Unethical? Uncivil? Unprofessional? I’m Not Sure What This Is, But I Am Sure No Competent Mayor Would Do It..

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

mayor_of_charlottesville_03-24-2021-1

Walker is the Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia.

And they said Donald Trump posted inappropriate tweets…

After that delightful ditty was taken down by Facebook, the Honorable Mayor posted the whole poem, of which she is apparently proud, on Twitter:

mayor_of_charlottesville 2

Either she is having a nervous breakdown, of the citizens of Charlottesville are the most incompetent voters in the nation. I’m desperately searching to find another example of an elected official publicly announcing that he or she hates the city she has vowed to serve. It is a per se breach of loyalty and civic responsibility.

She is ethically obligated to resign. I’m sure she can support herself with her poetry…

Rainy Day Ethics Puddles, 3/24/2021:

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

1 Shut up or be funny. For some reason, the fact that Monday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers’ included a gratuitous and facile lecture by the host about gun control legislation was plastered all over the progressive news media as if he had begun speaking in tongues or channeling the ghost of Emily Dickinson. I hate to be a spoil sport, but who cares what Seth Myers thinks about gun control? He’s a comedian and a comedy writer, and has been nothing but since college. Again, he has no brief to lecture anyone on that topic: he has his job to be funny, and the show he hosts is, theoretically at least, a comedy show. Did Julia Child ever lecture her PBS audience about U.S. nuclear policy while explaining how to cook an omelette? No. Did Walter Cronkite ever break into knock-knock jokes during The CBS Evening News? Never. Did Andy Williams ever pause in the middle of “Moon River” to deliver his analysis of a Presidential campaign? Absolutely not.

Myers has a right to his opinion, as sophomoric and echo chamber-nourished as it may be (he was pimping for “common sense gun laws,” which is what people say when they have no idea what laws will stop the criminal use of guns, but want us to “do something”), but it is arrogant and presumptuous to perform a bait and switch on his audience, which doesn’t come to his show for public policy wisdom. If they do, he has an ethical obligation to make it clear that they shouldn’t. As far as I can tell, Myers knows zilch about law, guns, government, or the Constitution, yet he presumes to use a vehicle awarded to him only because of an alleged gift for topical humor (personally, I don’t see it) for political advocacy.

Be funny, get educated, run for office, or shut up, Seth. And incidentally, there are not mass shootings “three or four times a week” and never have been. In a single atypical week, there were two mass shootings, and no Constitutional gun laws are likely to have stopped either of them.

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Wow, Bias Really DOES Make You Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The New York Times, like many shameless purveyors of left-leaning propaganda, has responded to the copious metaphorical blood drawn by the conservative (and funny) satire site The Babylon Bee by accusing it of being a “misinformation site.”

Morons.

Snopes, the dishonest “factchecking” site, has fallen into this pit of despond more than once, but then their idiocy is a matter of record (that places like Facebook choose to ignore for some reason). The Times’ political coverage has been sliding from slanted to dishonest to disgraceful, but I assumed—because I am a sap—that the paper was still above this.

No, it isn’t.

In a recent Times article, article, the Bee was referred to as an example of a “far-right misinformation site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.” This is approximately as valid as accusing the late Mad Magazine of being a misinformation vehicle. Fortunately, the people who run the Bee are not weenies. They responded,

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Prof. Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Not only could Chauvin be acquitted or left with a hung jury, but the impact could be the collapse of all four cases. That will be up to the jury. But if there is violence after the verdict, it will be far worse if the public is not aware up front of the serious challenges in proving this case.’

—Prof. Jonathan Turley in a column for The Hill, explaining that a conviction for Derek Chauvin in the George Floyd murder trial in Minneapolis is far from certain despite the news media refusing to inform the public of that fact.

As is too often the case, Turley professorially states a critical fact without appropriate indignation regarding its implications. Not only has the news media, in Turley’s words, “failed to shoulder their own burden to discuss the countervailing evidence in the case, ” it has done so because “there is a palpable fear that even mentioning countervailing defense arguments will trigger claims of racism or insensitivity to police abuse.” What are these, children? Journalists are supposed to be professionals. Yet Turley says—correctly, unfortunately—they they are deliberately misleading the public, and making a violent reaction to the eventual verdict in Chauvin’s trial more likely by feeding a false narrative rather than conveying essential facts.

