Jan McGee was the principal at Burns Science and Technology Charter School in Oak Hill, Florida. Everything at the school of about 1,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade was going swimmingly until Jan ended up in a long-running online friendship with Elon Musk, or so she thought.
I know how exciting it can be suddenly having a famous celebrity billionaire contacting you and emerging as your pal: I once was emailed by this cool Nigerian prince.
No, the Ethics Dunce President of the headline isn’t Joe Biden, despite the photo above of him bizarrely lowering his mask to shout at someone during the 9-11 ceremony. Does Joe even know how masks are supposed to work? If he doesn’t understand that, what business does he have dictating how citizens need to protect themselves and others from the Wuhan virus
? Anyway, it’s not Joe, and it’s not Clinton or Obama either. No, it’s not even Donald Trump, though accepting cash to provide live commentary along with his son on a pay-per-view stunt fight between 58-year-old Evander Holyfield (retired for a decade) and a 44-year-old mixed martial artist, Vitor Belfort on the 20th anniversary of the attacks is about as undignified an activity by a former POTUS as I can imagine. It’s—drum-roll!— George W. Bush!
But I’ll get to him in a minute, first let’s identify the unethical principal.
That would be the principal of Eastlake High School in Sammamish, Washington—Oh! Washington! It all makes sense now!— Chris Bede, who cancelled a Patriot’s Day theme at the school’s football game the day before the 20th anniversary. Students wanted to do something to commemorate the tragedy, and were prepared to wear red, white and blue.
Oh NO! The colors of the AMERICAN FLAG!
After conferring with staff, however, Bede put the kibosh on the tribute. “Our leadership teachers made this decision and explained it to students,” Bede wrote. “I know tomorrow is 9/11 and understand the sacrifice and values our flag represents, but I think they just did not want to unintentionally cause offense to some who see it differently.”
You know, like all those students in the Al Qida and “1619” clubs.
The principal is a weenie and an idiot, and cannot be trusted to oversee koi pond feeding, much less education.
The reason for the choice of song will reveal itself at the end of the post…
1. No 2020 Election Train Wreck update this morning, because there are only a few items to report. One stinker from yesterday: the New York Times had an across-the-front page, “This is important!” headline that read, “ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD.”
How did the Times’ ethics fall so far, so fast? That headline is pure propaganda, deceitful on its face. Do the editors think even the most partisan of their readers are that gullible?
2. Then there’s the Washington Post. I almost hate to post this after trying to talk commenter of the day Steve Witherspoon off the ledge in the previous Ethics Alarms entry. USPS whistleblower Richard Hopkins has demanded Tuesday that the false Washington Post story claiming he ‘recanted’ his sword statement regarding directions he was given by his Erie, PA postmaster to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day. He did not recant. In a video, the veteran says,
“My name is Richard Hopkins, I’m a postal employee who came out and whistleblew on the Erie, Pennsylvania postal service, postal office. I am right at this very moment looking at an article written by the Washington Post—it says that I fabricated the allegations of ballot tampering. I’m here to say that I did not recant my statements, that didn’t happen, that is not what happened. You will find out tomorrow, and I would like that the Washington Post recant their wonderful little article that they decided to throw out there, out at random.”
He has been placed on non-pay status by the Erie Post Office, which seems like a violation of whistle-blower laws to me, but I haven’t checked. GoFundMe, based on the Post story, erased the effort to provide him and his family financial support while he is being punished by the USPS.
Commemorating one week without our Rugby, who shrugged off his canine coil Saturday last. It has been a weird and lachrymose seven days, full of reflex attempts to call him, look for him, start to out out food, and more. Worsts of all have been the chance encounters with our neighbors and his admirers, which have ended in everyone involved getting choked up. This is all exhausting, and not conducive at all to adequate focus on other matters.
1. The rest of the story...Marshae Jones, the woman who got her unborn child killed by starting a fistfight with a co-worker, will not be charged for the death of the fetus in the Alabama case I wrote about here. I thought that would be the result. In the Ethics Alarms reader poll, over 50% felt that she should be charged:
2. Grandstanding idiot alert! Arizona Governor Doug Ducey received applause among those who do not appreciate gratuitous America-bashing and wokeness-groveling when he reacted to Nike’s decision to pull its “Betsy Ross flag” sneakers (because Colin Kaepernick objected) by announcing that he would no longer support state incentives for the company to build a plant in the Grand Canyon State. Two days later, Ducey arrived at a 4th of July party wearing Nikes.
I wonder how he managed to forget to wear his Colin Kaepernick tee shirt?
