Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Searching For the Most Apt Analogy for George Santos Turning Up at the SOTU…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Is it Scarlet O’Hara, forced by Rhett Butler to play the seductive Woman in Red at Melanie Wilkes’ birthday party, after he discovers her flirtations with Melanie’s husband? Is it the proverbial skunk at the picnic? Or was the expelled GOP Rep. emulating Davey Crockett in the most recent film account of the Alamo (which, I note with shame, I barely acknowledged this year since my week was occupied with another more personal tragedy), defiantly staring down his foes after the battle was lost?

Or do you have a better analogy? Whatever George Santos was doing by showing up last night, it took gall, which we know the serial liar, fraudster and poseur has in abundance.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring AND When Bias Makes You Stupid AND When You’re Not Too Bright to Begin With AND You Don’t Know Much About History AND You’re A DEI Hire Who’s Unqualified For Your Position…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This…

…triggers you to issue this:

One word: Unbelievable.

My beloved Grace was a World War II history fanatic. She died on the day this spectacularly offensive memo was released. If she had been in perfect health and read the swill above, it very well might have killed her.

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Regarding THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Apparently, as I have noted before, the Biden Administration doesn’t believe in firing anyone—well, anyone who doesn’t behave like this clown—which is itself a form of incompetence and avoidance of responsibility. A competent President who wasn’t more concerned with avoiding conflicts with the loosely-allied progressive tribes in his party than with upholding standards of conduct, ethics, and performance under his authority would fire everyone behind that screed above.

All right, he would do it immediately after giving Merrick Garland, Pete Buttigieg, Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Dr. Miguel Cardona, Alejandro Mayorkas, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and Karine Jean-Pierre their well-earned pink slips.

No executive in any organization has to tolerate public dissent like this regarding his or her leadership. For a President, such open defiance is divisive, confusing to the public, disloyal and disrespectful. It also erodes trust. The proper way for any staff member in any pursuit at any level to express his or her disagreement with the organization’s policies and actions is to do so privately, through proper channels, or publicly after resigning. Those are the only ethical options, and the latter course has severe ethical limitations based on confidentiality and mutual trust.

Having a staff express disagreement with a President and his administration as the letter jaw-dropping above does is unprecedented, and it had better not become institutionalized, because no government—indeed, no organization—can function effectively and with the full confidence of its constituency and stake-holders that permits such rebellions.

Moreover, even if such grandstanding could be justified—there must be an exception out there somewhere—this surely wouldn’t be an acceptable precedent. The letter above absurdly supports an act of self-terrorism by a mentally-disturbed fool, thus aligning themselves with the radical agent of chaos who issued this tweet…

Brilliant. This New York-based writer and apologist for terrorism lumps protesting peacefully, dissent, marching and heckling politicians in the same category as suicide, rioting and law-breaking. Yet even he has a better grasp on reality than “the Staffers for Ceasefire.” In a related tweet, he suggests to these fools, “The best eulogy you can offer Bushnell is resigning en masse.”

Exactly. By all means, honor that pathetic would-be martyr.

Theirs isn’t even smart dissent, persuasive dissent, or patriotic dissent. The letter represents a group of people who are making policy recommendations above their pay-grade, literally, and displaying their biases and ignorance while doing so.

Biden should fire each and every one of them. That he doesn’t and won’t would be proof of his unfitness to lead and incompetence as a Chief Executive even if he could sing ” I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General General” backwards in 12 languages, including Urdu.

OK, I Know “Mary Poppins” Well Enough That When I Heard That the BBC Had Ruled That It Contained “Offensive Language,” I Immediately Knew Why

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Why, that is, other than the fact that the UK has been lobotomized by The Great Stupid even more than the U.S. has.

Do you know what was “offensive” in one of my all-time favorite movies without cheating? Think, now…

Time’s up!

It’s this: Admiral Boom, a senile neighbor of the Banks family whose sole purpose in the plot is to set up a running gag showing how the Banks’ and their servants routinely deal with his shooting off a cannon (the house shakes, furniture slides around, things fall off shelves, hilarity reigns), twice refers to “Hottentots.”

The British Board of Film Classification announced that the film was resubmitted for a rating this month in preparation for a theatrical re-release. The Borad reclassified if from “G” to “PG” for discriminatory language, a spokesperson explained. “Mary Poppins (1964) includes two uses of the discriminatory term ‘Hottentots’…While “Mary Poppins” has a historical context, the use of discriminatory language is not condemned, and ultimately exceeds our guidelines for acceptable language. We therefore classified the film PG for discriminatory language.” The term was once used by the British to describe the Khoikhoi and San nomadic tribes in southern Africa—surely you remember them?

