Ethics Dunce: College Baseball Coach Rodney Velardi

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I don’t know about you, but nothing quite clears my ethics palate after a day of pondering the FBI’s corruption and people posing for happy selfies at Auschwitz like a nice baseball cheating scandal.

Rowan College Gloucester County was playing Atlantic Cape Community College (New Jersey) in a baseball game when the Rowan first baseman noticed little voices coming out of an Atlantic Cape baserunner’s helmet. He notified the umpire, who checked the helmet: sure enough, there was an electronic listening device inside. After a search, a device was found on a second player too. The assumption is that someone was stealing catcher’s signs from the stands, and using an electronic device to alert Atlantic Cape batters what pitches were coming.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Fun At Auschwitz!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

That’s an ice cream stand just outside Poland’s shrine to the victims of the Holocaust, the Auschwitz death camp. Isn’t it nice that tourists there will be able to grab a delicious ice cream cone for refreshment? Now here…

…a woman posed glamorously on the tracks that brought the railroad cars stuffed with captive Jews to be gassed. If I had to wager, I’d say the couple is American. In my various adventures abroad, I wanted to hide my head under a bag many times as I saw American tourists behaving abominably at such locales as Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. But it isn’t just Americans: my wife’s sister reported that at Pearl Harbor she witnessed smiling Japanese tourists posing by the memorials to the Arizona, the Oklahoma and the Utah.

Where does this attitude come from? Over at Victory Girls, Kim Hirsch writes, “Money and fame have replaced honor and memory of the history which changed the world.” I’d put it a little differently: as our culture increasingly sends the message that history is just another tool of politics, the public is either ignorant of the facts of the past, unable to understand why those facts are still important, or believe that history is irrelevant to their lives.

Assorted Ethics Observations On The Durham Report, Part II: The Substance

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

[The first installment, regarding the news media’s ongoing effort to bury this story, is here. Humble Talent’s invaluable summary of the Durham Report is here.]

1. The nice thing about waiting a day or so is that some other qualified commentators were likely to write virtually what I would write, saving me time. That was especially true in this case. Here’s Andrew McCarthy:

Perusing the report, I find it impossible to draw any other conclusion than that the FBI, and the Obama administration more broadly, did not ignore the intelligence about Clinton’s strategy but rather that the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the United States government knowingly abetted Clinton’s implementation of the strategy….

Clearly, there was a Clinton campaign strategy to frame Trump. Yet the most sensible interpretation of the evidence Durham has amassed is not that the FBI, in evaluating its collusion evidence, failed to weigh intercepted Russian intelligence about that strategy. It is that the FBI was well aware of Clinton’s strategy, fully expected Clinton to be the next president, and helped implement the strategy, regardless of what Russian spies may or may not have thought about it…

The FBI knowingly treated Clinton with kid gloves. FBI lawyer Lisa Page warned the bureau’s senior intelligence investigator, Peter Strzok, to tread lightly in interviewing Clinton about the email scandal — fearful that, upon winning the election, Clinton would otherwise be vengeful against the FBI…

Durham documents that President Obama, Vice President Biden, top intelligence officials, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI director Comey were fully briefed by CIA director John Brennan on Russia’s assessment of Clinton’s plan to frame Trump.

2. At the last moment, I decided in 2016 that I could not vote for either Trump or Hillary after spending the previous months saying that Trump was so unethical that I was forced to vote for his opposition, who I found reprehensible. Then I found out that Clinton and the Democrats were cheating, and as a party the clearly did not respect or revere democracy, the Democratic Party was even a greater existential risk than Trump; I just didn’t know how much they were cheating.

3. Barack Obama and Joe Biden actively participated in the scheme, as McCarthy’s last paragraph above reminds us. This was genuinely impeachable conduct, far, far worse than the contrived grounds for Trump’s two impeachments.

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Assorted Ethics Observations On The Durham Report, Part II: Prelude

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ace commenter Humble Talent has performed a service to Ethics Alarms and its readers by reading the entire Durham report and explicating it. This was a comment on the previous post on Durham’s investigation, and I encountered it after I had started to write Part II, covering ethics take-aways from the report’s substance. Since Humble’s analysis will be useful background for Assorted Ethics Observations On The Durham Report, Part II, and because no similarly thorough annotation of the report has yet appeared, I’m giving it a stand-alone post.

