Of Signs, Flags and Art…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Two controversies raise issues of ethical line-drawing in state and local laws.

1. Sign or Art? Leavitt’s Country Bakery in Conway, a community of more than 10,000 people in New Hampshire, erected a colorful mural over the store in 2022. It was the creation of local high school art students showing sunbeams shining down on a mountain range made of sprinkle-covered chocolate and strawberry doughnuts, a blueberry muffin, a cinnamon roll and other pastries. The muralwas popular with everyone but the local zoning board, which ruled that the painting was not art but advertising. This meant it was a sign, and at about 90 square feet, four times bigger than the local sign ordinance allows. Lawyers for Conway insist that “restricting the size of signs serves the significant government interest of preserving the town’s aesthetics, promoting safety, and ensuring equal enforcement.” The store’s owner sued the town in federal court in 2023, saying his freedom of speech rights were being violated. He’s seeking a symbolic single dollar in damages.

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Friday Open Forum (and a Couple of Other Things)

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Thing I: The most obvious ethics issue going on is, still, the post 2024 election Axis freakout. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. When Ronald Reagan, whom the Democratic establishment in Washington regarded as a Neanderthal, washed-up actor whose most memorable film had him co-starring with a chimp (“Bedtime for Bonzo”), the reaction of liberals and Democrats wasn’t nearly this hysterical…or demeaning to them. The news media has been equally bonkers. The faces of network news anchors and hosts when a Trump administration supporter is talking are uniformly mask of pure hatred: I started noticing this yesterday. It reminded me of Katie Couric when she interviewed Ross Perot in the “Today Show” with an expression she reserved for people like David Duke…or Satan. Facial expressions and body language that tell an audience that an interviewer detests her interview subject is unprofessional, but it has now become the norm.

The same faces, restrained (and sometimes unrestrained fury) have been on display as the Democratic Senators question virtually all of Trump’s nominees. It says something that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who was derided by the Right for running for the Senate after suffering actual brain damage from a stroke,has emerged as the sole voice of reason in his party. “There isn’t a constitutional crisis, and all of these things ― it’s just a lot of noise,” Fetterman said this week. “That’s why I’m only gonna swing on the strikes. I’m still wishing him the best. I’m effectively rooting for [Elon Musk] and all the nominees because they’re working for America.” This should be the position of all Democrats and progressives, especially since, unlike 2017, the majority of American feel the same way, and it is the way Americans have usually regarded newly elected POTUSes and their emerging administrations.

The fury being directed at Elon Musk, a brilliant man who is giving his time to his nation as it tries to solve the problems of government bloat, waste, corruption and abuse that everyone at least claims they want to solve is an embarrassment for the Democrats and their Axis allies. Infamous dim-bulb Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson (he’s the one who worried that Guam would flip over because too much U.S. military material was on the island) raged yesterday, “What does that mean when an unelected billionaire can waltz into our agencies and slash and burn the whole thing to the ground like a Taliban terrorist, This level of corruption is shocking. President Trump and the Republicans in Congress, all of whom have abrogated their legislative power to the King, have handed the keys to the nation’s treasury to unelected co-president Elon Musk. Their actions are taking what we know as corruption to a whole new level. This is Banana Republic style corruption at its ugliest.” I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that this idiot doesn’t know how the Executive Branch works, but the frightening thing is that so many lawyers are behaving similarly based on their social media rants. Is it possible that they are really this stupid.

Thing 2: The guest post submissions I solicited a week ago are finally coming in: another will go up today. I thank you all: what I have seen so far is of excellent quality. This effort to try to keep up with an unprecedented wave of ethics stories while freeing me from a permanent government and politics beat is important; I also want to emphasize that it does not eliminate the Comment of the Day feature here. (I think I have at least one of those languishing).

I’m sorry: that was a longer intro than I anticipated.

The stage is yours.

“The Ethicist” Finds a Rationalization! Welcome #64 A: “It Didn’t Mean Anything”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rationalization #64 A, The Cheater’s Defense or “It Didn’t Mean Anything” is a rather narrowly applicable addition to the list: it arises when a half of a supposedly committed couple has sexual relations with a third party. I have entered it as a sub-rationalization to the infamous Yoo’s Rationalization (“It isn’t what it is”) because betraying a spouse, partner or lover does mean something, probably many things.

