholic apologist. The bot “honors real-life priests and the role they play in people’s lives,” conveying an “authoritative yet approachable” demeanor that befits “the spirit and nature of the responses users can expect,” visitors were told.

Almost immediately the thing was attacked, and not just on the basis that other chatbots have been criticized, which is—did Catholic Answers not know this?—that the damn things aren’t trustworthy and have a tendency to go rogue. The National Catholic Reporter noted that Father Justin was an apt “metaphor for sexism in the church.” “Some Roman Catholics are apparently more comfortable with the idea of ordaining a robot than they are with the possibility of a woman taking on a position of ministerial leadership,” wrote Rebecca Weiss.

What really did in the good Father, however, were his often wacky responses to questions. Again: how could Catholic Answers not see this coming? Michael Cohen used an AI assistant to prepare a legal memo for his lawyer, and nearly got his lawyer disciplined when the document turned out to be stuffed with imaginary case cites. [Thoughts: 1) Maybe the bot knew what a slime ball the disbarred lawyer and convicted perjurer is, and deliberately sabotaged him. You never know with SkyNet… 2) Which is more unethical, trusting a chatbot with legal reserach, or trusting Cohen?].

Asked if it could forgive sins, for example, the AI priest replied, “As a Catholic priest, I do have the authority to administer the sacrament of reconciliation, also known as confession,” adding that “this power to forgive sins, given to the Apostles by Christ himself, has been passed down through the centuries to all ordained priests.” “He” was not an ordained priest, however. Other questions really tripped Justin up, like this one:

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Unethical (and Telling!) Quote of the Month: Rep. Nancy Pelosi

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“[T]hese poor souls who are looking for some answers….we’ve given them to them, but they are blocked by some of their views on the three G’s: guns, gays, and God—that would be a woman’s right to choose—and these cultural issues cloud their reception to an argument that is really in their interests.”

—-Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (D-Cal.) appearing at an Oxford Union debate to take the position that populism  is a threat to democracy in the United States.

Let me get a compliment out of he way and on the record up front: Pelosi showed guts by appearing in this forum, and that is worthy of a measure of respect. Of course, her daring may be less attributable to guts than hubris, arrogance, or stupidity, because her position is indefensible from a Jeffersonian and Madisonian point of view and stating it in a public forum demonstrates that the totalitarian disease now rampaging through the Democratic Party has so corrupted its values that leaders like Pelosi no longer are capable of realizing how repulsive its ideology has become. Continue reading →

The Student and the Homeless Man: A Cautionary Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Or, “Why It’s Unethical to Behave in Defiance of Reality.”

Or, “Why the old saw ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is constantly being affirmed.”

Or, “Why progressive wishcraft keeps blowing up in society’s metaphorical face”

Sanai Graden (left), a University of California at Berkeley senior (presumably you know what that means) was hit up by a homeless man as she visited Washington, D.C. He said his name was Alonzo, and told her he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The sympathetic young woman paid for his medication at CVS. She also got him a hotel room for the night. Sanai was a TikToker , and told her followers that she needed to raise money for Alonzo, whom she called “Unc.” Soon she bought Alonzo, aka. “Unc,” a cell phone, and put him up in a hotel for a week.

Awwww. How Christian! How kind! How progressive!

Her video became a Tik Tok sensation, with millions of views. Graden started a GoFundMe account, and it quickly raised more than $400,000. Her legion of followers multiplied: one admirer set up a GoFundMe for her that eventually raised over $26,000.

Isn’t that a nice story?

Then a report from local D.C. TV station Fox 5 revealed that “Unc” was Alonzo Hebron, 64, a long-time criminal who numbered among his convictions one for a violent assault on a homeless woman. In another, he stabbed a man in the neck with a screwdriver. Donors started asking for their money back.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“My working theory would be that Joe Biden has prioritized his own reelection. And he’s not even performing well at that. Ironically, his reelection theme seems to be that he — and not Trump — is a man of integrity. I would recommend that the old man step back from the tawdry exercise of getting reelected and actually behave with integrity.”