Thanks, Humble.

***

Churning through it now…. Some of it is unsurprising, but it’s nice to see put in language as clear as he used:

Page 11 (On the Steele Dossier)

“Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting. Nor was Steele able to produce corroboration for any of the reported allegations, even after being offered $1 million or more by the FBI for such corroboration. Further, when interviewed by the FBI in January 2017, Danchenko also was unable to corroborate any of the substantive allegations in the Reports. Rather, Danchenko characterized the information he provided to Steele as rumor and speculation and the product of casual conversation.”

Page 60 (On opening Crossfire Hurricane)

“As it relates to predication for opening Crossfire Hurricane as a full investigation, after Strzok and Supervisory Special Agent-1 had traveled to London and interviewed the Australian diplomats on August2, 2016, the following Lync exchange between UKALAT-1 and Supervisory Special Agent – 1 on August 11, 2016 is instructive:

UKALAT- : Dude, are we telling them [British Intelligence Service] everything we know, or is there more to this?
Supervisory Special Agent – 1: that’s all we have
Supervisory Special Agent – 1: not holding anything back
UKALAT- 1 : Damn that’s thin
Supervisory Special Agent- 1: I know
Supervisory Special Agent-1: it sucks

UK ALAT – 1 went on to tell the Inspection Division that in discussing the matter with a senior British Intelligence Service – 1 official, the official was openly skeptical , said the FBI’s plan for an operation made no sense, and asked UK ALAT- 1 why the FBI did not just go to Papadopoulos and ask him what they wanted to know, a sentiment UK ALAT- 1 told investigators that he shared.

Later in the Fall of 2016 , UKALAT- 1 was at FBI Headquarters with some of his British Intelligence Service- counterparts . While there , members of the Crossfire Hurricane team played the audio /visual recordings of CHS- 1’s August 20, 2016 meeting with Carter Page . UKALAT – 1 said the effect on the British Intelligence Service – personnel was not positive because of the lack of any evidence coming out of the conversation:

UKALAT – 1 told the OIG that after watching the video one of his British colleagues said, “For [expletive ] sake , man. You went through a lot of trouble to get him to say nothing.” At a later point in time, after the Mueller Special Counsel team was in place, UKALAT – 1 said that the Brits finally had enough, and in response to a request for some assistance [a British Intelligence Serviceperson] basically said there was “no [expletive] way in hell they were going to do it.”

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Comment Of The Day: “Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

There I was, thinking dark thoughts and moping about the horrible traffic here over the weekend, and along comes A.M. Golden to remind me that this blog has always sought to inspire quality rather than quantity, with this superb Comment of the Day on the post about the enterprising Mr. Clifford, who feels that IBM isn’t him paying him enough not to work for 30 years, Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”! Here it is; it even has a “Facts of Life” reference!

* * *

Stipulated: The plaintiff’s disability could be a legitimate one. We don’t know. That doesn’t really change my answer.

How did we get here?

The Deep Pockets Rationalization aka The Jo Polniaczek Excuse: Named for Nancy McKeon’s character on the ’80s show “The Facts of Life.” In one episode, Jo borrows a watch belonging to her frenemy, wealthy Blair Warner, without asking so she can time herself while taking an exam. On her way back, the watch is damaged when she jumps into a quick basketball game. She blows it off because Blair is wealthy and has a lot of watches.

The Deep Pockets Rationalization states that the person with the most money should pay even if not at fault. A guy driving a Hyundai hits a guy driving a BMW. The Hyundai driver tries to argue that the BMW driver should pay for everything because he has more money. A person trips in a store and tries to compel the business to pay even though she tripped because she wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing. Or a restaurant is pressured to pay for a disfigured child’s surgery after the family failed to extort money with false allegations against employees (Remember the KFC incident from a few years’ back?).

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Unethical Website Of The Month: “The Anarchist”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“The Anarchist”is the website of a hate-based Toronto coffee shop of the same name. Ironically, Ethics Alarms just learned of the site’s existence as it announced the demise of the business. (Good!) The shop anointed itself as “an anti-capitalist cafe, shop and radical community space on stolen land”—yes, the owners are delusional. It was a “pay what you choose” establishment designed to spit in the metaphorical eye of evil Capitalism. Of course it went belly-up, though the fact that the carzy project lasted even a year is impressive, sort of, in the same way Brian Stelter getting hired is impressive.

