Workplace

The Naked Mayor Principle ( or “What an Idiot!”)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Tom Ross, the “non-partisan” mayor of Minot, North Dakota, has resigned. Guess why. He accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to City Attorney Stefanie Stalheim. For some reason, this moron waited for a city investigation to be completed before doing what he should have done the moment it happened, which was back in January. The investigation found that the mayor and Stalheim had concluded a town business related phone call about a Minot police officer who had committed suicide and the mayor sent her the “Ew!” video shortly thereafter.

Ross insisted he sent the video to the wrong address and had intended to send it to his girlfriend. So what? The Naked Mayor Principle, though never explicitly stated here because no previous mayor has been this stupid (or stupid in this particular way), is a natural corollary to the Naked Teacher Principle, which states that a secondary school teacher or administrator who allows pictures of himself or herself showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses to be seem online cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result. A high elected official who sends such a photo or video to an employee is in an ethically similar position. Bye!

The frisky mayor handed over his resignation letter prior to a Minot City Council special meeting called to deal with the scandal. The city investigator found that due “to Ross’s position as one of increased visibility, responsibility, and trust, and due to his decision to use a personal cell phone to conduct city business, that the fact that he would use that device to record and send videos of this nature is in and of itself reckless enough that he knew the risk he was taking by engaging in such behavior.” Yah think? The investigator also concluded that the incident met the city’s standard for workplace harassment, whether or not it was accidental. I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t matter. The town’s mayor takes naked photos of himself and sends it to people. Ick. Pooie. Elected officials shouldn’t be behaving like teenagers, even competently. He’s an idiot. Idiots shouldn’t be mayors.

Case closed.

An Unethical Cascade…Thanks, Metropolis!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The photo above carries the caption: “Metropolis parking utilizing AI to create drive in drive out parking without the need for a ticket and validation. This lot is at 236 S. Los Angeles in Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles.” Here’s my caption: “Metropolis parking can bite me.”

And did, come to think of it.

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Addendum to “An Ethics Can of Worms: The Mental Health of Airline Pilots”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This has been happening to me a lot lately: I finish a post under the pressure of my large and enthusiastic dog making it painfully obvious that he wants a walk and won’t leave me in peace before he gets one, rush to get it up while he’s pawing at my arm, and then, on the walk, think of something I should have included in the post.

In this case, I should have mentioned the comparison with the military. We don’t want those suffering from mental and emotional illnesses holding guns and defending the country any more than we want them flying planes, but the standards are much, much lower. A “Section 8” draft deferment required far more serious symptoms than chronic depression.

Four famous movies had the issue of mentally ill soldiers at their centers: “Dr. Strangelove…,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “M*A*S*H,” and “Catch 22.” (I never could figure out what was the problem with Trini Lopez in “The Dirty Dozen” except for his obsession with songs about vegetation.) My father was somewhat bitter about the low standards WWII draftees were subject to, I assume because his foot was almost blown off because of a member of Dad’s platoon who had an IQ in the sixties.

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Observations on a Jobs Graph

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That provocative graph above is brought to you by Apollo Global Management.

It purports to reveal what proportion of new jobs added each year since 2016 were in the private and public sectors. I have no way of telling whether the numbers are accurate, whether the manner of presenting them is fair, and whether Apollo has an agenda in presenting them this way. I guess that’s the first ethics observation. It is now impossible to trust news accounts, statistics, analysis, surveys, studies and data, no matter where it comes from. We can add this to the fact that photographs, films, recordings and videos are also untrustworthy.

But here are some more observations on the off chance that the numbers are correct and can be trusted:

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Marketing Ethics: “That’s Some Bad Hat, MLB!”*

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

We shall see if the ethical value of accountability is completely dead in our culture by how many people are fired by Major League Baseball in the aftermath of the Great Baseball Cap Disaster of 2025. It should be a lot.

Baseball finally figured out that the clubs could make a lot of money by constantly adding new uniforms and baseball cap options to each team. (I blame former Commissioner of Baseball Peter Ueberroth, whose entire function during his tenure was to modernize the sport’s merchandising and public relations.) I thought this hustle had reached its apotheosis with the dreadful “City Connect” uniforms that were inflicted on the teams a few years ago, creating inexplicable eyesores like this for the RED Sox…

but the sport’s greed and lack of taste knows no bounds. Fans and collectors actually bought those jerseys and caps (to be fair, some of the redesigned uniforms aren’t quite that bad), along with the “vintage” uniforms and caps, the Mother’s Day uniforms and caps, the stupid “nickname” jerseys, the boring All-Star team jerseys and caps, “turn-back-the clock” uniforms….As P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So someone got the bright idea to foist these ugly team caps off on the public, since obviously baseball fans will buy anything:

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About the “Appearance of Impropriety,” the Limits of “Deny, Deny, Deny,” and the Foolishness of Defying the Lessons of Michael Clayton

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Yes, ProPublica is generally a one-way-only ethics watchdog, but that way is still worth watching.

