Etiquette and manners

Ethics Dunce: Bride-To-Be Rochelle Mindrum

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

When social media over-sharing meets publicity obsession, the result is misbehavior like Rochelle Mindrum’s.

The 29-year-old was expecting her boyfriend Jak Keller to pop the question, and had even gone ring shopping with him. She specified that she wanted the proposal to be done “in nature.” When they took a trip to Georgia together, she figured it must be coming soon. Sure enough, after a hike, on the side of a cliff, Keller set up his phone to take a video. He took Mindrum’s hands in his, got down on one knee, and proposed. But when Mindrum looked down at the ring, she saw that her fiancé had chosen a blue diamond rather than the colorless diamond she’d picked out. And she blurted out her disappointment on camera: “It’s so blue!”

Rochelle accepted, then posted the video on Tik-Tok along with a note that she was disappointed with the color. “I was extremely surprised by the blue diamond,” she says now. “The box it was in was dark blue, so at first I thought it was a reflection of the box. Once it was on my finger though, I was able to see that the diamond was in fact blue.”

The Amityville House has some advice for Jak, her already hen-pecked fiancé:

Unbelievable! This guy tries his best to give his girlfriend the proposal she dreams of, and the thanks he gets is to have her complain about the color of the diamond on TikTok, where it went viral. Why? Because she’s an ungrateful ethics dunce, and viewers were horrified.

It gets worse! Since the video was getting so much attention, “People” magazine, which apparently has nothing better to write about, gave Rachel another platform to bitch from, and sure enough, she did. From the article “Woman Surprised When Boyfriend Got Down on One Knee and Proposed. The Type of Ring He Chose Left Her ‘Shocked’ (Exclusive)”:

“I thought the ring was gorgeous, however, I had always dreamed of my engagement ring being a colorless diamond, so it just didn’t fit my vision,” she explains. “It does not help that my birthstone is aquamarine, so I am used to receiving blue-hued stones.” “It turns out he was trying to get me a higher quality diamond and the website was a little confusing, so he thought the higher quality diamonds all threw off a little blue hue, as the pictures online were a very faint blue,” continues Mindrum. “He was scared to drop the ring, so he never took it out of the box. He only looked at in the box. So he was just as shocked as I was with how blue it was!”

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Confronting My Biases, #29: Absurd Fake Eyelashes

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

This is really a “two-fer,” as in “two-for-one.” Here’s the bonus bias:

I visited the gloomy medical office in which I get my monthly blood analysis—I think I’ve mentioned here that the only decoration in the waiting room is a photograph of gravestones. This time I learned that the sad, monosyllabic tech who had manned the office alone for years finally had hired an assistant, and it would be she who would be sticking a needle in that prominent vein in my right arm.

As I went into the blood-letting area, I greeted her, said hello, introduced myself, cheerfully said that I was looking forward to her expertise, and basically tried to be cordial and friendly to a new acquaintance. The youngish African American woman wouldn’t answer, smile, or look me in the face; she just grimly went about her business. She did it well, too: I barely felt the needle, which is more than I can say for her boss’s performance at least 50% of the time.

However, I resent the sullen freeze-out conduct from service providers, clerks and those in similar jobs, and maybe this is my bigoted imagination, but I seem to get this treatment from young black women more often than not. It is the result of poor training, poor manners, and a rotten attitude. My current house guest, who is much younger than I, says this is a Gen Z thing, “pretending to be autistic.” I don’t care what it is: it makes life and society less pleasant, and there is no excuse for it. In the past, there have been instances where I have forced the issue and confronted such jerks, but I sure wasn’t going to try that approach with a woman about to plunge a needle into me.

Now on to the main bias…

The rude tech also was wearing the longest, thickest, fakest looking false eyelashes I have ever seen in my life. I’ve been checking the web about this phenomenon: it’s apparently part of current “black culture,” so no white person is supposed to question it, because to do so is racist. Whatever. We are doing black women no favors by being afraid to point out that this werewolf look is unprofessional, unattractive, makes women of any race look like not just hookers, but cheap hookers, and is a career handicap.

True, a tech in a back office can dress up in a mushroom suit if she wants, but I wouldn’t hire any woman wearing those lashes for a job requiring her to represent me and my company, even if the woman had the charisma of Gladys Knight. My instant reaction to a woman in eyelashes that would make Bambi self-conscious is to assume that she is not too bright, has bad taste, is inclined to blindly follow fads, and therefore untrustworthy. My conclusions about establishments that hire such woman are also uncomplimentary.