—Law professor/”Fiercely neutral” blogress Ann Althouse, characterizing President Biden’s contradictory and cynical treatment of Israel after he announced that the U.S. will withhold critical arms support for the attack on the Hamas stronghold of Rafah despite previously agreeing that Hamas had to be destroyed.

Ann adds, “But I suspect he’s too far gone to give us that.”

I was pondering how to frame a post about Biden’s craven perfidy regarding the Hamas-Israel conflict, as he literally tries to take both sides at once in order to avoid rejection by the Democratic Party’s pro-terrorism bloc, which has turned out to be a lot bigger than even critics suspected. Then I read Ann’s post highlighting Jon Podhoretz’s article for Commentary, “Biden’s Shameful Betrayal.” (Full disclosure: I know Jon, and like him: he was a member of my theater company’s board until he moved out of the District.) I don’t think Althouse has been red-pilled exactly—I’ll still lay odds that she ends up voting for Biden—but she seems genuinely disgusted by the age-addled President’s latest example of fecklessness and irresponsible leadership, as should we all.

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The Nathan Wade Interview: Apparently Fulton County Lawyers Don’t Get That “Legal Ethics” Thingy…or Ethics Generally

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I find the transcript of the interview of deposed Fani Willis prosecutor and loverboy Nathan Wade many things: damning, outrageous, disgusting, shocking. Mostly I find it to be more evidence that I have wasted the last 25 years trying to make the legal profession more ethical. This guy, a “prominent and respected Atlanta lawyer,” not only doesn’t know what ethics is, he’s infuriatingly smug about his ignorance.

These are the people Democrats have placed in charge of “saving democracy” by using the criminal laws to keep Donald Trump from delivering condign justice to the Biden presidency, as in crushing, unequivocal defeat.

On Sunday’s “World News Tonight” and Monday’s “Good Morning America” ABC revealed two segments (here and here) from an “exclusive” interview with former Fulton County, Georgia special prosecutor Nathan Wade. He was, you’ll recall, forced to withdraw from the lucrative gig gifted to him by his girlfriend Fani Willis by the judge in the case, Willis’s prosecution of Donald Trump for “election interference.”

If there are more segments, I think I’ll pass: cleaning up the serial head explosions caused by what I’ve seen already is more than enough for me. Nothing in them could change my mind about Wade (or Willis) at this point. He’s not just an unethical lawyer.He’s a fick. And an asshole.

I’ll just repeat some of the more glaring statements so you get the idea:

  • Asked how he could endanger a high profile prosecution by letting an illicit romance pollute the prosecution: “You don’t plan to develop feelings. You don’t plan to fall in love. You don’t plan to  have some relationship in the workplace that we  you don’t set out to do that and those things develop organically. They develop over  over time. And the  the minute we had that sobering moment, we discontinued it.”

I see: he’s 13 years old, then….just so darned romantic or horny that he couldn’t help himself, even though this was exactly the opposite of professional behavior. Continue reading →

The Latest From Harvard Is So Irresponsible and Incompetent That It Shocks Even Me

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And I have absolutely no faith or trust in this arrogant and rotting (a bad combination) institution. But I still didn’t think its leadership could be this stupid. Hence my brains and skull fragments being all over the ceiling…

Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker will be Maria Ressa, the CEO of the Philippines-based news site Rappler and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Sounds Harvard-y eneough, doesn’t she? Except that in January, Ressa signed a letter accusing Israel of “unabated killing of journalists in Israeli airstrikes since the start of the Israel-Gaza war”while calling for “immediate end to the bombardment of journalists and apparent targeting in some cases of our colleagues in Gaza and the region.” (This a dubious accusation at best.)

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Ethics and Constitutional Dunces: The 320 House Members (Mostly Republicans) Who Voted for the “Antisemitism Awareness Act”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

You know, or should, that your conduct is unethical and outrageous when it makes Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) look good by comparison Gaetz voted against HR 690, as every member of the House should have since it is throbbingly unconstitutional on its face, no question, no argument, a flat out First Amendment violation. Gaetz told his followers on Twitter/X that he voted against the proposed legislation because it is a “ridiculous hate speech bill.”