The Ethicist received a question from, as always, “Name Withheld,” whose partner had cheated on her and used that phrase, “It didn’t mean anything.” She asks, years after the event, “I still don’t understand why cheaters use the phrase ‘‘(She/he) didn’t mean anything to me.’ How does one even respond to a statement like that?”

Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his usual measured fashion, says that the line “is how cheaters try to reassure their partners that their infidelity wasn’t going to lead to a serious relationship and needn’t spell the end of their existing one; that a fling was ‘just sex.’’’ But that still doesn’t translate to “It didn’t mean anything.” Having sex out of one’s committed relationship probably means, among other things,

  • The cheater isn’t as committed as he or she had led the betrayed partner to believe.
  • The cheater cannot be trusted.
  • The cheater has a drinking or substance abuse problem.
  • The cheater has some apparent needs that the supposed love of his or her life isn’t supplying
  • The cheater lacks some degree of impulse control.
  • The cheater is an easy mark for an aggressive come-on from an attractive member of the opposite sex (in other words, the cheater is a typical heterosexual male.)

Of course it meant something. The statement, like many rationalizations, is a lie. “The Ethicist” concentrates on what the use of the rationalization means: that the cheater, in addition to cheating, is manipulative jerk. “Cheaters demean the people they cheated with by dismissing them as meaningless, demean their partner by implying their pain is unjustified and demean their relationship by saying that they betrayed their beloved’s trust for a liaison they insist was insignificant,” he concludes.

Yeah, that too.

Impoundment and Other Confounding Obstacles To Government Fiscal Responsibility

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Guest Post

By Chris Marschner

Some of our elected leaders would like people to believe that the 2+ million workers are doing yeoman’s work keeping our nation secure and running like a well-oiled machine.  They will suggest to you that only federal workers have access to sensitive data like your personal information.  That is misrepresenting who can get access to your data.

The government uses numerous private contractors to perform all types of specialized services.  Essential IT work such as systems engineering, data security, software development and other user support functions are handled by an array of prime contractors and their sub-contractors.  To do this work, the contractor must be able to access private data.   While some aspects do not require being able to sort through individual records others do.  Software engineers must have the ability to parse records to create templates and test and debug systems.  

Below are a few of these contractors whose employees are not federal employees.   The point I am making is not that these organizations should not be in a position to access private records. The point is that this access happens every day in agencies managed by the Executive branch, whichoversees the agencies that issue contracts to carry out mission-critical services.   

To hear Congress bemoan the fact that the DOGE team is somehow unlawful or illegitimate because they are not federal employees is laughable, and it is also misinformation.  The person responsible for ensuring that the agencies are carrying out the policies laid out by the President through his Cabinet Secretaries is ultimately the President.  As Harry Truman said, “The Buck Stops Here,” “here” being The White House.  

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Pope Francis [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Pope has issued a letter (It’s in larger type at the link than what you’ll see below) to the “Bishops of the United States of America.”

Ethics verdicts: Abuse of position, abuse of authority, grandstanding, hypocrisy, breach of responsibility and intellectual dishonesty.

Nice job, Your Holiness.

Because you are likely to be semi-conscious or have your brains splattered on the ceiling from serial head-explosions after reading this thing, I’ll make my other ethics observations now:

1. I’ll pay attention to the Pope’s dictates about how my country handles illegal immigration when the Vatican lets anyone who feels like it move into Vatican City because it will give them “a better life.” Instead of sending the “worst of the worst” to Guantanamo, let’s send them right to the Pope. Based on this screed, I’m sure he’ll welcome them with open arms in the spirit of recognizing the inherent human rights of “the most fragile and marginalized.”

2. Anyone who uses the migration practices that existed in the Middle East over 2,000 years ago as an analogy to 21st century policy issues in the United States of America is either a con artist, a liar or an idiot. The same goes for comparing Jesus to fentanyl smugglers. Fans of the Pope can take their pick. It’s an indefensible, insulting, reductive argument. Nobody should make such comparisons who are over the age of six; for a major world figure revered by millions to stoop to it is signature significance for demagoguery.

3. The Pope admonishes Americans not to equate illegal conduct with criminal conduct. Funny, I just looked up “criminal conduct” and the definitions all boil down to “Criminal conduct is an unlawful act that breaks the law.” Call me a nit-picker, but it sure seems that  breaking our laws to come into and stay in the U.S. is the equivalent of a criminal act.

