Ethics Dunces

Ethics Dunce: The California State Government, But You Knew That.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 673 into law. The measure will create a missing child alert system for black children only. This is the guy who wants to be President.

NBC News reports, “The law, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, will allow the California Highway Patrol to activate the alert upon request from local law enforcement when a Black youth goes missing in the area.The Ebony Alert will utilize electronic highway signs and encourage use of radio, TV, social media and other systems to spread information about the missing persons’ alert. The Ebony Alert will be used for missing Black people aged 12 to 25.”

If a white child is missing, well, too bad, honky’s got their own alert. “California is taking bold and needed action to locate missing black children and black women in California,” Democratic state Sen. Steven Bradford said in a press release. “Our black children and young women are disproportionately represented on the lists of missing persons. This is heartbreaking and painful for so many families and a public crisis for our entire state.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The revolting response of students and other members of campus communities to the Hamas attack and subsequent barbarism inflicted on Israeli citizens has launched a full-fledged ethics train wreck:

  • Zareena Grewal, a professor of American Studies at Yale, tweeted out “There is no question who the oppressors are who the oppressed are. And somehow people are confused about this. White supremacy never stops being shocking to me.” Then she wrote,  “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.”

  • Derron Borders, a diversity administrator at the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, wrote on Instagram in support of the Hamas terrorists who killed more than 900 people, “When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settle colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model.”

Meanwhile, the students in the 31 Harvard campus organizations that famously announced that Israel was fully responsible for all the violence erupting in and out of Gaza, are facing organized efforts to ensure they are punished:

  • Bill Ackman, the billionaire founder of hedge fund giant Pershing Square Capital Management, has demanded that Harvard release the names of the students who belong to the 31 organizations, so that corporations know not to hire them. “I have been asked by a number of CEOs if Harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” Ackman, a Harvard alum, wrote on “X.” “If, in fact, their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known. One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts.”  So far, at least a dozen company heads  have endorsed his campaign.
  • Two trucks circled Harvard Square yesterday with LED screens that flashed the names and photos of about a half dozen students known to be involved with the pro-Hamas groups.  The billboard trucks were funded by the conservative news group Accuracy in Media, showed the Harvard students under the words, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” and linked to a website, HarvardHatesJews.com, which directed users to send messages to Harvard’s board of trustees. “Tell them to take action against these despicable, hateful students,” the website states. “Each and every one of these students should be expelled and their student organizations should be kicked off campus.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What constitutes a fair and responsible response to the campus supporters of the Hamas terror attacks?

Two thoughts: 1) The consequences facing professors, administrators and students should be different, 2) College is a time to make mistakes.

The First Amendment’s principles and academic freedom must apply. I believe the primary negative consequences should fall on the institutions who hire fools like Borders, allow political ideologues like Grewal to indoctrinate students, and who are negligent in teaching their charges in history, ethics, and critical thinking.

I Know “Fact Don’t Matter” To The Woke Anti-Semites, But At Least They Should Know What Facts They’re Ignoring…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In the short (5.5 minutes) video above, an articulate, objective, unpretentious podcaster explains the origins of the possibly endless Israel-Palestinian conflict in terms even “The Squad” should be able to understand (but won’t). He doesn’t even have to go into more recent events, like the Palestinian reliance on terrorism for the last 50 years, or point out that Israel took over Gaza after it successfully defended itself against a coordinated, unprovoked attack, the second, by surrounding Arab nations, or dwell on the fact (there’s that word again) that the group still refuses to accept the legitimacy of the nation of Israel and is pledged to wipe it from the map.

It is a quick, accurate (if simplified) history lesson that should be mandatory viewing for all of the young, unethical (incompetent, unfair, irresponsible…) bigots and fools cheering on Hamas at colleges and universities. As for the alleged American “intellectuals” who are posting pictures of the Hamas paragliders with machine guns as an image of liberation, I’m not sure what can help them re-enter reality…or decency.

Brava Brianna Coppage, The Sort-Of Ethical Naked Teacher

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s Brianna in all three photos.

As stated right above in the Ethics Alarms Glossary, The Naked Teacher Principle: states that “a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.” The NTP, as we call it for short, has been a staple of Ethics Alarms from the beginning…well, a little after the beginning, since the first installment of the series goes back to the old Ethics Scoreboard, which is still up for your edification and entertainment, here. The first Naked Teacher was Tamara Hoover, whom I discussed in 2005. On Ethics Alarms, the NTP, in addition to its classic versions, has many sundry variations, all of which can be found here. An unexpected variation just surfaced last month, with the “The Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle.”