3. Harry Truman’s best quote comes to mind. That would be, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
Two British playwrights, Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley, have accused actor Idris Elba of misappropriating their work on “Tree,” a play they worked on with Elba for several years. “Tree” will have its world premiere at the Manchester International Festival this month, but the aggrieved playwrights will not be at the premiere,
They complain that their role in the play’s development has been erased, and that their work is not being properly acknowledged. Elba and and the play’s director say Allen-Martin and Henley withdrew from the project, and that the show that has evolved no longer reflects their work.
“This whole process has been terribly upsetting, and we’ve felt terrified about speaking out…People need to be better, especially people who inspire others,” the pair wrote on Medium. Continue reading
Abby Smith, a graduating student at Parkersburg High School in West Virginia, noticed something vaguely familiar about the speech given by the school’s principal, Ken DeMoss, at her graduation last week. Later, she went home and looked for a video of a speech actor Ashton Kutcher (formerly the goof on “The 70s Show,” the goof who succeeded Charlie Sheen on “Two and a Half Men,” and the guy who took over froim Bruce Willis when Demi Moore decided she wanted a husband with hair) gave at the 2013 Kid’s Choice Awards. Then she edited DeMoss’s speech and Kutcher’s together, and posted them on YouTube.
There’s no doubt about it, as you can see above. The principal ripped off the speech.
Some might say that what Smith did was mean and unnecessary. No, it was responsible, essential, and gutsy. Students are taught in school, or are supposed to be, to do their own work, a lesson especially hard to convey when the internet makes plagiarism easy to do and hard to detect. The distinction between being inspired by another person’s creative output, using it as a foundation for an original work, borrowing phrases and ideas (with attribution), and, in contrast, stealing intellectual property and presenting it as your own, is a crucial one for students to understand. When a role model, a school administer, flagrantly does what the school must teach students not to do, and worse, does this in front of students, and even worse than that, does it in the course of a speech about the virtues of hard work, such cynicism, laziness, and cheating must not be allowed to pass unnoticed, and I hope, unpunished.
After he was caught, “Kenny” issued this epicly horrible statement, incorporating rationalizations, unethical apologies, multiple logical fallacies, a Jumbo and, of course, lies: Continue reading
1. Boycott/extortion update! Let’s see if Georgia has as much guts and principle as Alabama, and tells Disney to go fly a kite.
Hugh Culverhouse, Jr., the University of Alabama’s largest donor, called for a boycott of Alabama , both the University and the state , because of Alabama’s defiant, anti-Roe abortion ban, recently signed into law. The university’s law school was renamed Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law last September 2018 after the Florida businessman pledged $26.5 million to the university. In response to Culverhouse’s boycott call, University of Alabama System Chancellor Finis St. John recommended to the Board of Trustees that it return the $21.5 million the law school it has actually received from Culverhouse, and restore the name to “The University of Alabama School of Law.”
Good. That’s exactly how states should respond to attempted extortion by individuals and corporations to control their lawmaking and bend the state to their wills rather than the decisions of voters. The whole story is at TaxProf Blog.
2. Nah! A reverend like, say, Martin Luther King would never engage in the kinds of sordid acts his biographer claims! They are men of God!
Bobby J. Blackburn, the pastor of Elevate Church in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, was arrested this week and charged with the prohibited use of an electronic communication system to procure a minor to commit a sex act. Blackburn is also the owner of Giovanni’s, a pizza restaurant in Prestonsburg. A girl who worked there showed a police sergeant images of an iMessage conversation she had with Blackburn in which he asked the minor to engage in a “threesome” with him and another girl, also a minor. He also made other sexually explicit requests.
Rev. Bobby tried to weasel out of his mess by bringing a third young woman to the police station and having her claim that she sent the incriminating messages from his phone. It didn’t work: under questioning, she admitted that she was lying and that Blackburn ordered her to make the false claim under threat of losing her job.
I hear he’s one heck of a pastor, though! Continue reading
I usually hesitate to call for anyone to be fired, though there have been exceptions. In this case, however, the call is mandatory on ethical grounds. It is unethical for a school dedicated to the arts to hand oversight to an gross incompetent who doesn’t comprehend the arts she is supposedly responsible for teaching; it is unethical for someone to take on this responsibility who is wildly unqualified for the job; and it is unethical for that individual to act in a way that undermines the mission of the school she heads.
I have just fairly described Lisa Mars, currently the principal at the Fiorello LaGuardia High School, the high school “of music, arts the performing arts” made famous in the movie and TV show, “Fame.”
