accountability

Ethics Dunce: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This news item has the added advantage for me of adding to my file, now voluminous, of ridiculous legal theories that nonetheless cannot be sanctioned violations of Rule 3.1: Meritorious Claims & Contentions, aka. “Frivolous claims” when they are used as the justification for lawsuits. (The profession’s aversion to punishing lawyers for Hail Mary lawsuits apparently applies to all lawyers accept those representing Donald Trump.) Mostly, however, it demonstrates how completely incompetent another progressive big city mayor is when it comes to dealing with crime.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) announced yesterday that his crime-ridden hell-hole of city, rife with property crimes and murder, will be suing automakers Kia and Hyundai for “their failure to include industry-standard engine immobilizers in multiple models of their vehicles.” This, the theory goes, is why there are so many car thefts in the Windy City.

Yes, it’s the cars’ fault that they get stolen! It certainly isn’t the fault of the car thieves, whom the new mayor wants to see treated with compassion, care and as little punishment as possible. Even though the crime explosion in Chicago was the main reason he defeated the previous mayor, Lori Lightfoot (that, and the fact that she was dishonest and incompetent), Johnson’s plan to stop crime is pure John Lennon wishery: defund as much of the police as possible, seek “restorative justice” and “treatment over punishment,” and have judges who will avoid handing down jail sentences.

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Ethics Hero: ESPN Pundit Stephen A. Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Boy, that’s a headline I thought I’d never write! Smith was a major reason I dropped ESPN from our satellite package: here’s a typical post about his work. The kind of loud-mouthed opinionated jackass that I’d get up and move away from if he was holding forth near me at a bar, if Smith were a white pundit who talked about blacks the way Smith talks about whites, he would be fired mid-sentence. I still stand by the last thing I wrote about Smith in that post: “‘Ethics Dunce’ doesn’t really describe someone like Smith, an arrogant narcissist who feels entitled to inflame racial resentment and division while not only profiting from it, but complaining that he isn’t profiting from it enough. What is that? Maybe it’s just as simple as ‘asshole’.”

And yet…here we are. That video above is from Smith’s podcast, “The Stephen A. Smith Show.” In this case, the fact that Smith sees anti-black racism in all things actually helps. His bias, and he’s all bias, all the time, gives him credibility here. If anyone would be thrilled to excuse black culture malignancy by crying “systemic racism,” it would be Smith. Instead, the amazing number of shootings in Chicago over the Memorial Day Weekend prompted Smith to ask the black community: “When are we going to look at ourselves when it comes to black people being killed in the streets of America?”

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And Now For Something Completely Stupid! Will Somebody Please Explain To This Guy The Concept Of “Accountability”?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That’s Anthony Loffredo above. He used to look like the inset photo, but now he calls himself the “black alien,” having surgically removed his ears, nostrils and a few fingers so he could have claws. He also sharpened his teeth and dyed them purple, while getting tattooed from head to toe.

Hey, good luck to you, dude! Whatever floats your boat!

But now Tony has authored a complaint in the New York Post. He feels put-upon and discriminated against because restaurants refuse to serve him. They say he scares the customers.

Imagine that!

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Lock ‘Em Up!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, a group of corporate managers and their lackeys will actually have to spend time in prison for killing people, instead of just reaching into company coffers and paying a fine. If that does happen to the Boeing villains, it might save a lot of lives.

Boeing negotiated an agreement with federal prosecutors allowing it to pay a fine of $2.5 billion instead of being prosecuted for killing the 300 passengers who didn’t know they were flying in a plane, the 737 Max that its makers knew was going to crash sooner or later, and probably sooner. The families of the victims of that crash opposed the settlement on the grounds that the government violated their rights by agreeing to it without consulting them first. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled last year that the victims were victims of a deadly crime so the government should have consulted with their heirs. This week, Judge O’Connor specifically ordered Boeing to present representatives for a criminal arraignment, meaning that he has rejected the settlement, and that there will be criminal charges after all.

Good.

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Empathy And Compassion Are Ethical Values But This Idiot Deserves Neither

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

…unless, of course, we should have compassion and empathy for unapologetic, self-destructive idiots like Anaya Peterson.

Peterson is a mother of five and—KABOOM!—a law student, but nonetheless thought it would be a good idea to get her eyes tattooed. After all, Australian model Amber Luke tattooed her eyes a vivid blue and only went blind for three weeks! That was good enough for Peterson, whose seven-year-old daughter cautioned her that the procedure was too risky. “What if you go blind?” the kid asked? Oh pshaw, Mom answered; adults know best.

Now it looks as if Mother may go blind after all. “I don’t have 20/20 vision anymore. From a distance, I can’t see features on faces,” Peterson told the media. “If I didn’t have my eyeballs tattooed, I wouldn’t be having this problem. Even today I woke up with more floaters in my eyes. And that is dangerous.” Continue reading →

Leadership Ethics: The First Lady’s Ignorant Whine

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Dr. Jill is having a difficult month. I almost put her latest post-breakfast taco remarks under the “Unethical Quote” heading, but her infuriating comments during a private Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts qualify as more ignorant and incompetent than anything else.

