Recently I was led to the Facebook profile of a local Alder for the City of Madison, WI to leave him a message related to a vote that was cast on an entirely different subject. After I left the message I scrolled through his profile page to read some of the posts. On July 2, 2021 this Alder posted the following statement on Facebook followed by a link to a video that contained the 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes.
The Alderman wrote,
“As I age, I become more aware and misinformed at the same time. I used to celebrate the 4th with fantastical, flag waving, fervor and fireworks. Now, I use it as a day of mourning and reflection. While our republic is relatively young, the insidious histories of attempted genocide against BIPOC people, here at home, and around the world, forever stains the collective soul of this nation.”
I have gotten to date: a phone call, numerous post cards, and a text message, along with emails from my insurance company and… of course, FB announcements. If people are unaware of vaccines, their purpose, safety, etc… a knock on the door likely will not matter. Actually, it makes me want to dig in my heels to NOT do this.
I feel like there’s medical discrimination at play. Never have I ever been convinced to “do the right thing” with lotteries, scholarships for kids, phone calls asking me to schedule an appointment, a postcard, and now door to door. Umm, Fuck you. No.
I was considering it. Now “they” can leave me alone or see me in a courtroom. Translation: You would be better off shutting your stupid mouths and letting me work through the information, IN MY OWN TIME. If I die, I die. It’s my choice. You’re vaccinated so what do you care what I do? Or are they saying they don’t work as claimed? Pick one people, you can’t have both.
Side note: our history is full of amazing and epic scientific breakthroughs of things that turned out not to be safe, that we thought were, and and ended up killing thousands or more. Tell you what, Biden: Go back to the lab (you have a cancer cure so this should be simple!), create an airborne vaccine—I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong—and you’d get your wish to have everyone vaccinated for the greater good.
The Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence have taken undeserved (and ignorant) abuse and disrespect this year, so I’ll extend the celebration a bit with the recognition of this date in 1776, when the 2,000-pound copper-and-tin “Liberty Bell” rang out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, so citizens could come and hear the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, and know that their new nation had been conceived. Four days earlier, the Decalarationhad been adopted by the Continental Congress delegates, but the the public reading had to wait until the Declaration of Independence returned from the printer on July 8.
In April 1775, the bell had been rung to announce the battles of Lexington and Concord. After its most famous ringing on July 8, 1776, the British advanced on Philadelphia in the fall of 1777 caused the bell to be removed from the city and hidden to save it from being melted down by the British. After the British defeat in 1781, the bell was returned to Philadelphia, which served as the nation’s capital from 1790 to 1800. It was tolled annually to celebrate George Washington’s birthday on February 22 and the Fourth of July. The name “Liberty Bell” wasn’t used until an 1839 poem about abolishing slavery.
Contrary to public belief, the famous crack in the bell, rendering it useless except as a symbol, did not occur during its most famous swing and ring, but while tolling to mark the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall, in 1835. Sounding a bit off but still used for another decade, the bell was still used until 1846 when the crack got worse while ringing out to mark George’s birthday that year. It was retired after that.
I learned about the crack when the Disneyland TV show’s “Ballad of Davy Crockett” epic reached the episode accompanied by the verse that went,
He went off to Congress an’ served a spell Fixin’ up the Govern’ments an’ laws as well Took over Washin’ton so we heered tell An’ patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell Davy, Davy Crockett, seein’ his duty clear!
1. I just noticed that Tom Cruise violated the ethics rules in “The Firm.” In the film of John Grisham’s legal thriller, Tom Cruise’s character Mitch McDeere works mightily to avoid disbarment by solving his dilemma (his firm is a Mafia ally) without violating the Rules of Professional Conduct. But Mitch has already engaged in a serious ethics breach by engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. He gives legal advice [Notice of Correction: I erroneously wrote “ethics advice” by mistake when this was posted.] advice to a big client of his firm before he has passed the Tennessee Bar exam and been sworn in. That’s practicing law, and he can’t do that.