It is reporting that Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), had a romantic relationship with a legislative affairs official for the Navy. According to two sources with knowledge of an inspector general’s nvestigation, this was not the GOP combat veteran’s only inappropriate relationship with military personnel. Earlier this year, the Air Force revealed that Maj. Gen. Christopher Finerty, who oversaw its lobbying before Congress, had inappropriate romantic relationships with five women, including three who worked on Capitol Hill. One of those, though the names in the report were redacted, was allegedly Ernst. Because the Senator is an influential voice in Congress regarding the Pentagon and she sits on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee which has a crucial role in setting its annual budget, these are troubling accounts.

ProPublica says that neither Ernst nor the two military officers were married at the time. Current Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates, although why I don’t know. Nonetheless, government employees and officials, like judges, are supposed to avoid appearances of impropriety.” “Ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest,” ProPublica tells us. “A former legislative affairs official for the military” tells ProPublica that “From an ethics standpoint, [these relationships] are severely problematic.”

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Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown Law Center Dean William Treanor

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

[Psst! It’s Georgetown University Law Center, not “school.” The Hill and other lazy publications keep calling it the law school, which was what the institution’s name was before it moved from the Georgetown campus (in Georgetown, a picturesque section of D.C.) to Capitol Hill near all the courts, including the Supreme Court. If you saw the place, you would know that “center” is an appropriate description. The name was the inspiration of then Dean Paul Dean, visionary, a respected lawyer and talented fund-raiser. He was also a good friend of mine as well as a cherished mentor]

William Trainor has been criticized on Ethics Alarms before notably during this fiasco, when he punished an incoming faculty member, Illya Shapiro, for daring to question Joe Biden’s wisdom of narrowing his choice of Supreme Court nominees to fill a vacancy to women of color, the same criteria that worked out so, so well with Kamala Harris. Following the lead of his radically indoctrinated students (it’s supposed to be the other way around), the GULC dean suspended Shapiro pending…well, something, and then after letting him twist slowly in the wind for months, finally let him back into the fold whereupon Shapiro quite properly told him to take his job and shove it, as I would have under like circumstances.

There were other instances when Trainer allowed his institution to be more woke than responsible; he is largely the reason my Law Center diploma is turned face to the wall in my ProEthics office. Here is an episode that didn’t directly involve the Dean but that occurred on his watch.

Now comes another skirmish. Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin sent a letter to GULC last month asking if the Law Center had eliminated its commitment to DEI. “At this time, you should know that no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered,” Martin wrote.

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Rachel Maddow’s Self-Indicting Message on MSNBC’s Firing Joy Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As EA noted in last night’s post, MSNBC finally fired Joy Reid and ended her nightly racist, unhinged rants on the network. For this it deserves no special credit or plaudits, for Reid was objectively terrible, getting worse as her Trump Derangement raged, and should have been fired years ago….for this head-exploding incident, for example.

On yesterday’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Maddow told us all we should need to know…. about Maddow…with this outburst:

“Joy Reid’s show “The ReidOut” ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different types of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But in all the jobs that I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think. I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”

All righty then! There we have it: a full-throated endorsement of racial quotas, discrimination in hiring and career advancement, and double standards. For a special bonus, Maddow endorsed the practices and conduct of an unethical and untrustworthy former colleague, which means that Maddow is unfit to appear on any respectable news organization’s broadcasts.

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The YouGov. Poll: Maybe Americans Are Just Too Stupid and Unethical For Democracy to Survive After All…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

All research indicates that the majority of Americans, not having the IQ’s of Pet Rocks, recognize that our bloated government is corrupt, inept and wasteful. Pew Research polling concluded that 56% of Americans felt that way last year. “Nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials, stated another survey. In January, A.P.-NORC researchers found that 70% of Americans believe corruption in the federal government is a serious problem.

Despite these beliefs, only 39 % of Americans polled gave DOGE a “favorable” rating in the latest The Economist/YouGov poll, with”unfavorable” at 36%, and the human slugs who chose “don’t know” came in at a whopping 25%. Another poll this month found only 49% approving DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts.

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Musk’s Email

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

There are many others, but two tells the Trump Deranged on my Facebook feed are displaying symptomatic of their malady are the ridiculous obsession with the name change to “Gulf of America,” and most recently, Elon Musk’s email to the Federal workforce.

Yesterday Musk tweeted out, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” And as night follows day, this email from Allan Smith was delivered as promised:

“Subject: What did you do last week?” “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”

Echoing my bizarre Facebook friends, Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, sent out a ludicrous statement that read: “It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life. Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people.”

This should go into the “Methinks he doth protest too much!” Hall of Fame. As has become all-too familiar, the lazy resorting to ad hominem insults, the certifiably ignorant emphasis on an agent of the President being “unelected,” and the juvenile working class hero smear of a man who has strengthened and benefited his country and its citizens by his industry, boldness and public mindedness are all throbbing evidence of desperation. But throwing a fit because workers are asked to list five things they accomplished on the job in a week?

I doubt that I have ever had a week in my spectacularly varied, eccentric and often failed career when I couldn’t do that. Today is a Sunday. I can list three substantive work-related accomplishments on this single day, and I feel like I didn’t meet my self-identified goals.

If there is a principled, reasonable, logical reason to find that email threatening, demeaning or unfair, I’d love to know what it is.