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Just Bake The Damn Cake, Jack!

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

trans cake

Jack Phillips, the stubborn Christian baker who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, is being sued again, this time because he refused to make a custom cake celebrating a clients’ gender transition. In 2012, the baker refused to bake a custom cake for a same-sex wedding and was accused of unlawful discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 for Phillips overturning the decision of the Commission on the grounds that it was obviously biased against him as well as devout Christians. One commissioner even compared Phillips’s invocation of his Christian beliefs to justify rejecting the cake design to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. Yeah, I remember that the Nazis were really unreasonable about cakes. SCOTUS never reached the constitutional question of whether the government can compel people to create speech or artistic expressions they object to on religious grounds or otherwise.

If a custom cake design is art, then I think the answer to this is easy: no. Similarly wedding photographs, though if you used what we got from our wedding photographer, calling them “art” is a stretch.

With a conservative Supreme Court, the baker wins. And yet…

The first time around, after finally getting all the facts, I held that both Phillips and the gay couple who obviously targeted him to bend him to their will were being jerks. My position hasn’t changed a bit. I wrote here,

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Comment Of The Day: “Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/23/2021: Shots” [Item #1: McDonald’s]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

mcdonalds drive-thru

I have been at war periodically with our two local McDonald’s, one of which I have permanently boycotted since a manager there insisted that when my son’s friend ordered a “cheeseburger with nothing on it,” it was reasonable to omit the cheese. The other one is notorious for non-English speaking drive-up order-takers, long delays, and, as in this instance, botched orders. I wish I had prompted Michael R’s Comment of the Day on Item #1 of today’s warm-up years ago.

Here it is, a cautionary tale to be sure…

Why is McDonald’s messed up? I can tell you why, because I lived through it.. McDonald’s used to be pretty fast and efficient. McDonald’s stores were a mix of franchisees and Corporate-owned stores. The McDonald’s Corporation provided training and support for franchisees and their key staff, but franchisees ran their own stores and had some latitude in how that was done.

In the early 1990’s, the Corporation found that their most profitable stores were ALL owned by franchisees. They couldn’t understand it. The Corporation was staffed by highly-trained experts and professionals. The franchisees were just Joe-blow off the street hiring their relatives for managers. How could average people out-perform the EXPERTS? They decided that the franchisees must have lucked into ALL the good locations. So, they proceeded to buy up all the best-performing McDonald’s in the country. These were ‘fast stores’, averaging over $20,000 in sales/day at the time. After a year of corporate ownership, however, these stores had all become ‘slow’ stores, with well under $10,000/day in sales. The McDonald’s Corporation even sued several of the former franchisees, claiming that their sales figures must have been faked, because the ‘experts’ couldn’t replicate the success.

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Ethics Hero: Dave Cieslewicz. Sort Of…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Mayor Dave

Dave Cieslewicz is an ex-mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, one of the more super-woke college towns, though they are all super-woke these days. Avid reader and commenter Steve Witherspoon nominated him for the Ethics Hero honor because he wrote a recent post on his blog rejecting Critical Race Theory. I initially misread Steve’s email to say that the post was from the current Madison mayor. Now that would have been courageous: students with pitchforks and torches would have gathered outside her home the second such a post hit the web. No, Cieslewicz, a he not a her, was mayor a decade ago, long before the shadow of The Great Stupid fell across the land.

I have some trouble designating anyone an ethics hero for stating what should be obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together. Dave Cieslewicz calls himself a moderate, which only shows what is regarded as a moderate in Madison: he’s a hard progressive in almost every respect. He’s just not a racist, anti-American progressive, the most visible species in 2021.

Does not being an anti-white racist and saying so out loud in a hotbed of Marxism like Madison qualify someone as an Ethics Hero now? I guess so.

That’s depressing. I thought Ethics Heroes were supposed to lift our spirits.

Cieslewicz writes in part,

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/23/2021: Shots

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This morning served as a perfect example of how the news is now automatically politicized and prioritized for partisan ends. On CNN, a panel was discussing the mass shooting in Boulder. Colorado, and instantly transforming the segment into gun-control mass rant. On Fox, the crisis of the day was the chaos at the border, where the virtual open-borders policies everyone—including those planning to be illegal immigrants—knew would come in along with the Biden administration is having the predictable effects. That segment was a diatribe against the wink-wink, nudge-nudge Democratic enabling of uncontrolled immigration.