Here are some highlights from the website:

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Assorted Ethics Observations On The Durham Report, Part I: The News Media

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

John Durham, the special counsel charged with investigating the Trump campaign-Russian collusion “witch hunt” (as Donald Trump calls it, with more accuracy than usual) finally released his 306 page report late yesterday. I’m still slogging through it, but I’ve read a lot of excerpts and snippets, and it’s not too early to make some judgments.

I don’t need to read the whole thing, for example, to cite the news media’s coverage of Durham’s work as a fairly revolting example of a “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” spin job. Attention should be paid, because various outlets are essentially plastering signs on their metaphorical foreheads reading, “We’re biased, pro-Democrat, anti-Trump hacks!”

At Memeorandum, for example, the useful headline aggregator much praised by Ann Althouse, the Durham report’s release isn’t even the lead story. That would be the “graphic” law suit a former assistant has filed against Rudy Giuliani alleging that he coerced her into sex, among other sensational claims. One headline above the Durham report coverage is “Rudy Giuliani made antisemitic remarks about Jews’ genitalia, mocked ‘freaking Passover’ observance, new lawsuit claims.” I think I can state with reasonable certainty that when the history of this awful period is written, the successful efforts by Democrats, the news media and the “deep state” to cripple and de-legitimize the efforts of a duly-elected U.S. President to do the job he was elected to do will be a continuing source of analysis and debate, and the accusations made in his dotage against Giuliani will be a footnote at best, even if they turn out to be true.

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Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Hi there, everyone! It’s time to play the exciting ethics game that’s sweeping America: “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”! As you know, contestants are asked to name which ethics virtues are missing from the miscreants in our stories, and, if they can, explain how they got the way they are.

“Are you ready, contestants? Then let’s play, “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”! Introduce our subject for Round I, Johnny!“

“Sure thing, Jack! Meet Ian Clifford!

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Two For The “Shut Up And Act” Files

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The ethical formula is to concentrate critical evaluations on the message rather than the messenger, but celebrities using their popularity and influence to push for policies they are unqualified to evaluate and activism they are too corrupt to promote have to be in a separate category. They use their cognitive dissonance scale weight to make irresponsible positions seem reasonable to those sad and numerous members of the public who assume that being rich, beautiful and talented automatically makes one wise.

I know the temptation for these stars of both the glittering and the shooting- variety is great, but it is their duty to resist it except in the rare instances where they have more practical experience and knowledge of an issue than the average airport show-shine stand proprietor, and fully functioning ethics alarms. (Remember: Hollywood shorts out ethics alarms .)

Two prominent actresses in recent days have illustrated the principle.

1. Kate Winslet

Winslet is one of my favorite actresses, but unfortunately she’s British. The British don’t understand or support freedom of speech and expression, as anyone who watched the anti-monarchists being hauled away by police at King Charles’ coronation can attest. Accepting a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for her performance in a show about the dangers of social media, Winslet said,

To people in power and to people who can make change, please criminalize harmful content. Please eradicate harmful content. We don’t want it. We want our children back.”

Shut up, Kate.

Who is “we”? What is “harmful?” Dim bulbs like Winslet, waving the “Think of the Children!” banner, will lead us right to Big Brother’s door. If you’re worried about what your children see online, set rules for them and enforce them yourself. Better yet, teach them about what social media is and how to avoid its many perils. Monitor what they are hearing from their teachers in school, if you want them “back.” Educate yourself, and then educate them. It’s your job, not the government’s.

2. Natalie Portman

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT.)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The Democrats have quite an array of incompetent U.S. Senators, though some of them have excuses. Diane Feinstein is so old she makes Joe Biden look quick, and John Fetterman is brain-damaged. Senator Murphy, however, is special. He hates the Second Amendment almost as much as he hates Donald Trump. His preferred method of persuasion is bullying and fear-mongering. (All of those links are from the extensive Ethics Alarms dossier on Murphy.)

It is fine that Murphy doesn’t like the Second Amendment, but he has no choice but to follow it. He doesn’t get that, it seems. It is fine that he wishes that the Supreme Court wasn’t around to stop Congress and the President from violating the Constitution to, but he doesn’t understand that either. Thus he says things like this, to NBC’s Chuck Todd during Sunday morning’s broadcast of “Meet the Press”:

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