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The Game Is Afoot in Missouri, and Boy, Is It Ever Stupid…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out this mystery.

The Springfield News-Leader reported on the most ridiculous example of attempted insurance fraud I’ve ever read or heard about. In addition to being spectacularly dishonest, it was also incompetent. Hold on to your heads for this one, and tell anyone in the room to move away to avoid flying pieces of skull…

The Howell County (Missouri) Sheriff’s last November sent out a release about a case of insurance fraud involving a man falsely claiming that an accident involving “a brush hog” had robbed him of both feet. A brush hog is a rotary mower often attached to a tractor; I never heard the term before. See? There are side benefits to even the most ridiculous ethics tales!

The perpetrator of the fraud was a 60-year-old paraplegic who had the brilliant idea of paying someone to cut off his feet so he could claim the insurance money. After all, he couldn’t walk anyway, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. The first problem with the plan was that the responding medics and law enforcement officers couldn’t find his severed feet anywhere. (Usually when someone says they have lost limbs, the limbs aren’t literally lost.) Authorities’ suspicions were also aroused by the tourniquets on the supposed brush hog victim’s legs. Who put them there? Then there were the wounds where the feet used to be. They were far too clean for foot manglings that result from farm equipment mishaps. “If it was done by a brush hog, it would have been a bloody, gory mess,” Torey Thompson, a lieutenant with the Howell County Sheriff’s Office, told the Springfield News Leader. “It was a poorly executed plan.”

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Now THIS Is an Unethical Lawyer!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Tennessee Supreme Court this month disbarred a Nashville lawyer, Brian Philip Manookian, for habitual unethical conduct that I have a hard time believing that any lawyer would dare to engage in even once. Manookian, wrote the Court, “engaged in this long pattern of intimidating and degrading conduct” to succeed in a medical liability case, the Tennessee Supreme Court said. His goal was to coerce opposing lawyers “into standing down to avoid personal humiliation and emotional distress for them or their families. A business model of sorts, based on fear….To say that Mr. Manookian engaged in multiple offenses is to understate,” the state supreme court continued. “Despite lectures, fines, sanctions and suspensions from judge after judge, Mr. Manookian did not choose merely to continue engaging in misconduct—each time he received the expected negative reaction to his behavior, he responded by escalating it.”

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This Question to the Ethicist Sends Me to the Wood-chipper

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

[That would be my foot sticking out. I’m sure my good neighbor Ted would be willing to get me through…or any one of the thousands of people I’ve infuriated over the years.]

You can read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s answer to the most discouraging question he’s ever been asked (my description, not his) if you like. Essentially “The Ethicist” says (I’m counting here), “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no!” As usual the New York Times “Ethicist ” is thorough, but he could have written his response in his sleep, as I could have, and if you’re reading an ethics blog, so could you.

Here’s the question, and hold on to your heads…

A close friend of many years whom I’ve always thought of as an extremely honest, ethical person recently confided in me that she shoplifts on a regular basis. She explained that she never steals from small or independently owned businesses, only from large companies, and only when no small business nearby carries the items she needs. She targets companies that are known to treat their employees badly, or that knowingly source their products from places where human rights are violated, or whose owners/C.E.O.s donate to ultraconservative, authoritarian-leaning candidates, etc.

My friend volunteers in her community and has worked her entire life for nonprofit antipoverty and human rights organizations. While she isn’t wealthy, she is able to afford the items she steals and believes that she is redistributing wealth; she says she keeps track of the value of what she’s stolen and donates an equal amount to charity. She thinks of her actions as civil disobedience and says she will accept the consequences if she’s caught.

When she told me, I thought, Stealing is wrong. But as we discussed it, I realized I was oversimplifying a complex moral issue. Is it wrong to steal food to feed your starving children? What if I stole a legally purchased gun from a person I knew was about to commit a mass shooting? Are those who bring office supplies home from their workplace also thieves? I find myself struggling with the question of whether an individual’s actions are morally defensible if they do more good than harm. — Name Withheld

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The Super Bowl Produces an Early Nominee For Ethics Alarms “Asshole of the Year”: KC Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Cowabunga! This goes beyond the mere jerkish behavior one (or at least I) expects of NFL players.

