integrity

A Show Of Hands, Now: Who’s Shocked That A “Technology Misinformation” Expert Used A.I. Generated Fake Information?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

geewhatasurprise. But as Mastercard would say, this story is priceless.

Professor Jeff Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, and his faculty biography states that he is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology.” Apparently he knows the subject very well: Hancock submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation in Minnesota that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology in support of a candidate (or to discredit one) in an election. Republican state Rep. Mary Franson is challenging the law in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment (which, of course, it is). But Democrats don’t like the First Amendment. Surely you know that by now.

But I digress…

Continue reading →

Megyn and Mika and Joe, Oh My! Three Ethics Dunces

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Not merely social media chatterers but many others (like Nikki Haley, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Fox News (of course) and CNN’s John Berman, and, if anyone cares, Keith Olberman) are castigating MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who chattered away yesterday about how they had flown to Mar-A-Largo to kiss the ring, or ass, or whatever, of President-Elect Trump. This seemed like a craven reversal of their stance during the entire campaign, one that became more extreme and shrill as Election Day approached, that Trump was a fool, a racist, an enemy of democracy, a threat to the nation, and literally an American Hitler. The pilgrimage to Florida seemed like a craven reversal because that’s what it was. Joe and Mika proved that they are, at heart, “Good Germans.”

Trump has done nothing since his election that would warrant the Trump-Deranged from abandoning their hysterical position, since he had done nothing to justify it in the first place. All the obsequious reversal by the “Morning Joe” duo indicated was hypocrisy and a complete lack of integrity, not that we didn’t already know that. To be fair to Joe and Mika, they work for MSNBC, where nobody knows the meaning of integrity, honesty, or “ethics.” It’s a propaganda arm of the Angry Left. All “Morning Joe” does is follow orders. This spectacular double-reverse backflip in mid-air (I’m mentally humming “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”) however, is despicable even by MSNBC’s wretched standards.

Continue reading →

Wait, I’m Sorry, I’m Getting All Confused: WHICH Is the Party That Is An Existential Threat To Democracy?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yesterday, Ethics Alarms noted [Item #6] that Democrats in Pennsylvania had voted in favor of counting mail-in ballots that were ruled invalid by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and will be counting those disqualified ballots to try to overturn the apparent victory of GOP Senator-elect Dave McCormick over incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in the upcoming recount. The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on November 7, and he is now leading Casey by over 17,000 votes.

This fondness for counting void votes is, of course, passing strange conduct from the party whose captive journalists keep saying that President-Elect Trump’s four years of claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen” from him are “completely groundless.” Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes are among those the incoming President felt were stolen. Call me crazy and paint me puce, but I’d say deliberately and openly counting votes the state Supreme Court says are invalid is prima facie evidence that this a party not above cheating to hold onto power.

Now, after the Republican National Committee sued last week after several counties decided to openly cheat by counting ballots with incorrect dates, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court today reiterated its decision from November 5. Justice David Wecht wrote in his concurring statement that it is “critical to the rule of law that individual counties and municipalities and their elected and appointed officials, like any other parties, obey orders of this Court.” Justice Kevin Brobson likewise wrote that local election officials do not “have the authority to ignore Election Code provisions that they believe are unconstitutional.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed on November 1 that requiring mail-in ballots to have handwritten dates is constitutional.

Continue reading →

Oh Look! Now the LEFT Is Complaining About Lawyers Being Reluctant To Represent Unpopular Clients!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In 2020, as discussed here, The NeverTrump Lincoln Project joined the anti-Trump Democrats in targeting law firms hired by the Trump campaign to challenge alleged irregularities in the election. Election law specialists Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur and its lawyers were threatened with professional ruin and financial disaster, as they were told that daring to support the President of the United States constitutes a “dangerous attack on our democracy.” The firm, showing a dearth of legal ethics and integrity, withdrew, whining that the assault on its reputation created a conflict of interest, was disrupting the firm, and had prompted at least one lawyer’s resignation. Other firms dropped the campaign as a client, and the reason was fear—of losing clients, of being shunned in the legal community, of losing money. Mostly the latter.