Maybe he hadn’t gotten to that part of the Tennessee Rules of Professional Conduct while he was studying for the exam…
President Biden has announced that there will be a door-to-door campaign designed to inform people in less-vaccinated sections of the country to encourage getting the shots and to address concerns about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. Many Republican, conservatives and civil libertarians fell the plan is an abuse of power. “How about don’t knock on my door. You’re not my parents. You’re the government. Make the vaccine available, and let people be free to choose. Why is that concept so hard for the left?” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) tweeted. “The government now wants to go door-to-door to convince you to get an ‘optional’ vaccine,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, (R-Colo)., snarked. Some reactions were a bit more hysterical, such as this from GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:
“Biden pushing a vaccine that is NOT FDA approved shows covid is a political tool used to control people. People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations. You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment.”
But you know…Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Is a representative of the Federal Government coming to your home to try to get you to do something you have chosen not to do or may not want to do an abuse of power? It might be. I have ruled it unethical for uniformed police officers to come to homes seeking contributions to police charities, and indeed this practice has largely been stopped because it was viewed as inherently coercive. A government representative coming to your home to urge you to do anything, from paying taxes to brushing your teeth, may be stressful and feel like the heavy hand of Big Brothers. Moreover, such a visit strongly suggests “We are watching you!”
My guess is that the national public health goal of having as many Americans vaccinated as possible would be seen by most courts as a sufficient justification for this minimal incursion on public privacy, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more court rule that the government has no business coming to you home to metaphorically twist your arm.
The Ethics Alarms verdict is that door-to-door visits are ethically defensible if…
Each home targeted for such a visits gets advance notice of at least 72 hours, and an opportunity to opt out.
The government representative begins every visit by handing out a document and reciting it’s contents, which should be something like a Miranda Warning:
Hello, my name is XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, and I am representing the Federal Government in a national effort to encourage the public to be fully vaccinated against the Wuhan virus. You have no obligation to listen to me, invite me into your home, take or read the materials I have for you or to get vaccinated. If you prefer, I will leave immediately. However, I would be grateful if you would allow me to explain why it is important for you and members of your family to get vaccinated, and to answer any questions you might have. If you decline this visit, there will be no penalties or consequences, nor will your decision be noted on any government records.
Update: Upon thinking some more about this, I would want to see this added:
“Furthermore. no benefits or advantages will accrue to any of your neighbors who do not decline to speak with me, allow me into their homes, or accept my materials.”
Absent such warning, any visit by a government employee (or volunteer) is potentially coercive and an abuse of government power.
How long before the sad and seamy saga of President Biden’s desperate, influence-peddling son blows up in Joe’s face? It would have and should have already, but the mainstream news media has scrupulously refused to publicize, much less investigate, the many hints of family-level corruption emerging from the First Family Black Sheep’s emails. The latest development is Hunter Biden, the Acclaimed Artist. No, that isn’t a microscope photo of the Wuhan virus above—that’s a Hunter Biden masterpiece. How much would you pay to have that hanging in your living room? (How much would you pay NOT to have that hanging in your living room?)
A New York gallery owner, Georges Bergès, is planning to offer Hunter’s artwork to buyers for prices ranging from from $75,000 to $500,000, despite the fact that art critics have described Hunter’s paintings as “not bad” at best, and “generic post zombie formalism illustration” at worst, which was the assessment of art critic Jerry Saltz in Artnet News. Scott Indrisek, the former editor in chief of Modern Painters magazine and a former deputy editor at Artsy, said: “I would call it very much a hotel art aesthetic. It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine. It’s somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”
So why would anyone pay so much for paintings by someone who has no professional training and has never sold art on the commercial market? You know why.
Above is the mug shot for 31-year-old Bridgette Frank, arrested in California last week on a felony bad check charge and for failing to appear in court in a misdemeanor case. her record includes convictions for drunk driving, assault with a deadly weapon, child cruelty, and narcotics possession.
Note her shirt, which appears to be an incredibly inept knock-off of a Louis Vuitton T-shirt, since it, you know, spells “Vuitton” wrong. That’s Stupid Level One.
Stupid Level Two is that the knock-off was still not so stupid that it couldn’t fool Frank. Oh, you may choose to argue that Bridget is just full of sly, ironic humor and is wearing the self-identifying moron shirt for laughs. Go ahead. She strikes you as a P.G. Wodehouse aficionado, does she? That conclusion might qualify as Stupid Level Three, but it’s not.
This is: after the Smoking Gun’s article about the shirt concluded with “Public records do not indicate whether, at the time of Frank’s arrest, she was wearing a Rolez watch or carrying a Channel handbag,” commenter Thomas D Fitzpatrick asked, “What is a Rolez watch?”