Maybe it’s a language thing. Does “not criminal” in Italian mean “lawbreaking that the Pope regards as excusable if one is ‘poor and marginalized’? Continue reading →

Why Does Ann Althouse Think Axis Media Headlines Like This Are Funny?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yesterday, the blogging Madison, Wisconsin, retired law professor began a post titled with this from Mediaite, “Elon Musk Gives Rambling Explanation of DOGE’s Work In Oval Office Address” by by stating, “I’m laughing at that Mediaite headline.” Then she goes on one of her trademarked rants about a tangential detail in a serious topic, the fact that the website used the word “rambled.”

It was the first thing I read this morning, and, to use vernacular that Anderson Cooper might use, it pissed me off. This is typical Althouse, but I have about reached the metaphorical end of my rope with her elite, arrogant, “Oh, the things you lesser proles concern yourself with!” approach to vital national controversies that normal Americans—you know, people who don’t have generous pensions and an estimated net worth of around $5 million dollars—have good reason to be very concerned about. She just sits on her “fiercely” non-partisan and laughs from her scholarly “What fools these mortal be!” perch.

I watched Musk’s unusual Oval Office monologue while he let his kid climb all over him. By any legitimate standard, his performance, while eccentric, was impressive, and compared to the bottom-of-the-barrel rhetorical standards of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and, yes, Donald Trump, it was dazzling. The man is obviously intelligent and focused, and, unless you are blinded by ideologically inspired hate, likeable. Most people don’t have or take the time to watch things like Musk’s off-the-cuff explanation of what DOGE is doing, so they rely on their supposedly astute and engaged friends and, because it is supposedly why they exist, news sources like Mediaite.

The fact that most of these sources are furiously spinning and manipulating their accounts to turn public opinion against Trump and Musk isn’t funny. It’s a ongoing crisis that needs a unified, measured, forceful and unified response by the people who have the intellect to understand what’s wrong with an unethical and untrustworthy journalism culture and the time and resources to help everyone else understand it too.

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Stay Classy, Anderson Cooper!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ah, yes, journalistic professionalism! Those were the days! Walter Cronkite may have been a Democratic party mouthpiece when he wasn’t slamming the Vietnam war, but he never called Spiro Agnew a “dick,” at least in public. Neither did Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith or Barbara Walters. But that cute Anderson Cooper on CNN, he’s the face of broadcast journalism today and one of the cool kids, so he can talk like this while he was arguing about DOGE attacks on FEMA on a news show that airs coast-to-coast (this happens right before the two minute mark in the video above)…

COOPER: Some of the details, like millions for hotels, it’s actually not…

CHRIS SUNUNU: You mean the FEMA money for migrants? That’s OK now?

COOPER: I’m not saying it’s OK, don’t put words in my mouth. Don’t be a dick!

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Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I hate to throw an ethics flag on Musk while he’s doing such essential work and being attacked for it. Still, this kind of stuff doesn’t help. At all.

Yeah, I know, I know. Musk is one the autistic spectrum and in some respects is a bout 10 years old, and like Donald Trump, he enjoys trolling and doesn’t care who he alienates. Conservative pundits and wags were crowing about CNN’s Dana Bash saying solemnly on the air, “”Now the ‘Disruptor in Chief, Elon Musk, who apparently has adopted the alias, at least he changed his social media handle, to ‘Harry Bōlz’, tweeted this morning, ‘Democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup. An activist judge is not a real judge.”

Indeed this thrust us into Poe’s Law hell, where it is impossible to distinguish reality from satire. Musk was mocking the breathless doxxing of one of his fuzzy-cheeked geeks as “Big Balls” by the Axis media, and I’m sure he got a good laugh out of it; I’m sure Trump did too. Nonetheless, what he is doing with DOGE is too important to be vulnerable to the accusation that the man in charge is just fooling around, having fun, and not taking seriously decisions that effect the lives and livelihood of so many people.

It is easy to make the news media look foolish because they are foolish. Still, Elon Musk (and the President, but he’s beyond reforming) can’t afford to go after this low-hanging fruit and behave like Bart Simpson tricking Moe into calling out in his bar, “I.P. Freely ! I.P. Freely on the phone here! ” He must be seen as the serious analyst that he is if the DOGE effort is to have any chance of succeeding.

“The Meat Axe”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had some amusing bloody meat-axe graphics all ready to go for this post, but it is really about flat learning curves: the Democratic Party’s, the Axis news media’s, and maybe, frighteningly, the public’s.

