I know it’s impossible now, and probably always, but the healthy, ethical move would be to eliminate “Black History Month.” Segregating history is no better than segregating any other aspect of American society and culture. I’m sure there are other ethnic and racial “months” scattered around the calendar—did you know February is also Canned Food Month? National Bird Feeding Month? National Hot Breakfast Month?—but African-Americans are the only group that get this kind of special attention, as if that 15% of the population doesn’t already dominate news and social policy debate year round. Black history is American history. The celebration is divisive and fractures a nation that aspires to peaceful inclusion and equality.

1. Theory: Reasonable election security causes trouble for really incompetent and stupid people, so it’s best not to have any. The Vet Voice Foundation, Washington Bus, and El Centro de la Raza  have filed a lawsuit challenging Washington state’s signature verification requirement on ballots. The three leftist groups  are represented by the Perkins Coie firm, counsel to the Democratic National Committee.  Signature verification is mandated by Washington law, and is the only mechanism that can ensure that the ballot submitted was completed by the registered voter. The lawsuits argue that the process is arbitrary, prone to errors, and disenfranchises young voters and minority groups. One plaintiff, Daisha Britt,feels disenfranchised because she has trouble signing her name as a “Black, Native American, and White” citizen who “has a self-described ‘complicated signature.’” The fact that only one party actively opposes ballot and voting integrity is one of many reasons the suspicions regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election cannot be called “unfounded.” There is no reason to trust these people, and many reasons not to. Continue reading →

So, as the saying goes, it’s come to this.

What’s “this”? “This” is a metastasizing cultural mandate that it is part of  systemic racism for a white citizen in the United States to seek any position, place of honor, influence, prestige or prominence, reward, benefit or achievement that a “BIPOC” might have attained without the competition. Naturally Hollywood in one of the agar nutrients growing this toxic and unethical contagion.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced  that it will be “conducting a review” of this season’s Oscar nomination campaigns by studios and artists. Everyone knows, however, that the real impetus for the investigation is the grassroots campaign  that nabbed a best actress Oscar nomination for Andrea Riseborough’s performance in the independent film “To Leslie.”  Riseborough is, to the public at least, an obscure 41-year-old British actress whose film was heard of by few, seen by fewer, cost little to make and grossed nothing by Hollywood standards. Critics, however, were lavish in their praise for her performance, and, missing the advantage of big studio promotional marketing aimed at Oscar voters, she and the film’s supporters created buzz the old-fashioned way, through networking and word of mouth.

The film’s director, Michael Morris and his wife, the actress Mary McCormack, appealed to notable friends in the actors’ section of the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences, urging them to see the film,  post about Riseborough’s performance on social media, and to host in-person or Zoomed interviews with the actress. Among the glitterati who promoted Riseborough on social media or through events hyping the film were Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, Zooey Deschanel, Mira Sorvino, Constance Zimmer, Rosie O’Donnell, Alan Cumming , Edward Norton, Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Minnie Driver, Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Adams, Frances Fisher and Kate Winslet, who said of Riseborough’s To Leslie performance at the event she hosted, “I think this is the greatest female performance onscreen I have ever seen in my life!”

It worked. But—oh-oh!—none of Riseborough’s advocates were black, and you know what THAT means. Continue reading →

After Facebook announced that it was reinstating Donald Trump’s Facebook privileges this week (following over two years of blocking him, beginning while he was still President of the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union suddenly decided that a major source of public discourse and opinion in this alleged democracy was right to let a major political leader and former POTUS have the same privileges as anyone else, like, say, Democrats and progressives.

“This is the right call. Like it or not, President Trump is one of the country’s leading political figures and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech,” the ACLU tweeted. In another statement, ACLU’s executive director Anthony Romero said,

“Indeed, some of Trump’s most offensive social media posts ended up being critical evidence in lawsuits filed against him and his administration. And we should know—we filed over 400 legal actions against him. While the government cannot force platforms to carry certain speech, that doesn’t mean the largest platforms should engage in political censorship. The biggest social media companies are central actors when it comes to our collective ability to speak—and hear the speech of others—online. They should err on the side of allowing a wide range of political speech, even when it offends.”