But Brianna Coppage, the soon to be ex-English at St. Clair High School in St. Clair, Mo., is in one respect the perfect Naked Teacher by Ethics Alarms standards. After all, she understands how the NTP works and why.

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Do Progressive Voters Comprehend The Significance Of Their Elected Officials’ Hypocrisy And Flip-Flops?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Rhetorical question. Based on the evidence, the clear answer is “No.”

Exhibit A for today is that part of the 16th St. “street mural” that Black Lives Matter protesters painted next to the official “Black Lives Matter” lettering ordered up by Democratic Mayor Murial Bowser in 2020, when she pandered disgracefully to the Marxist, racist, scamster movement by re-naming the area running directly to the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” At the time this stunt was intended by Bowser and teh D.C. City Council as a rebuke to then-President trump, but its syill there, even though Bowser has, weasel-like insisted that the “Defund the Police” message isn’t part of the official D.C. mural. Typical Bowser: the protesters are correct; that’s an equal sign to the left, making the full message “Black Lives Matter = Defund the Police.” BLM does stand for defunding the police, among other things (riots, unpunished crime, thugs resisting arrest…). Three years ago, Bowser dodged the a question on ABC’s “This Week” as to whether she would remove the unauthorized message. “It’s not a part of the mural,” mewled, adding that she hadn’t “had the opportunity to review it.” It’s still there, of course.

Nonetheless, just a few days before the embarrassing episode where a Democratic Congressman had his car hijacked at gunpoint, Bowser, whose city is in a crime wave like so many other Democrat-run cities in the thrall of the George Floyd Freakout and The Great Stupid, announced that her city needed more police. “We don’t have the officers that we need, and sadly we’ve lost three to four hundred officers in the last four years,” she said. “We haven’t had officers in our schools, and we have policies that make it difficult to recruit new officers.”

The obvious rejoinder should be, “And whose fault is that, you dummy?” But it isn’t. Joe Biden’s intellect-challenged mouthpiece blamed Rep. Cuellar’s hijacking on Republicans, though the party virtually doesn’t exist in the nation’s Capitol. Moreover, who voted for Bowser, not to mention that long trail of incompetent and/or corrupt Democratic mayors before her stretch back to convicted felon and crack-head Marion Barry (who has a statue honoring him downtown)?

When elected officials act like Bowser, it is convincing evidence that they can’t be trusted. Changing one’s position in the wake of facts that show you were wrong is simply competent leadership, but arguing two positions that are mutually exclusive is the mark of a politician who lack integrity, accountability, and sufficient brain cells to rub together to make small fire. We are seeing this self-indicting conduct coast to coast, from New York—where New York City’s major and the state’s governor still insist that they govern “sancuaries” for illegal immigrants but who are complaining that they don’t have the space or funds to actually be what they say they are—to California, where Gavin Newsom, hoping to fool an entire country into giving him power when he has presided over the ethics and societal rot that is now California, is brazenly taking contradictory positions on a slew of issues. President Biden, much to Donald Trump’s amusement, is now trying to build Trump’s “wonderful wall.”

Hypocrisy and a flagrant flip-flopping apparently means nothing to voters, perhaps because they have been raised to lack integrity themselves.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., the CVS in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of D.C. regularly looks like this:

You see, black lives matter, and black teens, gang members and thieves regularly loot the store, leaving almost all the shelves empty. “A big group of kids, like 45 or more, walk in before school, after school and late at night to steal chips and drinks,” local station Fox 5 reported this week. “They even throw the food and beverages on the ground and stomp on them, leaving behind a big mess. Staff at CVS have been alerted that thieves are aware of when new shipments come in and that’s when they target the store.” Street vendors are allegedly paying people to go in and steal the merchandise so they can resell it.

The neighborhood is almost exclusively black, so the majority of law abiding citizens in the area are the ones being most harmed by the collapse of the rule of law in the District (Black Lives Matter = Collapse of the Rule of Law), but you watch: they’ll still vote for Bowser next time around, or if not, someone as bad or worse. This was the result in Chicago, when voters got rid of one incompetent, lying, leftist mayor only to replace him with someone more radical and inept than even she was.

As Pete Seeger, himself a reality-challenged Marxist, sang in his best composition, “When will they ever learn?” It’s beginning to look like the answer may be “Never!”