How times had changed. When Bush Department of Defense Deputy Secretary Cully Stimson, a lawyer, gave a radio interview in which he condemned attorneys from large law firms who were representing Guantanamo Bay detainees pro bono and suggested that corporations avoid employing those firms because they were aiding the nation’s enemies, the legal profession reacted with indignation and horror. Karen J. Mathis, then the president of the American Bar Association, said, “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.” Prof. Stephen Gillers, the media’s favorite legal ethicist thanks to his penchant for being hard on conservatives and lenient on liberals, wrote, “This is prejudicial to the administration of justice. It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.” Christopher Moore, a lawyer at the New York firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton continued the profession’s defense of core lawyer ethics, telling the New York Times, “We believe in the concept of justice and that every person is entitled to counsel.”

Continue reading →

Squirrel Ethics: The P’Nut Saga [Corrected and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

State government officials this week seized and ultimately destroyed P’Nut, a pet squirrel with a popular Instagram page, in Pine City, New York. Somehow, conservatives have decided to make this incident some kind of watershed for state abuse of personal liberties , not to mention pet squirrels. Thus P’Nut has become an election issue; Hey, why not, everything else is from McDonald’s to Liz Cheney. First pet squirrels, next guns and free enterprise. “First, they came for P’Nut, and I said nothing…”

Give me a break.

Mark Longo adopted P’Nut seven years ago in New York City as an orphaned baby squirrel that crawled up his leg after his mommy was squished by a car. The squirrel ended up with his own room, and when Longo and his wife were at home the furry friend wandered wherever he wanted in their house. Longo described P’Nut as “the most charismatic, sassy animal.”

P’Nut also was a profitable animal. The rodent became the face and name of P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary, a nonprofit Longo and his wife started in April. The Longos contribute half of the organization’s roughly $20,000-a-month expenses to run the sanctuary and donors supply the other half, with most of those donations raised largely through cute P’Nut videos posted on Instagram. “We have rescued over 300 animals in our sanctuary already,” Longo said. “Cats, dogs, horses, goats, sheep, donkeys and pigs.”

Ah! The ends justify the means! Here is the problem: it is illegal to keep wildlife like squirrels as pets, in New York as well as many other states. The full list is here. (Pointer: jeffguinn) According to that source, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming all allow people to own pet squirrels. [Note: This is a correction from the original post, in which I assumed that all states would have prohibited P’Nut.]

None of which is relevant to the law in New York and it’s enforcement.

“Following multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets, D.E.C. conducted an investigation,” the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said in a statement after P’Nut was seized. “Investigation” is a bit sanitized: the operation has been described as a raid, and sure sounds like one. Before the officers left with P’Nut (and a raccoon, which nobody seems to care about), they “ransacked my entire house,” Longo said. “They made me sit outside for five hours.”

Presumably they were making sure that the house didn’t contain any other illegal residents. “We have had P’nut for seven years without a single complaint,” Longo said. “Now it’s suddenly an issue? It’s not like we were hiding him.”

Well, yes. That’s the problem. Longo and his wife were openly violating a law, and the argument for letting P’Nut keep hiding his nuts under their rugs is simple: the law is the law, there is no exception for cute law-breaking or profitable law-breaking. Regardless of the squirrel’s popularity and use in fundraising for a worthy cause, a law that isn’t enforced when it is broken for reasons some people think are justifications isn’t a law at all.

This isn’t just one slippery slope, it is several. Today it’s P’Nut the Squirrels, then it’s whenever that raccoon was, and tomorrow it’s Chewy the Wolverine.

“To the people who filed complaints, thank you for taking away the best part of me, thank you for taking away my best friend,” Longo whined online.