Sigh.
The Ethics Alarms motto that “Bias makes you stupid” has its corollary in “Jack’s Observation” that “Stupid makes you unethical,” leading to the depressing but undeniable Ron White’s Law, “You can’t fix stupid.” How much of America’s ethics crisis flows from that sequence?
Let me preface this absurd episode by saying that it makes no sense whatsoever, not ethically, not logically, and certainly not legally.
Craig Doran, the chief judge of the region that includes Rochester, New York, has resigned from his administrative judicial duties because an old photograph turned up from 1988 when he was a second-year law student. It was, yes, from a Halloween party, and showed him costumed as a “well-known public figure of color.” We aren’t even told who in any of the media reports. In case your calculator isn’t handy, that was 33 years ago.
Since his graduation from law school, Doran has had a stellar career. Elected in 1994 to represent New York State’s 129th Assembly District in the State Legislature, he was appointed Supervising Judge of Family Courts in the Seventh Judicial District in 2006. . In 2011, he was appointed Administrative Judge of the Seventh Judicial District, making him the chief supervisor of all Courts in an eight-county region. He has also been the Presiding Judge of Drug Treatment Courts, a member of the NYS Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children, has served as Chair of the Judicial Commission on Interbranch Relations, Co-Chair of the NYS Juvenile Justice Strategic Planning Advisory Committee (advising the Governor on statewide juvenile justice policy), and as a member of the Office of Court Administration Raise the Age (RTA) Task Force. Judge Doran was selected to serve on the Judiciary Task Force on the Constitution, and the Judicial Commission on Parental Representation, and has also been active as a law professor at the University of Rochester and at Keuka College. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at the former, teaching upper level classes in the Legal Studies, and with the latter in the Adult Studies Criminal Justice Bachelor and Master’s Degree Programs, and also as an Instructor Expert for the Center for Professional Studies and International Programs at Keuka.
Never mind: what’s really important is what he wore as his costume at a law student Halloween Party.
The image above was tweeted out by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. It really was. It was also deleted in seconds, but not before enough people and bots captured it to set the stage for her to get swamped by online mockery.
How much crap is it fair and ethical to give a public official who has this happen to her? My answer: an endless amount. Obviously Bowser didn’t do this; the incompetent she assigned to send out tweets in her name did. Too bad. If you delegate your identity, you are responsible for what goes out under your name. Should Bowser get more or less flack than, just to pick an example out of the air, Donald Trump, who sent out his own tweets and was widely mocked for every typo, poor chosen re-tweet, or dumb comment.?
Exactly the same amount.
This meme has been going around on Twitter…
Boy, I didn’t see that ending coming. I thought we would learn that the one hired was the interviewee who left first….which would have been me, after about 30 minutes.
Anyone who would agree to work for a manifest asshole like the employer in the story is such a pathetic weenie that he or she deserves the abuse that such a job would inevitably entail.
I sure hope it’s not a true story. And I hope only a tiny percentage of those seeing the meme are not so foolish and submissive as to think this was a test of “patience.”
These tweets have not made me regret my decision to get off of Twitter.
Now on to Facebook, which isevidently trying to make me quit that platform too…
1. I’d make a whole post out of this, but it would be short. Conservatives are beginning to call for video cameras in classrooms. Tucker Carlson promoted the idea on his show last night. Naturally, teachers are horrified. There is no good reason not to video classrooms, from kindergarten through the 12th grade. Parents can’t take time off from work to monitor classrooms, as would be ideal, so they should have the option of reviewing videos of what transpired. Teachers were in a profession, like police, the clergy and journalists , who were once regarded as inherently trustworthy. That, we now know, was sentimental and lazy fantasy.
Carlson’s justification for the measure was to make sure Critical Race Theory wasn’t being jammed into impressionable young brains, but videos would have made sense before CRT was a twinkle in Cori Bush’s eye. I don’t want teachers pushing their political and social views about anything on kids. If they talk about current events, I want to see that they are competent, informed, and not injecting bias into education. Are they touching children inappropriately? Flirting with students? Treating boys tougher than girls? Being cruel or mean?
“Trust but verify” has few more appropriate applications than in checking the conduct of teachers.