The Amazing Trevor Bauer Ethics Train Wreck: It Has Everything: #MeToo, Kinky Sex, Ethics Zugzwang, Predatory Women, ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent,’ “The Asshole’s Handicap,” Legal Ethics And Baseball! [Part I: The Story] (Updated And Corrected)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This story broke a couple of days ago, and readers have been chiding me for not posting on it. I must admit, I was stalling, because it is a total mess that will take two major posts to unravel, and to cap it all off, my baseball posts don’t attract enough interest to meet the time/reward minimum. Nevertheless, this disaster raises major ethical issues. Ignore at your peril.

1. Background: Trevor Bauer: I have written a great deal about Trevor Bower, a talented Major League starting pitcher who, somewhat like Curt Schilling (recently discussed here), had a well-earned reputation for being an eccentric, and kind of a jerk. Bauer was also Donald Trump-like on social media, with similar, if more narrowly focused, results.

He once knocked himself out of a crucial post-season start by cutting a pitching hand finger playing with a drone (he loves drones). In 2018, while pitching for the Cleveland Indians, Bauer appeared to carve “BD 911” into the pitching mound during a game. That has been Truther short-hand for “Bush Did” the 9-11 bombings, and Bauer was widely criticized for the stunt. He then angrily denied that the message meant anything political, but never explained what it did mean. This also did not make him popular in a sport that is branded as patriotic and embodying core American values. In 2019, a sportswriter started claiming that Bauer’s tweets made him a “problem” because he had a contentious exchange with a female Twitter user. He was accused of harassment. It wasn’t harassment, but a pattern was set that eventually bit Bauer, hard.

In 2019, after allowing seven runs, Bauer threw a baseball over the centerfield wall after seeing his manager Terry Francona come out of the dugout to remove him from the game. Bauer apologized profusely, but it was the final straw for Francona, and the Indians traded him. Bauer was among the most vocal critics (and one of the few player critics) of the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal (see here), and cheating in baseball generally. This is also not the way to be popular in the clubhouse. In 2021, MLB announced that umpires would be checking the balls more carefully and regularly to ensure that the rule against doctoring pitches wasn’t being violated. The first pitcher to have his thrown baseballs collected for inspection based on suspicion of doctoring was…Trevor Bauer, Anti-Cheating Crusader. Bauer reacted sarcastically to the report on his Twitter account, and noted that many baseballs were being collected from games across baseball, not only from him. I wrote that this was an ethics red flag for me, as was his reaction when baseball announced the new policy, saying that there would be no way to determine who doctored the balls.

Luckily for Bauer, the SOB can really pitch. In the shortened season of 2020, Bauer won the National League Cy Young Award as one of the two best pitchers the Major Leagues. The King’s Pass reigns supreme in baseball (as in other sports): if a player is good enough, he can get away with almost anything. Almost. The Dodger signed Bauer to a rich, three year contract.

2. The Scandal. Bauer had a much larger scandal coming. A restraining order was taken out against him in late June of 2021 by a former sex partner. The woman claimed she had what started as a consensual relationship involving rough sex with the pitcher, but in a 67-page document, alleged that Bauer assaulted her on two different occasions, punching her in the face, vagina, and buttocks, sticking his fingers down her throat, and strangling her to the point where she lost consciousness twice, an experience she said she did not consent to. After the second choking episode, the woman claimed she awoke to find Bauer punching her in the head and face, inflicting serious injuries. She contacted police, and an investigation of Bauer by the Pasadena, California police department began.

Baseball, which had made the NFL and the NBA look bad (they are bad) by cracking down on domestic abuse by players, placed Bauer on indefinite “administrative leave” although her allegations were unsubstantiated. At the time, I wrote,

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More Ethics Estoppel: President Biden Is The Last One I Want To Hear Call “To Change The Poisonous Atmosphere In Washington”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This is head-exploding hypocrisy, and I’m not going to let it pass.

Yesterday, announcing yet another give-away of money the U.S. doesn’t have to people who don’t deserve it—a student loan forgiveness stunt—Biden said,

“More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. You know, we have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies, need to talk to one another, listen to one another, work with one another.”

How dare he? It was just about a year ago when Biden called Republicans fascists and dangers to democracy. Has he forgotten? Oh, heck, its poor addled Joe: maybe he has. I don’t care. This is ethics estoppel in its purest form: even though addressing the culture of hate, revenge and demonizing in politics is desperately needed, Joe Biden is among those who mock a legitimate ethical objective by endorsing it. Maybe there is a Democrat somewhere who isn’t in that position, but I can’t think of any.

