Parody Ethics: What Is This Case Doing At The Supreme Court? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Well, KABOOM! There goes my head.

Absurdly, Jack Daniel’s, the largest American whiskey manufacturer, sued VIP Products, one of the principle American dog toy manufacturer (Spuds loves their toys) over a parody plastic squeaky toy modeled on Jack Daniel’s bottles. (Spud likes a squeaky toy that looks like a Coor beer bottle). On the dog toy, as you can see, instead of describing “Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey” manufactured by “Jack Daniel’s,” the toy is “Bad Spaniel,” “Old No. 2 on your Tennessee carpet.”

Oral argument at the Supreme Court was yesterday. Finding a likelihood that consumers would confuse the “Bad Spaniels” toy with Jack Daniel’s, the trial court ruled in favor of the liquor company and barred VIP from continuing to manufacture the parody toy, ruling, believe it or not, that that consumers would confuse the “Bad Spaniels” toy with Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Yeah, I always have that problem, mixing up dog toys with liquor bottles. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed on both counts, because the trial court’s theory was…well, let Sidney Wang explain:

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Lawyer Jerry Goldfeder

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You know, it’s not a slam-dunk. But I think that survives a motion to dismiss, and then let the jury decide.”

—-Jerry H. Goldfeder, a special counsel at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP and an  expert in New York state election law, to the New York Times regarding Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s supposedly imminent indictment and prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

That is an flat-out unethical endorsement of prosecutorial abuse of power, for not only a lawyer, but a lawyer in a major Manhattan law firm, being quoted as authority in the New York Times, uncritically, of course.

An ethical prosecutor does not bring a case unless he or she is certain that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue isn’t whether the prosecution will prevail, but whether the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to justify it prevailing with an objective and fair jury. Surviving a motion to dismiss is not an ethical standard; it’s the bottom-of-the-barrel standard. The judge agreeing that the case has no merit at all as a matter of law, is not the equivalent of holding that the case should not be brought by an ethical prosecutor. “Hey, who knows if the guy is guilty or if we have the evidence to convict? Let’s just get it in front of a jury and see what they think!”

Unspoken in this case: “After all, the point is to make Trump look bad, right? If we can get a conviction, it’s frosting on the cake.”

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UPDATE! The Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump Prosecution Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

  • Unethical quote, and a telling one: Sunny Hostin, arguably the most unethical member of “The View’s” panel of idiots though Joy Behar is far and away the dumbest and most obnoxious, said the quiet part out loud yesterday while making the legally ignorant claim that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has a “slam-dunk” criminal case against former President Donald Trump. “I think the goal is to never have this man be in a position of power again — not even [as] a crossing guard,” Hostin, a lawyer, said on the show. And there it is! Not only does Hostin admit that these various prosecutions are political, but she has no problem with that, which means that she has no problem with using the legal system for partisan warfare, and undermining democracy by criminalizing politics, banana republic-style. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” boasted  Joseph Stalin’s infamous secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria. One of Stalin’s methods was to sic Beria on any political foe and count on his henchman to  find or fabricate a crime that justified imprisoning him or making him “disappear.” This has been the modus operandi of Democrats since the dawn of the “Destroy Donald Trump” era. People like Hostin are telling us who and what they are. Pay attention, and take them at their word.
  • Later—I would say “incredibly” but sadly it isn’t hard to believe at all, CNN’s Don Lemon quoted Hostin on the air regarding the “slam-dunk” case. Yes, he really did quote a member of “The View” to inform CNN watchers on a legal issue. Jonathan Turley, an actual legal expert who isn’t welcome on CNN because he spits out progressive Kool-Aid, and is just a bit more reliable on such topics, has declared Bragg’s potential indictment as a “Frankenstein indictment….to convert a misdemeanor for falsifying financial records into a prosecution of a federal crime.” He added, “There are serious challenges to this prosecution, including an argument that time has expired under the statute of limitations.”

You know: a slam dunk. Continue reading →

A Perfect Explication Of The “2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck” By Someone Other Than Me

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Nicely timed to compliment yesterday’s post officially christening the Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump Prosecution Ethics Train Wreck as yet another extension of the horrifically destructive—and still rolling—-2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck is a post on a substack I had never heard of called “The Ivy Exile,” ironically a title I could use myself. It includes an excellent explanation of that most disastrous of all recent ethics train wrecks, though I have been attempting to explain it for seven long years.