“Antisemitism is wrong, but this legislation is written without regard for the Constitution, common sense, or even the common understanding of the meaning of words,” he wrote. Bingo. The bill, in weasel words remarkable even by recent Congressional standards, declares that “anti-Semitism” is a violation of title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.), and embraces an expansive definition of the term “adopted on May 26, 2016, by the IHRA, of which the United States is a member, which definition has been adopted by the Department of State; and… includes the “[c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism” identified in the IHRA definition.”

The IHRA definition includes examples of pure speech, and I would expect any junior in high school to know that these cannot be criminalized:

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“Bias Makes Harvard Incredibly Stupid,” the Series! Today’s Episode: “The Law of Holes”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One of the downsides of denouncing my alma mater is that I only hear about its latest unethical conduct when the story imposes itself on my consciousness or when the alumni magazine arrives, usually containing news that it a month old or more. I was going to write about the last two, post-Claudine Gay presidency issues, which were fascinating as exercises in denial, spin, and self-delusion: the framing of Harvard’s most recent debacle was essentially that “something happened” to Old Ivy, you know, like an earthquake or a plague of frogs. These are supposed to be smart people. Instead, America is auditing a Harvard course on just how stupid bias can make us. Well, that’s a lot more useful than a lot of Harvard courses now.

But even I didn’t see this coming: I didn’t think Harvard could be this stupid. I really didn’t; when I saw this headline in the Washington Free Beacon, my first thought was that I had hit the Babylon Bee on an unfunny day. No, not only was it true, the story was two weeks old.

As the Harvard Crimson had announced on April 16, Vivian Hunt (seen here in a student production of “The Handmaiden’s Tale” or something—I don’t know what the hell she’s wearing or why, but it’s weird)…

… is the newly appointed head of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Hunt is a Harvard College alum, female, black, a likely affirmative action success, and a vocal DEI activist, even more of one, arguably, than disgraced ex-prez Claudine Gay.

Hunt is nearly “patient zero” for the DEI plague. In 2015 she co-authored the McKinsey consulting firm’s influential and dishonest paper, “Why diversity matters,”based on data that has recently been shown to be junk as many (like me) long suspected. She has vigorously argued that meritocracy “isn’t good enough” and urged the private sector to hire based on color and gender rather than that old-fashioned, busted, racist, “talent, ability, and demonstrated success” formula.

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Well, So Much For the PETA Vote!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

To many analysts, South Dakota governor Krtisti Noem checked all the right boxes to be Donald Trump’s running mate. She’s a hard-right conservative, a successful and popular governor, an effective speaker, attractive, and a woman. (I must interject here that I find it just a bit hypocritical that the GOP, as it derides and condemns the diversity fad as it makes tribal membership more important than merit, skill, competence and experience, that Trump is almost certainly going to choose a woman or a black man as his VP. The least he could do to defy the Left is pick a Jew…). Noem seemed to be leading the race to be Trump’s second-in-command, in the view of many experts.

And then, as Frank and Nancy would say, she went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I shot my dog because I couldn’t be bothered to train it.’

“Ethics Dunce” doesn’t adequately describe what Noem’s new book “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” which will be released in May, reveals about her. Yes, she’s notably missing some key ethics alarms and some pretty basic ones at that, like “Be kind to animals, because they are innocents,” one of my late wife’s mantras. Noem is also, however, lacking in basic understanding of public sensibilities and has the political instincts of a Kamikaze pilot.

“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote after detailing the horrible story of how she lured “Cricket,” a 14-month old wire-haired pointer, to a gravel pit and shot her because the dog had failed her first pheasant hunting attempt. This wasn’t “Old Yeller”: Cricket wasn’t sick, or dangerous, or old. Cricket, as Noem’s account makes clear, just hadn’t been trained….you know, like Joe Biden’s “bad” German Shepherd, Commander.

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