Have any Democrats criticized the endless Jan. 6 kangaroo hearings? How about Rep. Bowman’s “poisonous” “talking points” blaming Republicans because he broke the law and lied about it—remember them?

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In Which I Speak Regarding A Head-Exploding Donald Trump Post That Should Speak For Itself (Res Ipsa Loquitur)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

How can anyone in their right mind want to have someone who thinks posting something like this is appropriate as their President?

I initially thought that post was a hoax. Silly me. It is now clearer than clear that this chaotic man is capable of saying or posting anything. He has no filters, he has no shame, the ethics alarms were never installed, and his narcissism knows no bounds. Even knowing all this well, I was still stunned to see Trump take his messianic and martyr complexes to this extreme.

Actually, I can answer, sort of, my opening question with this social media post in response to Trump’s…

Maybe this poster is in his right mind, but his right mind has an IQ of 46.

You can almost hear the more intellectually capable of conservatives desperately spinning. Here’s the reaction, for instance, of Joel Abbott of “Not the Bee”:

The name of Jesus Christ has been sanitized from our halls of power. You can’t get supposed Christian politicians to even whisper his name. They talk about “God” and providence and the divine – with a little “Amen and Awoman” on the side these days – but they won’t dare talk about Jesus. So sure, you can rant about how Trump clearly needs a savior, and how some of the Trump crowd clearly needs to tone down the messiah worship comparing him to Christ…But as for me, I am glad that such a man would share silly boomer memes of himself hanging with Jesus in the courtroom, because the name of Jesus is being magnified one way or the other. Meanwhile, the wisdom of the world – the so-called experts with their high-browed decorum – are being clowned by the foolishness of God, who would use a man like Trump in spite of Trump.

Just in case you are bothered by the Left making excuses and being in denial regarding Jamaal Bowman and the fire alarm, that’s what the Right is capable of.

Further observations:

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How Hard Is It To Make A Competent And Responsible Interim Appointment To Fill A U.S. Senate Seat? Too Hard, Apparently, For Gov. Gavin Newsom…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In California, the governor has the power to appoint a senator to serve until the next regularly scheduled statewide general election. Current California Governor Gavin Newsom had the opportunity to exercise this power because, in a previous example of unethical conduct by a California elected official, Senator Diane Feinstein had died in office after irresponsibly running for re-election when she was already 85 and declining in health and mental acuity. (California voters, who would vote for a pet rock if it had a (D) next to it, dutifully sent her back to the Senate anyway).

Newsom is running a shadow campaign to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President in 2024 in case President Biden does a Feinstein, and has recently shown his utter lack of integrity (but we knew that) by vetoing three progressive bills that his rhetoric had previously supported, one that would have given striking union workers in California the opportunity to apply for unemployment benefits, another requiring judges to consider children’s gender identities in custody disputes, and a third that would have barred California’s prison system from sharing information about incarcerated immigrants with federal officials, in keeping with California’s “sanctuary state” position. You can almost hear the wheels turning: Newsom knows that progressives will vote for him over Donald Trump no matter what he does, so he’s trying to look like a moderate to those millions of apathetic and ignorant voters who haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening in California under his watch. Good plan! Unethical, weasel-like, but smart.

In a similarly cynical calculation, Newsom promised in 2021 to appoint a black woman should Feinstein’s seat become open. Not only was this an announcement that Newsom placed pandering to poweful Democratic constituency groups over seeking the most qualified person to fill a crucial legislative position, it also was a betrayal of his duty to the population of Claifornia, all of whose interests must be served by a U.S. Senator, but also to the citizens of the United States as a whole, who require the best representation in their republic available. Gender and skin color are not qualifications for high elected office.

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An Ethics Estoppel Classic: This Op-Ed Heads Straight To The “Pot Calling The Kettle Black” Hall Of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

How incapable of self-awareness must an extreme abortion advocate be to accuse abortion opponents of manipulating the language to mislead the public about what they are really talking about? The entire pro-abortion movement has been built on linguistic deceit of the most flagrant kind for decades, with abortion being referred to as “choice.” This is deliberate deception, as if proposals to prevent the killing of nascent living human beings have as their objective a broad rejection of autonomy, rather than an ethical respect for human life, no matter how early in that life an individual may be.

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