CNN wins in the closely contested dubious ethics category by having “contributor” Andrew McCabe on the panel. McCabe epitomized the FBI’s corrupt and partisan efforts to injure the Trump Administration from within; he leaked information to the media and lied about it; he was fired, and deserved to be. McCabe’s high-profile anti-Trump conduct was sufficient to get him a gig on CNN, where being part of “the resistance” is all one needs to endear oneself to the Trump Deranged.

McCabe should have lost his law license, as any attorney who leaks confidential information should, and personally, I wouldn’t trust him to walk my dog.

1. You want to be paid $15 an hour for doing a job this poorly? This morning, having been forced to get up and move my car at 7 am, I decided to drive to the local McDoanld’s for my favorite guilty morning pleasure, a sausage biscuit and some hash browns. For once I could understand the heavily accented woman on the intercom, and I made a clear and distinct order. But given false security by this unusual development, for the first time in a long while I didn’t check the bag—this McDonald’s bats about .500 in getting orders right—and sure enough, when I arrived home, I found an Egg McMuffin instead of a sausage biscuit. I hate Egg McMuffins.

This isn’t brain surgery. I know it’s a crummy job, but it is what they are being paid for. Don’t tell me someone who is that inattentive deserves “a living wage.” Pay them for not working, if you foolishly want to treat them as charity cases; at least then they aren’t getting rewarded for doing a job badly.

2. Why can’t McDonald’s work this efficiently? My experience getting my first Wuhan virus vaccination (in Alexandria, Virginia) was excellent. The elaborate process, staged at a middle school about five minutes from my home, was well-planned, cheerful, and quick, even on a Saturday with long lines. I must have personally thanked ten volunteers.

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Perhaps The Strangest Unethical Prosecutor Story Yet

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

doordash

I have written about over-zealous prosecutors and incompetent prosecutors. I have written about a prosecutor who moonlighted as a dominatrix and another who moonlighted as an NFL cheerleader; a prosecutor who helped his drug-dealing prepare nickel bags, and a prosecutor who faked sleeping during trials to distract the jury from a defense attorney’s closing argument. However, I never thought I would see this.

Greg Shore, the first assistant district attorney in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, not only moonlighted as a delivery driver for the online food ordering company DoorDash, he did so during his work hours as a prosecutor. As in, “I’m sorry, I can’t work on my closing argument right now, I have to get this Chinese food order across town, stat.” Or “Hey, thanks for the barbecue delivery–wait! Aren’t you the guy prosecuting the man who raped my wife?“

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Mid-Day Ethics Alarms, 3/22/2021: A Wonderful Father And A Judge Sees The Light, Though Others Not So Much…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Alarms2

1. Spitballing ethics? When everyone is throwing out ideas—you know, “Just say whatever crazy thing pops into your head, don’t worry whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea, just let ’em rip!” is it fair later to hold someone to account because a discarded idea was offensive or politically incorrect? I tend to think not.

Hiroshi Sasaki, the creative director for Tokyo Olympics, was participating in a brainstorming session about the opening ceremony with members of a committee a year ago, and at one point suggested that a popular overweight female Japanese comedian and plus-size fashion designer, Naomi Watanabe, be costumed in pig ears, perhaps a snout and curly tail, and parachute out of the heavens as an Olympic messenger: “Olympig.”

No? OK, bad idea. Let’s move on. The inspiration received immediate negative reviews in the private meeting, but when the president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, Yoshiro Mori, 83, resigned this year after saying that women talk too much in meetings, the year-old conversation about “Olympig” was recalled in an article on the website of “Shukan Bunshun,” a weekly magazine. Yes, one of Sasaki’s trusted colleagues had talked. (That’s an easy call: Unethical.)

So you know what comes next, right? Groveling. “Now many people know what I wrote. I cannot apologize enough to Ms. Watanabe,” he said, adding that he was a big fan of hers. “I have been trying not to hurt others by making fun of diversity, gender and physical appearances. But it was a great misunderstanding. I realized my low consciousness and insensitivity.” He resigned.

Now you know that at least for now, when someone says to just suggest whatever pops into your head, no filters, no fear, don’t.

On the positive side, it’s comforting to know that The Great Stupid isn’t just an American phenomenon.

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