Observations: Continue reading →

• At 11:38 a.m. EST on this date in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It’s destruction soon after marked one of the most vivid and provocative ethics scandals in American history. The tragedy—in many ways—has been discussed extensively on Ethics Alarms, and surely will be again. You can review the posts and comments here. But I’m not writing any more about the Challenger today. I’m in a bad enough mood already.
• Contributing to my mood was a discussion I had yesterday with an apparently well-educated young lawyer. We were talking about the issue of wilful blindness or contrived ignorance, a big ethics problem in the law, where lawyers often avoid evidence of facts that would obligate them to take action that would have adverse financial or professional consequences. When I mentioned Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany during most of World War II who infamously argued that he had no idea that the Holocaust was underway despite his place in the center of Nazi leadership, the lawyer asked, “Who’s Albert Speer?”
• Earlier in the week, during her brief hospital stay, equally disturbing questions were received by my wife during discussions with nurses: “Who’s Lucille Ball?” and “What’s “Gone With The Wind”?

1. Tyrell Nichols. The police-instigated death of young Tyrell Nichols didn’t set of a string of nation-wide riots as was widely predicted last night, even though what the bodycam vidos showed was, as one police training and use-of-force expert opined after watching the video, “worse than Rodney King.” It was worse than what happened to George Floyd, too. What kept this from becoming a justification for violence in BLM World is that the brutal cops, all of them, were black. Race, not police misconduct, is what drove both the King riots and the Floyd riots, though in neither of those earlier incidents did the facts implicate race as a motive. A friend of mine, a lawyer, said yesterday that he is convinced that the constant stress of dealing with escalating crime combined with the relentless hostility that has been directed at police as they try to do a difficult and dangerous job has caused many officers to exits in a constant state of rage. In addition to that problem, the pool of individuals with the right character, skills and stability to be police officers has been shrinking, meaning that less trustworthy people are increasingly recruited to perform that difficult and dangerous job. Policing is in a death cycle. Continue reading →

 Minnechaug Regional High School near Springfield, Massachusetts, installed a state of the art  lighting system when it was built over a decade ago. The system was supposed to save money and energy. But on August 24, 2021, the software that ran the system broke down. Minnechaug is the only high school in its district and serves 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden. The environmentally-conscious school board insisted on a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light. It would automatically adjusting the lighting, saving electricity, money, and Boston from being under water.

But in August 2021, something went wrong, and the lighting system went into default. The default setting is “lights on.” The school tried to contact  Reflex Lighting only to discover that the company had been sold and resold several times since the high school was built. The current management of Reflex Lighting had a hard time locating anyone familiar with the high school’s lighting system. Many of the parts necessary for repairs had to be sent from China.

The consequence has been that the lights at the school have been blazing day and night to this day. That’s 18 months.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”

Technology is far more complicated and subject to unexpected chaotic results than society’s leaders, managers and policy makers understand. This wasn’t an escaped T-Rex or SkyNet taking over the world, but the problem is the same: lazy assumptions about technology and insufficient attention to the danger of allowing cool tech to exceed the ability of human beings to operate it competently.

My wife just completed a procedure for a blacked carotid artery, obviously a stroke risk. She had the same procedure two years ago on the other side of her neck. In the discussions with the surgeon, he emphasized that this was a serious condition and had been put off too long: the artery was 80-90% blocked.

“You have a choice,” he said. “I can take care of this side just like last time, and the problem will be gone.”

“Or you can take part in an NIH study that will use experimental drugs and treatment over the next five years. It’s your choice.”

I had to interject. “What do you recommend?” I asked. “It’s up to you,” he replied. I said, “You just said this is a serious problem that poses the risk of a debilitating stroke. You said that you could fix the problem next week, and it would be gone. Why would my wife choose to endure the condition for five years?”

“For the good of humanity,” he answered. Continue reading →