Kelce has been getting nationwide publicity because of his romance with superstar pop artist Taylor Swift. He knew all eyes would be on the couple during the annual concussion-fest that is always the most viewed single event network TV offering, the Super Bowl (won in thrilling fashion, or so I was told, by the Chiefs in only the second overtime game in SB history). So how did Kelce, fully aware that his fans young and old would be watching, handle his moment in the spotlight?

You see it above: After the Chiefs lost a fumble in the second quarter of the game, Kelce was seen on live TV yelling in Coach Reid’s face and even bumping him. In any other sport, and usually this one, the disrespectful player would be benched, fined and suspended. One NFL player, seeing Kelce’s outburst, tweeted that if he did something like that, he’d be kicked out of the NFL.

Oh no, it was all in good fun, we were informed afterwards. Even though he embarrassed his coach and taught young NFL and Taylor Swift fans that it’s just fine to treat your superiors, bosses and authority figures like dirt, “sources” on the team assured the media that the player “respects Coach Reid. It’s really just about the passion of the game. It wasn’t anything serious.”

Right. Making hostile physical contact with your boss in front of team mates on national TV is nothing serious. I remember Reggie Jackson doing something similar to Yankees manager Billy Martin in the dugout during a game in Fenway Park, and Martin had to be restrained from attacking Reggie, who was immediately suspended.

But Martin had some self-respect, and Reggie wasn’t dating Taylor Swift, I guess. And Kelce? Asked about his actions, he told ESPN. “I was just telling him how much I love him.”

Ha. Funny.

What an asshole.

To be fair to Kelce, he probably already is suffering from brain damage, so that’s something of a mitigation. He and Taylor shouldn’t worry: Donald Trump is still the odds on favorite to win “Asshole of the Year,” as he usually does.

Here’s a New Way For a Public School Teacher to Be Unethical!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Mario Perron, a middle school teacher at Westwood Junior High School in Saint-Lazare, Canada, has apparently been secretly selling his students’ art projects on the web for his own profit. A pupil stumbled across the teacher’s website with listings for drawings created by the student and fellow classmates in class, and reported the discovery to the school, according to CTV News. The usual investigation is ongoing, but how else would class art projects end up on line being sold for as much as $100? Here, for example, are some of the student drawings being sold on mugs…

Wow. People will buy anything online. The drawings also are being offered on T-shirts and phone cases.

The father of the student who made the discovery told reporters, “I’m extremely disgusted with [the teacher]. It’s extremely, you know, it’s unbelievable…Is this teacher asking for certain types of projects to be done to be able to sell them? Is he asking for these types of portraits to be done so it meets the market?…I’m not impressed with the school, or the school board.”

Perron’s LinkedIn profile says he has been a full-time teacher at Westwood Junior since September 2019 His profile also promotes his personal website, 1-mario-perron.pixels.com, which is where he offered his students’ artwork for sale without their permission or knowledge.

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Pointer: JutGory

Unethical “Journalist” of the Month: Jason Sattler

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms just added “Unethical Journalist” to its categories. I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier, but the furious “It isn’t what it is” caterwauling from so many mainstream media voices that it is absurd–absurd, I tell you!—for anyone to think that Joe Biden isn’t ready to win “Jeopardy” and recite the Constitution from memory sealed the deal. The spectacle has been as depressing for the public as it is embarrassing for the rotting profession of journalism.

Some sectors managed to barely turn around and accept reality, sort of: the New York Times, after publishing ridiculous denials from Paul Krugman and others, issued an editorial Sunday expressing alarm at the combined effect of the Biden DOJ’s Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 388 page report stating that the President had “diminished faculties” and was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” But even that cry in the dark concluded that Biden “needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86,” a statement that disingenuously implies that Biden has done anything that indicates he can do his job now, much less in five years.” How can he do “more” to show something is true when it is so obvious that it isn’t true? It’s like complaining that public schools need to do more to show that they are unbiased and competent.

And naturally, the Times’ only stated impetus for its alarm was not that having a mentally deficient President is a peril to the nation, but that “the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump.” (Don Surber, a newspaper journalist turned Substack pundit, notes that his old employers, which have seen their circulation more than halved in the last 20 years and opines that newspapers have destroyed their credibility by dropping all pretense of credibility and are doomed. “It is not that the media gets the story wrong; it is that the media seldom admits it was wrong,” he writes.)

Which brings me to “journalist” Jason Sattler.

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