Ethics Alarms’ intense concentration on the phenomenon, which I believe is the most dangerous and significant cultural ethics breakdown in American political history, exceeding even the Red Scare and the McCarthy Era, has been costly. So many people hate Donald Trump so much, or are so committed to the progressive excesses he has significantly curtailed, that they rejected this site because it has insisted, and will insist, that core ethical and democratic values must apply to all regardless of their character or perceived misconduct. The efforts by what I have branded the Axis of Unethical Conduct, the “resistance,” Democratic Party and mainstream media to scar and defile American tradition and process in order to undermine, punish and remove a duly elected President, and its disastrous influence on the public that has promoted bright-line legal and ethical breaches that would once have been unthinkable, have so polluted civic discourse and political culture that it may never recover.

Yet many previously rational and intelligent people, once followers of this blog as well as my social media contacts, reflexively chose to regard my insistence that ethics and democratic mandates must apply to Mr. Trump (as the prime offender the New York Times would say) exactly as they must to any other President, political figure, American or human being as evidence that I had become a MAGA fanatic, a “Trumpist” and/or a fascist.

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Comment Of The Day: “Fire Them All: No, Training Cannot Fix Teachers Like This One”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Sarah B., proving that Ethics Alarms Comments of the Day do not have to be novelettes in order to make the grade, offers her reaction to the post about the Texas charter school’s grudging admission that forcing 7th graders to pose like sex workers seeking a “date” may not have been appropriate classroom fare:

***

I saw this and it saddens/frightens/infuriates me so much that I can hardly express it.

I believe that this exhibit, one of so many examples, proves that I need to change my answer to a question I get asked a lot.

“Why do you homeschool?”

Usually I cite my wanting to raise my children in my value system, the need of my second child to have incredible flexibility for medical appointments, a desire to control various aspects of the curriculum such as including cursive and home ec, inculcating them in my faith, nationwide illiteracy rates of 45% in fourth grade and 25% in 12th grade (local isn’t much higher), and my experience as a math tutor showing me that children are not taught math appropriately anymore.

The answer I should give is, “Why don’t you?”

Ethics Quiz: The Unmasked 97-Year-Old Driver

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Some background is necessary. Last month, by far the stupidest TV show currently on the air and arguably one of the top ten most ridiculous shows in U.S. entertainment history proved that metaphorical jewels van be found in garbage. On the pile of over-produced, pablum-for-morons, steaming idiot box crap called “The Masked Singer,” the scene in the video above emerged. Dick Van Dyke, now 97, was the secret singer (and dancer) disguised in a full-body costume worthy of a Disneyland character parade. The reaction of the studio audience, judges and Van Dyke himself when he was “unmasked” was unquestionably sincere as well as moving; yeah, it choked me up (though I’m easy.)

The episode, which shows the “Mary Poppins” icon to be something of a freak of nature (but we knew that when he performed a dance routine in the sequel to “Mary Poppins” a few years ago), is relevant to the issue on Ethics Alarms. Yesterday, Dick was behind the wheel of his a 2018 Lexus LS 500 in Malibu when he lost control of his vehicle and crashed into gate, sustaining minor injuries.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it responsible for a 97-year-old to be driving, and for society to permit one to drive?

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: “Regina: The City That Rhymes With Fun!”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can understand one dim bulb not realizing that this was a vulgar, juvenile, and offensive promotion. But an entire tourism organization? Nobody stepped up and said, “Wait a minute! Are you people nuts?”?

Wow.

Experience Regina, the tourism organization in Saskatchewan’s capital city of Regina, came up with an oh-so-clever idea for new tourism campaign slogan: “Show us your Regina.” They really did that. They had a second slogan too: “The city that rhymes with fun.” Get it??

Venus is a town in Texas, by the way. Just thought I’d mention it.

Back to Regina: oddly, many people found the two slogans inappropriate. Actually, just about everyone did, which again raised the question of how these locker-room level gags got past the first brain-storming session. So, because nobody involved possessed either good taste, the sense God gave an oyster, or the guts to stand up and make the tourist promotion equivalent of, “Uh, General Custer? I don’t think going down into the valley is such a good idea,”Experience Regina’s CEO had to release a quick abject apology. groveling,

“I want to start by apologizing, on behalf of myself and our team, for the negative impact we created with elements of our recent brand launch.  It was clear that we fell short of what is expected from our amazing community with some slogans that we used.”