Yes, it’s a bias, just like my bias against young black men a while back who wore their pants slightly above their knees. And, as in that ridiculous case, the bias is absolutely justified.

“Swinging Dick” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In a case involving a spa for women that refused ​service to a transgender woman, Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s dissented from ‌the full court’s decision not to review the spa’s claims that a Washington state anti-discrimination law violated its constitutional rights. (You know, Washington state. It was discrimination not to allow a biological male who had decided he was now female to join and all-female spa and undress in a women’s locker room.) VanDyke’s dissent begins, “This is a case about swinging dicks.”

“You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion,” the judge continued. “I hope we all can agree that it is far more ​jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa — some as young as 13 — to be visually assaulted by the real thing.”

Twenty-seven judges denounced VanDyke’s comments as “vulgar barroom talk” that could undermine public trust in the ⁠courts, including my old Georgetown Law Center classmate, Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown, who wrote separately that VanDyke’s “crass” language served only to distract from what she said was a routine case involving discrimination in public accommodations.

“It is certainly not a case involving ‘woke regulators’ and ‘complicit judges’ out ​to harm ‘women and young girls,'” she wrote.”Those assertions describe a case entirely different from the one presented to the panel.”

I hate to disagree with my distinguished classmate, especially since she’s judge and I’m just a…hell, I don’t know what I am. But the case was indeed about “swinging dicks.” Here’s the first paragraph of the decision:

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Nice.

I’d say that qualifies as an unethical tweet, wouldn’t you?

It doesn’t matter what the Democratic Party’s social media account was responding to, does it? (Stephen Miller referred to Democratic Party candidate for Texas governor as “trans.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that..) What does matter is that the party that has (often justifiably) condemned Donald Trump for immoderate social media posts, lack of self-control in his rhetoric and an addiction to ad hominem attacks stooped well below anything Trump has ever tweeted with a “Sopranos-esque” “Shut up you ugly fuck!”

That doesn’t mean the President won’t eventually go that low, but for the nonce, I really don’t care to hear anyone from that party (or that pimps for it, like, you know, the news media) criticizing the President for unpresidential language.

The tweet also tells us, as others have, what the character and attitudes of young Democrats are. If you don’t like mis-installed ethics alarms of current Democrats and progressives, just wait for the ones coming up the ranks.

In related news, Chicago’s WGN reports:

“An alderperson for the City of Waukegan was charged after allegedly mailing in a vote on behalf of her dead mother. Dr. Sylvia Sims Bolton was charged with knowingly falsifying election material, a felony, and disregarding election code, a misdemeanor.The investigation began in March, according to the Lake County clerk’s office.According to election records, a vote by mail ballot for Mary Sims, her mother, was issued and mailed by the Lake County Clerk’s Office on Feb. 5.On Feb. 12, the Lake County Clerk’s Office processed the cancelation of Mary Sim’s voter registration after receiving notification of her death record from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

The ballot was returned on Feb. 26

During a review, election officials identified that the voter’s death record had been processed prior to the return of the ballot. After evaluating the returned envelope and confirming that the ballot had been submitted after the voter’s recorded date of death, the matter was escalated internally and reported to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.

Bolton is accused of voting for her mother after she had passed away. She surrendered Wednesday morning.

‘The safeguards and verification procedures in place within our election system worked exactly as intended,’ said Anthony Vega. ‘Our staff followed established protocols, identified the irregularity, and immediately coordinated with law enforcement to ensure this matter is thoroughly investigated. Protecting the integrity of our elections remains our highest priority.’

The investigation did not uncover any facts linking the above allegations to her city duties as an alderperson.”

Gee, I wonder what party the “alderperson” belongs to? Since the media report doesn’t say, I’m assuming she’s a Democrat. (She is.) And how ironic that the only person who uses the mail-in ballot system to cheat happens to be an elected official!

Okay, I’m being arch. The Democratic party likes cheating and gaslighting. Just as Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary said under oath that the Southern border was secure and the entire party (as well as its media enablers) insisted that President Biden was “sharp as a tack,” it has claimed for years now that there is “no evidence” of widespread voter fraud and the more secure election procedures are “a return to Jim Crow.”

Unethical (and Tasteless) Tweet Of The Month: Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Call me sentimental and patriotic, but on Memorial Day 2026, I believe we have better people to remember than George Floyd, and almost anyone is more appropriate to honor.