Yes, once again we have a looming test of just how stupid the public really is. Democrats are betting their very existence on the public being as dumb as a box of Joe Bidens, and the biased, anti-Trump news media, having already been completely exposed as the enemies of the people Donald Trump said they are, have predominantly fallen back to the same tactics that served them so well in Trump 1.0. The unethical “advocacy journalists” are gambling that propaganda will prevail, and that the 2024 election was just a blip because the Democrats ran a babbling fool—but a historic one!—for President.

Trump’s tsunami of executive orders along with the relentless DOGE assault has the Axis searching for a magic bullet or two. They settled on two old unethical stand-bys: ad hominem attacks, aka. “kill the messenger,” and “It’s a constitutional crisis!” Trump being elected at all was a constitutional crisis for the Angry Left, and the phony “He’s breaching traditional democratic norms!” trope was core to both impeachments and the “Trump is Hitler” campaign refrain.

Elon Musk is being vilified by using classic Democrat class warfare tactics: he’s been successful and is rich, so obviously he’s only helping Trump cut spending because he greedy and he’ll make money from it somehow. How dumb does someone have to be to buy that logic? If there is anyone in the world who can be trusted not to be serving his country for the money, it’s Musk. I heard some mouth-foaming contributor on CNN screaming this morning that “Trump is a liar and criminal” and “Musk wasn’t even born here!,” an odd argument from a defender of illegal immigrants.

But the EA “Flat Learning Curve” graphic is up there because I heard Chuck Schumer—is he really an idiot or does he just play one on TV?—say that sure, everyone agrees that there is too much waste in government spending, but “this is a meat-axe!” Yup, it sure is, Chuck, and if you don’t know by now that the only way to seriously address systemic corruption, waste, incompetence, dishonesty and obstruction is with a meat-axe (or blow-torch, or metaphorical nuclear bomb), you’ve never successfully managed anything.

Experienced managers know this, and both Musk and Trump are experienced managers as well as successful ones. Good leaders know it too. Heck, I know it.

What Schumer is really saying is, “We don’t want to solve this problem, we want to look like we want to solve this problem, and we are confident that you out there listening are so uneducated, inexperienced, naive and gullible that you’ll fall for it…again.”

When a system is broken, corrupt and incorrigible, and because of its dysfunction causing constant harm, the technique of carefully trying to extract the jewels buried in the shit pile never works. It takes too long. Every inch of the shit will have advocates claiming that it isn’t really shit. Paring down the bureaucracy gets delegated to the bureaucracy, and improvement is minimal if you are lucky. Most of the time, the inefficiency, waste and corruption just gets worse. Nobody can deny that this is the futile path the United States government has been treading.

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EA Text Box Crash Update!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Breaking: I have heard from WordPress regarding the site malfunction yesterday that made commenting either a chore or impossible. This morning Happiness Engineer Gary P. wrote in an email,

“Hi Jack, thank you for your patience. I really appreciate you reporting this issue. It’s been very helpful! As my colleague mentioned, our team has identified this as a bug and is actively working on a permanent fix. The latest update from our developers is that the comment box should now be working again. I took a look at your site and can see that the text box appears to be functioning normally. I’ve also recorded a short video showing that typing is now possible: https://cloudup.com/c1W5oqw88Qm.

Whenever you have a moment, could you check from your end and let me know if everything is working as expected? Do note that while the text box is working, our developer is still actively looking for a cause for the issue itself, and what’s working now might not be perfect.

Let me know how it goes and if you have any other questions. I’d be happy to help.

Well, Gary had better be happy to help…he’s a Happiness Engineer!

I’m so sorry this happened yesterday. It obviously frustrated a lot of you and wasted your valuable time, as it did mine. If its any consolation, I deal with WordPress bugs constantly. I can no longer comment directly as a host on my own posts for example: I have to log in as a commenter. When I’m in the favored “Paragraph” block, I can’t post pictures or quotes. When I’m in the “classic “mode links don’t work. Recently, whole sentences just disappear while I’m finishing them. But that’s my problem. You shouldn’t have to deal with any posting issues. Again, I am sorry.

Special thanks are due to Diego Garcia and Alicia who blew the whistle on this right away via email.

Maybe I’ll be able to get some paying work done today, after I finish shoveling snow…