Now he needs to resign for assembling such an inept and sophomoric staff.

Incidentally, there is a Delores, Colorado. Maybe he can start over there…

___________________

Source: Outkick

Fire Them All: No, Training Cannot Fix Teachers Like This One

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Having some time to kill in her middle-school “Social Emotional Learning” classes (don’t get me started on that) at KIPP Poder Academy (in Texas), a public charter school, the teacher decided to introduce students to “Bear, Hunter, Hooker,” a variation on Paper, Stone and Scissors. The seventh-grade students were challenged to strike the pose of a threatening bear, a hunter pointing an imaginary rifle, or “seducing hooker.” I’m not clear on the rules of the game, but this story was one of dozens over the years that made me glad I wasn’t a parent encountering an example of teaching incompetence and lack of common sense like this, because I’m not sure how well I would control myself. As I understand it, when the “hooker” and hunter pair are improvised, the “seducing hooker” “wins over “beats” the hunter by “seducing” him. I assume that the hunter beats the bear, and the bear eats the hooker, or something. Students were allegedly organized to participate in order of least to most mature. In one of the classes, students were rewarded with candy to participate in the exercise.

At least one parent reacted badly to this classroom content. I wonder why? Yet it took her six months of battling with the school and enduring red tape and conferences for the school’s administrators to publicly concede that having kids imitate prostitutes, hookers or sex workers, whatever you want to call them, is not appropriate educational fare.

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The Absurd Dark Star Of The Latest “Get Trump!” Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

For the record, the official Ethics Alarms title for the now nearly full-speed second-wave ethics train wreck emerging—again!—out of the biggest and longest-running ethics train wreck of them all (unless you count the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, which you probably should), the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck, is the Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump Prosecution Ethics Train Wreck. I was going to do a full review of the all-star list of current passengers thus far— Trump and Daniels, of course; Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, George Soros, Senator Elizabeth Warren and all of the Democrats foolish enough to shatter the rules of ethics estoppel by bleating “No one is above the law!,” the cheerleading mainstream media, Ron DeSantis, Kevin McCarthy, Rand Paul, Rachel Maddow—assuming that the indictment would come down today and Trump would be arrested.

But it did not, and he wasn’t. (You would think, wouldn’t you, that after specializing himself in deliberately changing his plans once the news media engaged in what Ethics Alarms calls “future fake news” and announced that he was about to do something outrageous, Trump wouldn’t fall into the same trap by announcing that his arrest was imminent.) Instead, this post will focus on the Manhattan’s Democrats’ current “Get Trump!” Javert’s “star” witness, the ridiculous, slimy, reptilian, formerTrump fixer, Michael Cohen.

It was in 2015, back when I assumed that there was no way on earth sufficient numbers of Americans would be reckless enough to vote for Donald Trump in a primary, never mind an actual election, I first discussed Trump’s lawyer-fixer, Cohen in a Rhode Island legal ethics seminar, using him as an example of the archetypal untrustworthy lawyer, and declaring Trump as foolish for employing someone so clearly dishonest as well as incompetent. It wasn’t hard. Cohen had just given an interview in which he made the legally wrong claim that it was legal for a husband (in that case, Trump) to rape his own wife. Then he threatened The Daily Beast, saying…

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The Rotting American Public School System’s New Philosophy: “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Call Failure A Success.”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the ultimate expression of “The Great Stupid,” New York has gone to a bad Jerry Lewis movie (no, they aren’t all bad) for inspiration in revising its education policy. Faced with terrible math and reading scores for students—in some school, not one achieved what was considered minimum proficiency— a state school board lowered the standards so more students would “succees”. This was the measured response after, as one media source reported,

“A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight. Some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

No doubt? There are several reasons this crash is occurring. One is that the disastrous decision to close the schools in response to the health “experts” and news media-driven panic over the Wuhan virus seriously (and perhaps permanently) set back the intellectual development of America’s young. Before that, there was already evidence that U.S. IQs are declining, and not just in the White House. The politicized public school system now devotes crucial class hours to teaching black kids that they face a lifetime of permanent oppression in a racist nation, and making white kids believe that their skin shade signifies evil embedded in their DNA. Then there is the little problem of the education profession being riddled with incompetents from top to bottom, as well as today’s children spending more time on social media and video games than reading, while their parents have abdicated their traditional duties to stimulate their children’s intellectual life at home.

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