Make it hot, hot hot!

I had momentarily forgotten that the blog hits its non-holiday traffic nadir during the so-called “dog days of summer,” which officially occur between July 3 and August 11 every year. I am optimistic that the many looming issues out there along with EA’s loyal and alert commentariat can fight the tide a bit.

We shall see…

(And I haven’t even had time to read what you entered in the last one…)

This has been a genuinely rotten seven days for your host on all fronts including Ethics Alarms, where readership was down even considering the two-day interruption when my PC was fried. There weren’t even Red Sox games to take my mind off of more substantive matters, since this was All-Star Game week, and baseball’s All-Star Game is just one more piece of evidence of societal ethics rot. It used to have integrity and be played like a real game by the best in the sport; now the thing has all the authenticity of a company picnic softball game.

Oh…there was one bit of silver lining: Remember this post? To my shock and amazement, the organization reversed itself and asked me to do a new ethics seminar under its auspices. I had emailed a letter of protest to the Executive Director the same day I blogged about being fired for telling the truth; I did not apologize. The letter included the same points I made here: I said directly that the decision was not only unfair and unprofessional, but that as Continuing Legal Education providers, the company was ethically obligated to make every effort to get lawyers back in the classroom where training is more likely to be effective. I assumed that this would be the last contact I had with it.

And they reversed their decision. Having refused to grovel and held to my principles when faced with the negative consequences of a stand too many times to count over the years (a habit acquired from Jack Marshall, Sr.), I did not anticipate this result.

There is hope.

Let’s try to be upbeat today!

More than the usual number of major or potentially major ethics tales swirling around that Ethics Alarms hasn’t gotten around to (yet), and having been chastised yesterday by a veteran commenter for “all this e-ink on Bud Light” (marketing is one of my many past and present occupations and special interests, so bite me), I am even more interested than usual in what issues the commentariat wants to discuss.

I think my favorite news item that I’m not going to write about is the Mississippi state Senator who says it’s time to revive the old Confederate-themed state flag. I’ll just mention that by pure coincidence, Grace and I re-watched “Mississippi Burning” last night.

I wonder if that senator has seen it?

(And no, I will not be seeing an 80-year-old Harrison Form reprise Indiana Jones. I care about the integrity of the character even if he and Disney don’t.)

On Mediaite this morning–that’s the useful if still left-biased news media headline aggregator–there are 38 main stories and 17 of them involve Donald Trump. Quite a few also involve ethics issues, unless you consider the man’s very existence in our world an ethics issue, I have to deal with sorting this out every single day: if I give the constant tsunami of ethics issues raised by this persistent celebrity from Hell the attention and analysis they require, the blog ends up being as much about politics as ethics. Worse, the Trump Deranged apparently can’t process the concept that people can be unethical themselves and still have a right to be treated fairly, so any post delving into that situation, which has been an ongoing ethics scandal since at least 2016 (The 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck) is immediately attacked as “supporting” Trump. This, in turn, leads to a repetitive scenario like the one we saw twice this week, with two new and prolific single issue commenters flogging their hatred of the man refusing to move on to other topics, getting antagonistic, and forcing me to ban them.

Of course, non-Trump ethics news hasn’t been great lately either. Yesterday, I had to decide if this story—“Penn State professor arrested for having sex with dog”—was worthy of a post. I decided against it, even though I had a great line to use: “His horrified colleagues finally learned what he really meant when he told them, “I’ll be in the lab…”

Over to you, Clarence…

I can’t imagine what ethics matters you’ll talk about today, as there is so much to choose from. Me, I’d be sorely tempted to draw an analogy between the now completely partisan Justice Department indicting the primary threat to Democratic power for conduct identical to what their own President has engaged in, essentially throwing jet fuel on what is already a highly combustible political division, and irresponsible flea-circus entrepreneurs reintroducing dinosaurs into the food chain.

But you know me: everything reminds me of baseball, old movies, or dinosaurs…