Attempting to defend her husband’s miserable performance as President over the past 18 months and to rebut the public’s overwhelmingly negative assessment of his Presidency so far, the First Lady whined—and yes, that is a fair characterization—

“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment…He’s just had so many things thrown his way. Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.” 

Awww, poor Joe! He’s had to deal with the same challenge as every other President since the beginning of the Republic! Damn! It’s just one thing after another! Who could have predicted it?

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Comment Of The Day (1): “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Keeping up with the Supreme Court draft Alito opinion Freakout and the other ethics offal flying around has put me seriously behind in posting deserving Comments of the Day. There are two related to the May 5 Freakout post alone; this is the first of them, a neat summary of the state of affairs in Woke World.

Here is sooner 8728’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”…

***

If you notice, the far left’s policies are always about removing responsibility for bad decisions. You had reckless sex? Get rid of the baby. You didn’t pay your rent because you smoked pot and lost your job? Unemployment benefits. You don’t want to go back to work because you have an irrational fear of COVID-19? Let’s keep paying your rent. You committed a crime (and you are a minority), no jail time or possibly even a fine.

The test is too hard? Lower the standards. You can’t speak proper English? Attack proper English as elitist. Your culture teaches that it’s okay to beat your wife? Don’t judge other cultures who are different than you? There’s a dumbing down going on in this country. [Host’s Note: This process is what Ethics Alarms refers to as “The Great Stupid.”] Continue reading →

Tales of The Great Stupid: The FAA And The Crash Video

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

One of the really, really bad ideas that has taken toxic root in Woke World, which includes the Biden administration, is that penalties and punishments are mean, and that the consequences of deliberate wrongdoing should be minimal even when the miscreant isn’t “of color.”

This will not, as they say, turn out well.

Last November, Trevor Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder turned Youtube entrepreneur, crashed his small propeller airplane into the mountains of California’s Los Padres National Forest after the propeller stopped spinning. The exact moment when his plane’s propeller seized was caught on camera, as was his jump out of the airplane with a parachute. He used a selfie stick to film his descent. Three weeks later, Jacob posted a YouTube video titled “I Crashed My Plane.” It got over 2 million views. The video features Jacob narrating his brave trek out of the forest and his eventual rescue. “I’m just so happy to be alive!” Jacob exclaims at one point.

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They Just Couldn’t Do It…Critic Wesley Morris And The New York Times Blow Up Standards, Ethics And My Head To Try To Excuse Will Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Two graphics are called for to introduce this ethics horror. This:

..because I had hoped against hope that I wouldn’t have to write another post about Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock during the Oscars broadcast. But it is obviously and ethics train wreck now, and I have no choice. And this…

…because I am stunned, shocked, and disgusted, and think, or perhaps hope, that we have reached a tipping point where the sensible people in this nation say, “Enough!”

Spuds had woken me from a sound sleep up to go outside, good boy that he is, and though I was ready to go back to bed, I made the mistake of picking up the New York Times from my lawn. Then I made the bigger mistake of taking it to the bathroom with me, and the bigger mistake yet of turning to the Arts section. And there it was: an epic, head-exploding, all-in screed by Times critic Wesley Morris explaining why Will Smith was not really to blame for his astounding, incredible, unethical, unprofessional, unjust, infantile, and criminal attack on comedian Chris Rock (who will get his Ethics Hero award from me today). but just about everyone else and everything else was.

I’m taking a pause now because my head feels ready to go off again…

They just couldn’t do it, could they? The Left, the race-baiters, black activists, the news media and the opinion-making elite could not stop themselves from turning an attack by one black celebrity on another into another bigoted weapon in the “antiracism” war against American culture. I’m such an idiot. With everything we’ve seen, I just didn’t see it coming. Oh, I expected the racists and bigots on the right to try to make Smith actions symbolic of something rotten and predictable in black culture; except for the hypocrisy of its source, I agree with the assessment of Bernice A. King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King wrote, “Anybody who thinks ‘Black people look bad’ after the #Oscars already thought Black people look bad.” But I should have seen this stage coming, the desperate need to make Smith the victim instead of Rock, and someone, something, the wrongdoer instead of Smith. The big clue was the Oscar audience giving Smith a huge ovation after he had slapped Rock for an award he should not have been allowed to accept. I should read what I write sometimes: I already mused in one post about how different the response would have been if it had been Alec Baldwin slapping Rock.

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What Is The Appropriate Response To These Companies?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Target puppy

With crime rates soaring in many cities and “smash and garb” raids disrupting large retailers, companies like Home Depot, Nordstom’s and Target are calling on communities to increase policing. By “like,” I mean companies that previously hailed Black Lives Matter and other anti-policing organizations,, festooned their stores, ads and websites with endorsements of BLM as it vilified law enforcement and called for “defunding” the police, and gave large grants to it and other “social justice” movements seeking to reduce police protection of communities across the nation.

It was all part of “The Big Pander” sub-division of The Great Stupid, itself fueled by the George Floyd Freakout, because it makes perfect sense to decide that a single brutal police incident proves that all police are racist menaces. The fake history “1619 Project” and offshoots of Critical Race Theory also were bolstered by these corporations’ cynical virtue-signaling, at a time when catering to criminals is seen as a virtue.

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