Conservatives have to stop flipping their values any time they see a chance for political point-scoring. This is called lacking integrity. Taking away P’Nut is based on the same principle that says “good illegal immigrants” should still be deported, Hillary Clinton shouldn’t get away with mishandling classified materials, and that if Donald Trump is prosecuted for mishandling documents, Joe Biden should be as well.

The King’s Pass is a rationalization even if the king is a squirrel.

A grace note: P’Nut had to be euthanized after he bit one of the officers as they removed him from his happy home, so they had to see if the squirrel had rabies. Good for P’Nut: he didn’t go down without a fight. We can’t blame him for not knowing the law.

Yes, It’s Another Installment of “It’s Hell Being An Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This weekend was Grace’s memorial event, and yes, it came off very well despite my long-standing dread. I have wonderful, talented and loving friends, as did Grace. My long-time musical collaborator on my pop music parodies ethics programs, Mike Messer, brought down the house and made Grace smile, I hope, with a rousing performance of her favorite John Lennon solo, “Twist and Shout,” backed up by the unusually musical crowd.

But I digress. The next day, when a friend who helped organize and mange the event (since I was useless), brought me the receipts. I expected the bill for the platters of food I had ordered from Safeway, for he had picked them up. “No,” he said,”they told me you had paid for them when you made the order.”

But I had not. I tried to pay, but the dead-eyed, barely conversant clerk refused to process my credit card, and insisted that payment would be due when the platters were ready. The price is almost $400.

Well, I’m an ethicist, so I have to pay it, though I may take my sweet time about it and wait until my cash flow is a bit more robust. I know what my mother’s reaction would have been—“What luck! The food was free!”—just as surely that I know that my father would have headed over to Safeway by now and paid the bill.

Now, my sister had a dandy rationalization, though she didn’t commit to it. “These stores are incompetent,” she said. “I’ve had similar experiences, though not $400 worth. The only way they’re ever going to get better as if sloppy work like this costs them money.”

“I’d be tempted not to pay,” she said.

Oh, I’m tempted all right. And I’m drowning in debt dating back to when the pandemic crashed my business and ruined my credit. Nevertheless, I got the food, I owe Safeway the money, and I’m an ethicist, dammit.

Phooey.

Ethics Quiz: Musk Bans a “Journalist”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I quit Twitter with all my accumulated thousands of followers after it became clear to me that the platform was a progressive propaganda organ that censored users and tweets it didn’t like, notably President Trump. I returned (here) as a show of support for Elon Musk, who bought the platform and (largely) eliminated its tendency to content-based censorship. This Ethics Quiz has special interest for me.

X, as Twitter is now called ( I miss the little birdie logo) suspended left- “journalist” Ken Klippenstein when he linked to an article of his that contained a hacked document with negative, private and otherwise provocative information about Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Klippenstein used to write for the crypto-Communist The Nation, and was a senior investigative reporter for the far-Left online news program “The Young Turks.” Needless to say, he has an agenda.

The 271-page dossier on Vance has been traced to a hack by Iran. Most media outlets refused to publish it, but Klippenstein, who has a substack to sell, grabbed the opportunity. Musk took to his own platform to decry the document as “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.” He went on, “Presidential candidates are not speculatively in danger – there have already been two attempts on @realDonaldTrump’s life. Moreover, the doxxing included detailed information on the addresses of their children.” X explained that Klippenstein violated its policy against posting “unredacted private personal information,” including Vance’s physical addresses and part of his social security number.

Continue reading →

Kamala Harris, the “Integrity? What’s Integrity?” Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As an ethicist, I don’t have to agree with a Presidential candaidtes policies to find him or her ethical, unless a policy are per se unethical (like validating terrorism by forcing a ceasefire on Israel before it has destroyed Hamas), involves not enforcing laws (like at the Southern border) or violates the Constitution (as with Gov. Walz’s declarion that “hate speech” should be illegal). However, as an ethicist, it is explicitly my business when a Presidential candidate demonstrates a cynical contempt for integrity as an ethical value, for integrity is one of the most important of ethical values. An individual without integrity cannot be trusted.