We can and should blame President Trump, along with the foolish voters of Georgia, for the fact that someone as unqualified and ethically inert as Sen. Warnock is in Congress today and not haunting a ramshackle church somewhere. You will recall that Trump made the two 2021 special Georgia Senate elections into referendums on the January 6 riots and his claims of a stolen election, and managed to snatch two defeats from the jaws of victory.

Still, using Memorial Day to extol a lifetime street punk who was overdosing on fentanyl while resisting arrest demonstrates a special kind of sick priorities. There is literally nothing, zero, nada, to admire, respect or honor George Floyd for. He was in the right wrong place at the right wrong time, and an audacious cabal of race-hustlers exploited his accidental death by bad cop to extort all manner of weak principled businesses and institutions into white guilt seizures, causing extensive, perhaps irreparable harm to the nation, society, race relations, the justice system and more. Poor dumb, useless George wasn’t at fault for any of this, but Senator Warnock and ethics villains like him were.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Thomas Massie (R.-KY)

/ Jack Marshall / 56 Comments

I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

—Rep Thomas Massie, (R-Ky) after losing his primary against a Trump-endorsed candidate.

I would have more respect for Massie if he just came right out and called his opponent a “Jew-lover.”

Nothing could more emphatically validate President Trump’s decision to oppose Massie, who has cemented undying infamy at Ethics Alarms by insulting a victorious opponent in his concession speech. Such lack of civility, respect and decorum only exacerbates the decline of civic comity in Washington, and there is no excuse for it. Being a poor loser shows poor character, and an inability to meet one of the key markers of virtue in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”: “Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”

Naturally the Washington Post lionizes Massie in defeat, saying his lost primary was because of his “consistent unwillingness to go along to get along,” and that “Massie’s independence earned the enmity of President Donald Trump, who deployed his political machine to crush Massie and recruited primary winner Ed Gallrein. Yet the quixotic congressman, for better or worse, always seemed more driven by ideas than personalities.”

Yeah. One of those keen “ideas” was anti-Semitism. Burying the lede, the Post’s long sigh regarding Massie’s loss culminates in this admission:

“He was the only House Republican to vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism. Reasonable people might oppose U.S. aid to Israel, but Massie too often did so with over-the-top, even conspiratorial, rhetoric.”

Well nobody’s perfect.

Post Script: You want unethical “advocacy journalism”? Read the MSNow spin on Massie’s loss. Trump’s “revenge,” “a huge cost,” the whole event is presented as a platform for more Trump-bashing. No mention of Massie’s anti-Semitism, which all by itself justifies, indeed mandates, his loss. But then the MSNow gang is angry about all those dog-rapes…

The Low Chair Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Kudos to Ann Althouse: she flagged the use of the old chair dominance trick by Xi to make sure he appeared higher in his chair than President Trump.

Ann’s sketchy popular culture literacy was also exposed again: most normally-acculturated Americans would immediately think of the famous scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey (James Stewart) bargains with town bully Mr. Potter in a chair that reduces him to the stature of a child. Ann’s mind went instead to the scene in “The Great Dictator,” a far less well-known Chaplin film, where satirical versions of Mussolini and Hitler (Chaplin) keep raising their chairs’ heights during a meeting. Ann’s choice makes the point better, but she often posts about not having watched a lot of old movies, and it shows. (I have watched too many old movies, and it also shows.)

But kudos to Ann again for tracking down a December 2, 1987 David Letterman show when a young Donald Trump called out Letterman for having his guest chairs lower than the host’s, complaining, “How come this seat is at such a low level? You know, I’m looking at him. He’s got this stage rigged, folks…. That seat is a good six inches higher than my seat.”

Notes:

  • In law school I took a negotiation course from Adrian Fisher, then the Dean of Georgetown Law Center and known as a key U.S. negotiator in both SALT Treaties. Fisher had an exhaustive knowledge of negotiation mind games, and mentioned the chair trick as such a well-known and devious tactic that attempting it would be regarded as an insult by professional diplomats.
  • Trump had the good sense not to mention his annoyance with the chair trick in China. This indicates to me that he is capable of self-restraint when he chooses to exercise it, which is, obviously, not nearly enough.
  • Read (at Ann’s link above) the exchange between Letterman and Trump from 40 years ago. I detect no difference in Trump’s discourse from what we are used to today. One of the more irritating Big Lies the Axis (including my Trump Deranged Facebook friends) keeps pushing is that Trump’s rhetoric indicates cognitive decline (so he should be removed via the 25th Amendment.) He’s always talked this way.
  • Letterman has also always been an asshole. And a liar. When Trump points out that Letterman’s chair is “a good six inches” higher than Trump’s chair, Letterman says “And so am I” suggesting that it’s an illusion because he’s taller than Trump. Letterman is (or was) 6’2″ and Trump is (or was) an inch taller.
  • I blame Letterman for late night TV turning into the all-partisan-propaganda-all-the-time blight on society epitomized by Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. He’s an Ethics Villain.
  • Trump proved in that exchange that he, like Fisher, knew the negotiation game well.
  • Note also in the transcript how a Trump was talking about the same international trade grievances in 1987 that he has tried to address in his second term.
  • Letterman meanwhile, like any good class-obsessed left-winger, keeps trying to bring the discussion around to Trump’s wealth because, after all, as AOC tells us, billionaires are the cause of most of America’s problems.

