Ralph Petty, the Moonlighting Texas ADA, Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Back in 2021, an outrageous legal ethics scandal in Texas so disturbed me that I wrote virtually the same post about it twice, once in May and again in September, without realizing it until one of you reminded me. This time, however, I’m not repeating myself.

Former Texas attorney Weldon Ralph Petty Jr prosecuted defendants before Midland County judges as an assistant district attorney, while simultaneously working as a law clerk for some of the same judges, on occasion advising them regarding the criminal cases he was prosecuting. He did this for more than a decade, with the complicity of the judges and his colleagues. Finally another prosecutor blew the whistle on this unethical conduct, which even Fani Willis would recognize as a conflict of interest. Maybe.

Last month Petty, who was disbarred, appeared in the news again.

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“Ick or Ethics” Ethics Quiz: The Robot Collaborator

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

As Jackie Gleason, aka. “The Great One,” used to say to begin his popular variety show on CBS (“Jackie Gleason? Who’s he?”), “And awaaaaay we GO!”

Rie Kudan, accepting the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for promising new Japanese writers, told the audience that her novel, “The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy,” was co-authored by ChatGPT and other AI programs. She revealed that her novel, which is about artificial intelligence, had approximately 5% of its dialogue composed by the popular bots and added by her “verbatim” to the text. “The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy” has met with unanimous raves by critics: “The work is flawless and it’s difficult to find any faults,” said Shuichi Yoshida, a member of the prize judging committee. “It is highly entertaining and interesting work that prompts debate about how to consider it.”

It seems clear that the author’s public admission (“I made active use of generative AI like ChatGPT in writing this book. I would say about five per cent of the book quoted verbatim the sentences generated by AI.”) was designed to fuel that debate.

I think we can all agree that this was shrewd on the author’s part. But is what she admitted to ethical?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is having an AI program write all or part of your book or novel ethical, or merely something that feels wrong right now that we’ll eventually accept?

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Ethics Quiz: Presidential Immunity

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is there anybody out there who wants to argue that complete Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution is a safe, necessary, responsible and civically practical policy? Hello?

I’m not even going to ask the question in the usual quiz form, other than to wonder who would agree Trump’s theory this other than a former President facing multiple partisan prosecutions of varying legitimacy designed to take him out of the next election, or an aspiring leader who endorses near dictatorial powers in a republic.

George Washington made it quite clear that the U.S. President isn’t a king; indeed, this may have been George’s most important among his many precedent-setting and self-imposed embellishments on the office. There have been Presidents who believed in treading carefully within a carefully moderated set of powers; there have been others, like Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and Nixon, who took the office in the other direction, sometimes to the point of defying laws as well as exploiting areas of Constitutional ambiguity.

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Comment of the Day: “Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It is going to be interesting to see if the currently metastasizing DEI mania eventually collapses as its illiberal and destructive features become impossible to excuse or ignore. I assume it will eventually end up in history’s junk yard, and the sooner the better, but equally bad ideas have survived to cause decades of societal chaos.

The post about the diversity officer declaring “White people,” “Able-bodied people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Cisgender people,” “Males,” “Christians,” “Middle or owning class people,” “Middle-aged people,” and “English-speaking people” to be blights on efforts to build a just society (and then quickly disavowing her language as soon as she was called on it) provoked—is still provoking–many excellent comments, including the Comment of the Day by Extradimensional Cephalopod below. He (It? I don’t know EC’s preferred pronouns) shamed me by pointing out that the woke concept of “privilege” is a manifestation of the fundamental attribution error, which I haven’t discussed here for a long time. His Comment of the Day also provoked the Comment of the Day on a Comment Destined to Become a Comment of the Day by JutGory, who wrote,

Extradimensional Cephalopod: “(I keep unsuccessfully searching for a quote I remember where someone describes their “privilege” as a right that they want everyone to have, e.g. the right to have no reason to fear the police.)” Attribute it to me if you like; that is one of my critiques of the notion of privilege. In some instances, privilege is not part of an unearned advantage; it is part of an unwarranted disadvantage. I am not privileged by being treated the way everyone should be treated; someone else is “under-privileged” by not being treated the way one should be.

“Under-privileged”?

“Unprivileged”?

“Demoted”?

“Debased”?

We don’t really have a commensurate term to describe that.So, people use privilege to describe any advantage that one person may have over another. Actually, common with leftists, we talk about groups, not individuals, and then ascribe a quality of the group to the individual. This is kind of an example of the logical fallacy of division. But, the problem is that individuals have, as comments above have noted, many qualities, some of which are more advantageous or disadvantageous than others (almost as if individuals are somehow unique). It is because of this that they had to come up with notions of “intersectionality” because it turns out that “privilege” is a concept that is inadequate when it comes to describing the world. (But, hey, Ptolemy needed epicycles and the equant to make sense of the universe.)

“Privilege” does not exist. “Privilege” is an attempt to describe phenomena and create a generalization about it.

Here is EC’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Comment of the Day: “Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field”:

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Classic: CBS Reports on the Fani Willis Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now that the anti-Trump, Democrat propaganda-promoting, biased and incompetent mainstream media has been forced to cover the unfolding Fani Willis ethics debacle that threatens to swallow her partisan “Get Trump!” prosecution, it is giving us blazing examples of just how untrustworthy its coverage can be. The headline above looms over CBS’s “news” story that is really a lame and transparent effort to try to spin the Fulton County DA out of the mess of her own making.

