Wait, WHAT? Ethics (and Constitutional) Dunce: Carlsbad, California

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

From the London Times (Pointer: Ann Althouse):

“Carlsbad, a surfing hot spot near San Diego, has decided to prohibit people from lighting up inside apartments, condos and other shared buildings where multiple families live. From January residents will not be able to smoke or vape cannabis and nicotine products indoors or on balconies, porches and decks. The law does not apply to single-family homes or hotels and motels…At least 84 of California’s 483 municipalities — including Beverly Hills, Cupertino and Pasadena — have enacted similar bans in multi-family private residences, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation…Many residents in Carlsbad said the smoking ban would improve public health while making housing more pleasant despite concerns over how it will be enforced. Due to limited resources police will not enforce the law, but landlords and other tenants will be able to take legal action against anyone smoking indoors.”

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This Story Alone Should Be Sufficient to Make Any American Who Wants To “Save Democracy” Vote Against Harris…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Meta Platforms CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Congress this week that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” his company in 2021 to censor content related to the Wuhan virus, including posts by mere mortal Americans.

In response to questions from the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg confirmed that the Biden administration tried to censor his social media company and therefore probably the others as well.

“There’s a lot of talk right now, about how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, and I want to be clear about our position,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to the committee. “Our platforms are for everyone — we’re about promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way.” 

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Two Glaring Examples…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

1. The former reliably progressive, Democrat-supporting Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi nicely exposed the Washington Post’s astoundingly flagrant Democratic operative Phillip Bump (EA dossier here) on Taibbi’s substack. (I have been temped to subscribe, but…)

In “Note to Philip Bump: The Washington Post columnist speaks on CNN; a brief reply” he writes:

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Unethical Tweet of the Month: Actor Bradley Whitford

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Just remember, the Ethics Alarms position is to strive as much as possible to remain unbiased regarding a performer’s art regardless of his or her demonstrated political orientation or revealed personal character flaws. I enjoy Bradley Whitford as an actor.

But only an unethical, bullying asshole would write a tweet like that.

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Is Marco Bisbikis The Most Unethical Lawyer Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

How could a lawyer be more unethical?

As unethical, sure: I am confident that there have been other lawyers who are tied with this Michigan lawyer for the title. But more? Consider:

Marco Bisbikis, a Michigan lawyer in good standing, worked as an attorney for the Dan Hutchinson and his wife, wrote himself into popular Oakland County jeweler’s will while he was preparing it for his client, who was also under the impression that his attorney was a loyal friend. (Can you blame him? Who wouldn’t trust a face like that?)

Then Bisbikis paid a hit man to shoot and kill Hutchinson so the lawyer could inherit millions of dollars in a trust fund. On June 1, 2022, outside an Oak Park pawn shop, the hit man did just that. Bisbikis and the hired killer, Roy Larry, were convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation of murder, and felony firearm and in June they were both sentenced life in prison. Two other men involved in the plot were convicted and sentenced last year.

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Ugh! Ethics Dunce—AGAIN—: University of Houston Law Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

This is an example of why I am disgusted with my field and chosen profession. Just last month I designated Jefferson, a legal ethics professor among other things, as an ethics dunce for her blatantly partisan and biased commentary. This time, it’s personal.

Seeking to find a reliable, trustworthy, accurate source of legal ethics news and developments (since the demise of the excellent legal Ethics Forum, I am reduced to the scattershot, overwhelmingly left-biased commentary on the APRL listserv), I subscribed to the professor’s substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, taking seriously her promise that it would supply a “Monday morning tour of all things related to lawyer and judicial ethics.” But the Legal Ethics Roundup I received this morning, like all its predecessors this month, cheerfully informed me that “For the month of August, the Legal Ethics Roundup is on pause.”

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Ethics Observations On the Sale of Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” Jersey for $24 Million

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The jersey worn by baseball legend Babe Ruth when he “called his shot” in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series sold over the weekend for $24.12 million, setting the auction record for most expensive sports collectible. The previous record price for any sports collectible was the $12.6 million that a rare mint condition Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle card fetched in 2022. Babe’s jersey far eclipsed the $10.1 million a Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls jersey from Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals achived at auction that same year, the record for athletic attire until Babe broke it, like he shattered so many records when he was alive.

The sale raises many ethics issues, but the main one is that the exorbitant price is almost certainly based on a fabrication, a lie. It is similar to paying millions for the axe little George Washington used to cut down his father’s cherry tree.

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Comment of the Day: “As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With ‘Think of the Children!’ Porn: The Sequel”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This is an unusual Comment of the Day by Chris Marschner (on the post,“As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With ‘Think of the Children!’ Porn”), but it makes an important point, indeed, the crucial point that exposes the intellectual dishonesty of the Times’ “Think of the Children!” campaign to demonize Israel as it tries to defend its right to exist.

***

I reworked the original Times story to reflect a similar situation in the mid-20th century. All I did was change the name and the players. If the Times had written its report this way, then the Brits, the French, the Poles, the Czecks and others would be goose-stepping to their new bosses and Israel would not exist.

It is obvious to any rational thinker that when a nation faces existential peril from zealots who believe they are the rightful heirs of the entire region and that no one except the devout believers of Mohammed may live peacefully there, that when they are attacked they must eliminate the immediate as well as the long term threat in order to minimize civilian losses. We did this twice in the Pacific and Europe when despots saw opportunities for empire building.

My NYT rewrite:

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…More Deep Thoughts From Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Oh yeah, she’s secretly brilliant…

And the morons applaud.

Looking for that wood-chipper….

Unethical Business Practice: Experian….And It’s Time It Was Exposed.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

There is a necessary class action law suit that needs to be filed against Experian, the multinational data analytics and consumer credit reporting company. Its scam, and it is a scam, is diabolically simple: once you enroll in its lowest level paid subscription (just $3.99 a month!), it is virtually impossible to cancel it. I say “virtually” because I would not be surprised if there was some magic, hidden,absurdly complicated way to cancel that one can only access by luck, genius or accident. Thus Experian could argue, “Oh no! It’s easy to cancel: see?”

Experian isn’t the only company to play this profitable, unethical game; since my wife’s death, I have spent an astounding number of hours dealing with dozens of companies’ “customer service” (Ha!) systems that have to have been set up to foil genuine customer service, frustrate efforts by consumers to get out of traps, and to prompt the understandable reaction, “Oh, to hell with it, it’s only a few bucks and I don’t have time for this.”

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