On opening night of a school production of “The Sound of Music,” she ordered all Nazi-themed props and set pieces struck. They are offensive, you see. Never mind that the show is set during Germany’s take-over of Austria as the Third Reich was expanding. Never mind that Nazi Germany and its officers are major elements in the plot, or that the plot is based on the real-life escape of the singing Von Trapp family from the Nazis. Never mind that theater is a representational art form. Stage deaths are not real killings, stage rape isn’t really rape, stage racism isn’t really racism, and stage representations of Nazi symbols do not promote fascism. Most grade-school actors can grasp this basic principle, but not the head of a school for the performing arts.
“This is a very liberal school, we’re all against Nazis,” one sophomore said. “But to take out the symbol is to try to erase history.” Yes, that too. “Obviously the symbols are offensive,” he added. “But in context, they are supposed to be.”
Make him principal. Continue reading
…And a good morning to remember a very bad morning in Hawaii 77 years ago today.
1. Oscar’s latest fiasco. The Academy Awards, which like all awards shows has descended into nasty political advocacy, undermining its mission and alienating its audience, decided to pick famously non-partisan black comedian Kevin Hart, who is also a successful movie actor, to host. His gig lasted just a few day. People looking to discredit him went digging into his social media posts, and some tweets from eight years ago–you know, before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had flipped on gay marriage?—were judged as “homophobic.” In a post on Instagram at about 11 p.m. last night, Hart said he got a call from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was asked to apologize for his prior tweets, or step down as host. He chose to withdraw, and tweeted this:
“I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscar’s….this is because I do not want to be a distraction on a night that should be celebrated by so many amazing talented artists. I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past. ‘m sorry that I hurt people.. I am evolving and want to continue to do so. My goal is to bring people together not tear us apart. Much love & appreciation to the Academy. I hope we can meet again.”
The conservative media is calling Hart another example of political correctness run amuck. That’s ignorant and wrong. To be successful, an MC has to be liked and trusted by his audience, which is, for the Oscars, the people inside the theater above all. A huge percentage, even a half or more, of the Oscar audience is gay. No one can host the Oscars while it is known that he once said, even eight years ago, that he was terrified that his son might grow up to be gay. It doesn’t matter that he may have “evolved.” Hollywood is a substantially gay community, and the host of its biggest party of the year should neither be nor be suspected of being homophobic,
Why the Academy’s vetters and Hart himself couldn’t figure this out is a different issue: gross incompetence. Continue reading
Why are these students smiling sweetly? Because they sent the message to their teachers to be wary; after all, there’s a lot of dirt on the internet…
Ugh.
Seemingly every one is cheering the Pittsburg High School (Kansas) students on the school paper who investigated their newly hired principal, found her credentials to be dubious, and forced her to resigned from her $93,000-a-year job. You can read the story here and here.
For the purposes of Ethics Alarms, I’m not interested in the principal at all. What matters here is that journalists, teachers, TV talking heads and everyone else commenting on the story are proving themselves ignorant of basic ethical principles, like the fact that conduct that happens to result in something desirable doesn’t make the conduct appropriate if it wasn’t ethical at the outset, aka “consequentialism leads to bad lessons and bad ethics,” and “the ends justifies the means.”
“Pittsburg journalism adviser Emily Smith said she is “very proud” of her students. “They were not out to get anyone to resign or to get anyone fired. They worked very hard to uncover the truth.”
Emily Smith is too incompetent and ethically confused to advise aspiring student journalists or any other students. The students “wanted be assured that she was qualified and had the proper credentials,” according to the student editor of the paper. That’s not their job, their duty, or their business. They aren’t journalists; they are students learning about journalism. Determining if the new principal was qualified was entirely the responsibility of the the Pittsburg Board of Education, which botched its job and approved hiring the principal at its meeting March 6. That the students did the due diligence the Board failed to do is being used as cover by the Board: Everything worked out because of these great students, who we have educated so well!
Wrong. Unbelievably wrong. Dangerously wrong.
What’s going on here? Continue reading
The Horror.
In Cincinnati, Ohio, a first-grader at Our Lady of Lourdes school, just six-years old, was pretending to be a Power Ranger during recess, and “shot” another student with an imaginary bow and arrow. Principal Joe Crachiolo suspended the 6-year-old student for three days.
Denying the parents’ pleas to reconsider, Crachiolo sent a letter home to parents stating in part:
“I have no tolerance for any real, pretend, or imitated violence. The punishment is an out of school suspension.” Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 