Letterman’s wealth is estimated to be only 400 million.

__________

Pointer: Ann Althouse

Ethics Dunce and Incompetent Elected Official: Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) missed the last 43 House votes and hadn’t been seen for a month, several news reports noted yesterday. Moreover, her office had been mum on the matter. The eight-term incumbent is 83 years old, and her last recorded House vote was on April 17. House reporter Jaime Dupree noted on BlueSky Wednesday that she “missed all 10 votes on Wednesday in the House,” leading to the questions being raised yesterday. “80% of life is just showing up,” Woody Allen supposedly said. That’s a low bar, and Wilson still hasn’t cleared it.

Last night, Wilson surfaced at last and explained that she is recovering from eye surgery. “Following left eye surgery, my priority has been ensuring a full and responsible recovery,” Wilson said. “Although I am currently unable to fly under my doctors’ orders, my work has not stopped for a single day. While recovering in the district, I have continued carrying out my official duties, meeting with leaders, local organizations, city and county officials, and constituents.”

Nope, not good enough, not hardly. Normal people can’t just disappear from work for a month without adverse consequences, and elected officials have a duty to their constituents to be on the job or to inform the public and the news media why they aren’t. Wilson’s X timeline showed no change since she disappeared four weeks ago, and her staff was apparently under instructions to keep everyone in the dark about her whereabouts, in one case posting a photo of her represented as recent that was really a year old. That’s unacceptable.

Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense went AWOL too, though only for ten days, in 2024. He should have been fired, but Joe didn’t fire anybody, no matter how useless, incompetent or unqualified he or she might be. Wilson should be fired by her district’s voters in November, but of course she won’t be.

If you cant trust your Congresswoman to show up to vote or let you know why she isn’t, then you can’t trust your Congresswoman, period. Wilson’s party is claiming that Jim Crow is back and blacks are being “disenfranchised” because the Supreme Court won’t allow “good discrimination” to guarantee majority black districts. Wilson represents one of those districts, and not showing up in Congress to vote really does “disenfranchise ” her constituents.

Of course, Wilson now assures us that she was “carrying out [her] official duties,” except for the only one that is absolutely required. Why would anyone believe her?

Ethics Dunces: The San Francisco Giants

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Unbelievable.

But then, it is San Francisco, after all.

For some reason, the San Francisco Giants first year manager, Tony Vitello, couldn’t figure out that his outfielders’ post-victory celebratory ritual was inappropriate in a public venue, on TV, while playing America’s Pastime in front of family audiences.

The Commissioner’s office finally told them to cut it out. Why it took until May, I have no idea.

I would have fined the manager, the players and the team. A lot.

Morons.

Justice Alito Explains That Justice Jackson Is An Idiot. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In one SCOTUS case after another, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a demented President’s irresponsible DEI selection for our highest court, has demonstrated an absence of judicial integrity, or, in the alternative, intellectual ability. Her questions in oral argument have been incoherent, and her legal reasoning is regularly polluted by obvious partisan bias. She is, in short, an embarrassment to the Court, the nation, the judiciary, the law, her race, her gender, and her party. Finally, following an extreme example of Jackson’s incompetence, Justice Samuel Alito came as close to calling her an idiot as a Supreme Court Justice can within the limits of professional civility.

It’s about time.

The Supreme Court last night granted a request to lock in its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, discussed on EA here and here, where the Court struck down a congressional gerrymander as racially discriminatory in breach of federal law. The decision allows Louisiana to draw a new map in time for the 2026 mid-term elections. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter in the 8-1 decision to eschew the delay. Jackson’s fatuously argued that the Court’s ruling “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.”

Yes, chaos is often the result when a state is trying to do something unconstitutional and is blocked.

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