Harris’s whole campaign is an effort to pretend integrity is a myth. Bernie Sanders issued a damning verdict on Harris (and himself) when he told NBC’s “Meet the Press “ that despite her efforts to moderate her positions since taking over from Joe Biden on the top of the ticket, such as purporting to support fracking and opposing “Medicare for All,” Harris was just being “pragmatic” and “doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

In other words, lying.

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Pro Golfer Sahith Theegala

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Clearly, I don’t follow pro golf like I once did: I never heard of this guy (at first I thought his name was the second row on my keyboard). Now I think I may write in his name for President.

Playing in the PGA’s $100 million Tour Championship, (never heard of that tournament, either) at the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Sahith Reddy Theegala, an American professional golfer from Orange, California, called a rules infraction on himself, costing him two strokes. The self-reporting ended up preventing Theegala from tying for third place, and may have cost him five million dollars.

Continue reading →

Curmie’s Conjectures: Incompetence and Arrogance of Olympian Proportions

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

by Curmie

[This is Jack: With this welcome column by the indefatigable Curmie, I think I can safely say that Ethics Alarms has finally put all of the ethics controversies arising from the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to bed, yes?

I sure hope so. Let’s see: we had the Opening Ceremony “Last Supper” thing, the “don’t photograph beautiful and sexy female athletes so they look beautiful and sexy” silliness, the announcer who was sacked for evoking a mild female stereotype that is sort-of accurate, the intersex boxer thing, the Australian breakdancer, and now Curmie examines the bitter women’s gymnastics scoring controversy over mini-points that are completely subjective anyway.

I am truly grateful, because I was going to have to post on this if he didn’t. And if I needed any more validation of my position that the Olympics are a bad, corrupt joke and not worth my time (I don’t), Curmie just supplied it.]

The three women you see pictured at the top of the page currently stand in the third (i.e., bronze medal), fourth, and fifth positions in the Olympics final in the women’s floor exercise. You see them from top to bottom in their relative positions as I write this; whether those will be the final final rankings remains to be seen.

Anyway, from the top down we see Romania’s Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, and the US’s Jordan Chiles.  Each of them has reason to believe that she—and she alone—should be the bronze medalist.  But a series of judges’ fuck-ups (apologies for the language, but there is no other adequate term) have resulted in a brouhaha that makes clear that whatever the NCAA or FIFA may do, the IOC isn’t going to give up its title as Most Corrupt and Incompetent Sports Organization without a fight.  But wait!  Who’s that coming up on the outside?  It’s the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport), or TAS,  staking their claim, and they’re backing it up with hubristic posturing!  It’s coming down to the wire, and it’s anybody’s race!

I have already made clear  my distaste for sports which rely on the subjective opinions of judges rather than on some objective criterion.  Yes, referees can make mistakes, but at least we know that the team that scores the most points will win, as will the swimmer who touches the wall first or whoever throws the thing the farthest.  In these events, it’s clear: the US won a gold medal in the 100m sprint because a photograph made it clear that Noah Lyles’s torso crossed the finish line .005 seconds before Kishane Thompson’s did.  The US women’s basketball team also narrowly won gold, beating the French team by a single point because on the last play of the game the home team’s player had her toe on the three-point line instead of just outside it.

Those close finishes seem more arbitrary when there’s no objective way of distinguishing between the performances.  It’s also true that gymnastics is second only to figure skating in terms of judges giving credit to established stars just because they’re established. 

But let’s assume for the moment that the judges’ votes in the floor exercise, though subjective, were both informed and honest.  If you were to ask a dozen experts which of the three women discussed here was the “best,” I’m betting that all three would get at least two votes apiece, but ultimately that’s irrelevant to the current situation.

Continue reading →