The focus of the report is that poor Fani just about had to hire her lover as one of the prosecutors in the high profile case against Donald Trump, because she was “unable to find someone in the DA’s office with the stature and credentials needed for the case,” and “turned to at least two other legal heavy hitters in Atlanta who turned the job down.” Then the article, while conceding that Nathan Wade had little relevant experience, tells us that Wade was Willis’s “friend and mentor” <cough!> and that she told colleagues he “had the toughness to handle the scorched-earth legal tactics that Trump’s lawyers and their co-counsel were likely to employ in the legal battle.” You know, because Trump is such an evil bastard.

Then the article explains that…

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Snow Day Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Another snow storm in Virginia, and thus I have another opportunity to make up for my meager use of seasonal songs in December as I tried to avoid reminding myself of what a lousy time my family was going through. I don’t really like Babs’s version of “Jingle Bells” —-I don’t really like Streisand (or her voice, as astounding as it was…or her style, of the song, for that matter), but you can’t say her rendition isn’t unique.

One housekeeping note: Sarah B. was kind enough to send me a friendly email asking me to stop posting Fani Willis’s name as “Wallis.”Among the myriad things I resent Willis for is that her last name is one of the letter combinations that I instinctively type wrong every damn time, along with “their,” “Michael,” and a few others. I will now do a search for “Wallis” any time a post concerns her, as will my next one, if all goes as planned. I just corrected 12 more “Wallis” typos in the December post about this creep, and the single “Wallis” in the last post yesterday, which I thought I had checked but missed the headline.

I’m sorry.

[WordPress’s AI bot told me to tag this one : “book review”….]

The Fani Willis Clown Show Continues: Oh Yeah, This Case Is Going REALLY Well…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

From the New York Sun just now:

The accusation from the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, that the estranged wife of the special prosecutor in her employ with whom she is accused of having an affair is “interfering” in her prosecution of President Trump — and conspiring with one of his co-defendants — promises further chaos for a case that appears to be going off the rails.

Ms. Willis’s accusation comes in an emergency motion for a protective order in the superior court of Cobb County that attempts to quash a subpoena for her testimony in Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade’s divorce proceedings from his wife of 26 years, Joycelyn. Ms. Willis accuses Mrs. Wade of working in concert with one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, Michael Roman…Now comes Ms. Willis to argue that on January 8, three things happened “contemporaneously” — Mrs. Wade issued her subpoena, Mr. Roman petitioned for the divorce proceeding to be unsealed, and Mr. Roman filed for Ms. Willis to be disqualified. Ms. Willis alleges that all of this suggests coordination between Mrs. Wade and Mr. Roman to undermine Ms. Willis as she prepares for one of the most anticipated trials in American history…Ms. Willis does not deny — or admit — that she and Mr. Wade conducted an affair. Instead, she reasons that “because the parties agree that the marriage is irretrievably broken and the concept of fault is not at issue, there is no information” that she could provide that “might prove relevant to granting or denying the divorce.” She calls her role in the split “irrelevant.” …the district attorney claims Mrs. Wade is motivated by a desire to “harass and damage” Ms. Willis’s professional reputation and is acting in order to “annoy, embarrass, and oppress” her. The district attorney goes further, though, accusing Mrs. Wade of having “conspired” with Mr. Roman by coordinating that the subpoena and the request that the divorce docket be unsealed landed on the docket simultaneously. The implication is that the contents of the docket could be embarrassing to Ms. Willis, as could the testimony that she will be required to deliver should the subpoena stand…

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Oklahoma State Senator: Nathan Dahm, (R-Broken Arrow)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Senator Dahm has introduced Senate Bill 1837, the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act.” Here are its main provisions:

“Each individual reporter, producer, writer, editor, or any other employee involved in the production of content distributed by a media outlet is hereby required to:

a. complete a criminal background check conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation,
b. receive a license as prescribed by the Corporation Commission as provided in subsection C of this section,
c. complete a propaganda-free safety training course of no less than eight (8) hours as prescribed by the State Department of Education, which shall be developed in coordination with PragerU,
d. provide proof of liability insurance no less than One Million Dollars ($1,000,000.00), and
e. submit to quarterly drug testing for illicit substances to be administered by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation”

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Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Attention should be paid.

In the latest issue of the “Monthly Diversity Digest,”  Dr. Sherita Hill Golden defined as her “Diversity Word of the Month” privilege as “a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group.” “Given”? She went on to write that

“Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.”

Golden then named these unfairly and unethically favored groups: “White people,” “Able-bodied people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Cisgender people,” “Males,” “Christians,” “Middle or owning class people,” “Middle-aged people,” and “English-speaking people.”

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Why Nikki Haley Can’t Be Trusted, Continued [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Haley posted this support for mass rioting (what else could it mean?) about a month after the bad cop Derek Chauvin helped an overdosing career crook to his demise (or not) while George Floyd was over-dosing on a cocktail of drugs, including fentanyl. Three days earlier, the mass Black Lives Matter protests had begun under the unjustified assumption that Floyd’s death was a racial crime. In Minneapolis on May 26, 2020, the “mostly peaceful” protests turned to vandalism and arson. Her tweets were also among the many statements from public officials that predetermined Chauvin’s guilt, making certain that he would not get a fair trial (and he didn’t.)

To Haley’s credit, she hasn’t take down either pandering tweet (yet), but I regard it as further evidence that she is a weasel, and will say and “believe” whatever seems beneficial to her career calculations at the time.