I am a 53 year old teacher. I have double major in Speech and Criminal Justice resulting in a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma and a law degree.
Plainly Difficult is a YouTube site featuring some very fine videos.
From the “about” section of the page:
Short(ish) Educational Videos on Subjects that I think are interesting! Mainly General Interest history, focusing on disasters, scientific discovery and transportation
I write about business ethics as well as morality and ethics. “Plainly Difficult” sometimes writes about disasters. That is where we cross paths. The video below is about a truly incredible business ethics disaster.
The greatest fabric factory disaster in history featuring corruption, law breaking and incompetence. It sounds very much like my stuff.
I want to recommend “Plainly Difficult” as a site you should visit regularly. You should also subscribe and comment when you have something intelligent or just clever to say.
You and I both know that the internet is crowded with porn, trash and every kind of scam. “Plainly Difficult” is the kind of site and the kind of content that the web was originally created to facilitate. If there were more sites like this we would all be better off.
A new study concerning the dangers of gas stoves came out today. It is very alarming and it calls into question claims of safety for the appliance.
From the study (the top link above):
Beyond asthma cases, the long-term exposure to NO2 in American households with gas stoves is high enough to cause thousands of deaths each year – possibly as many as 19,000 or 40% of the number of deaths linked annually to secondhand smoke. This estimate is based on the researchers’ new measurements and calculations of how much nitrogen dioxide people breathe at home because of gas stoves and the best available data on deaths from long-term exposure to outdoor NO2, which is regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“As many as 19,000 deaths” is a lot of deaths but the new research also concerns childhood asthma and the overall national levels of pollutions.
The data we had before this was enough to strongly consider banning gas stove in new construction and if you have a child with asthma replacing your gas appliances immediately. This new research is more compelling and alarming. We should begin consider a national phase out.
However, for many families, the cost of replacement is just too much. If you have a gas stove, you can mitigate the effects by proper ventilation. Use the fan above the stove to diminish the pollutants. (Yes, there is supposed to be one up there.) And never ever use a stove to heat the home, they also produce benzene and carbon monoxide. Trust me, you don’t want large concentrations of either one in your home.
In the future, as a writer on business ethics, I am going to have to talk about the fossil fuel industry in the light of the history of lead pollution, climate denial, “clean and safe” natural gas, and some other things like fairly extensive support for various fascist governments before World War Two because I think it demonstrates a pattern of unethical behavior.
But that will be pretty lengthy and it will take a lot of research. For the moment, run with my observation that the oil and gas industry are not neutral observers when it comes to the use of gas stoves and treat what they say accordingly.
I believe based on the new research that this is not a safe way of cooking or heating.
James Pilant
This is from a year ago but it lines up nicely with the May 3rd Study.
I write about ethics and morality. When you write about basic right and wrong, words are important. And in the case above the words are very important, indeed.
From the article:
“Whitton looked for opportunities to attack: In his three documented assaults, he was either a leader or a solitary actor,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing. Videos show that contemporaneous attacks on police by Whitton and a co-defendant, Justin Jersey, “ignited the rageful onslaught of violence that followed” on the Lower West Terrace, prosecutors said. “As Whitton and Jersey commenced their assaults, the tenor of the crowd audibly changed,” they wrote. “Other rioters surged towards the Archway and joined the attack, throwing objects at the officers and striking at them with makeshift weapons such as a hockey stick, a pieces of wood, a flagpole, and a police riot shield.”
This was a very active member of a riot, we see words and phrases like “attack,” “rageful onslaught,” “throwing objects,” and there are some more. There were terrible acts that resulted in harm to policemen. And this particular individual has been sentenced for these crimes.
So, now you are asking (and you should), “James, where is your ethical issue? Why are we talking about this?”
To my disgust and astonishment, individuals like this fellow just sentenced have been described without any attempt at satire or irony as “hostages” and “political prisoners.”
No, these are criminals.
They were members of a violent mob hell bent on stopping the certification of 2020 election. That and the associated acts of violence and vandalism are all crimes.
These criminals deserve the penalties of the law that they broke. Period.
Let’s start with the facts of the matters as explained in the top article above:
On Feb. 10, 2022, the woman was hospitalized after experiencing high blood pressure at work, according to the lawsuit. When she returned to her office, she noticed a new employee, who was about 30 years younger, sitting at her desk, the lawsuit says. That day, the woman met with the general manager, who questioned her about how long she planned to work for the company, according to the suit. “Where do you see yourself? Do you need to keep working? Don’t you want to travel? See your brother?” are questions the manager is accused of asking her, the lawsuit says. The woman made it clear she wanted to continue working for two or three more years, according to the EEOC.
The resolution of the case, again from the article above:
Now Covenant Woods has agreed to settle the lawsuit for $78,000, the EEOC, the federal agency in charge of protecting workers against discrimination, announced in an April 30 news release. Covenant Woods is to pay the woman the amount in full, according to a consent decree filed April 29. She will receive $50,000 for compensatory damages and $28,000 for wages.
When I was teaching, I often got a very fine question from my students about these matters. Since, you can fire anyone for any cause, how does a business get caught for discrimination? It’s very simple, they explain it to the victim and the world. I have literally seen cases where people were fired and the business in question sent them a letter explaining that they were being fired for being old. (And then I would explain how businesses very often think they know the law when they clearly don’t.)
The business here didn’t leave us in much doubt as to their motives. I have to admire them for the cold blooded villainy with which the whole matter was executed.
This is one of the standard business ethics things we see over and over again. I don’t think it is as common as being fired for getting pregnant (You are not supposed to fire women for getting pregnant either.) but it is right up there.
Why do business owners keep doing stupid stuff like this? It’s very simple. Our society doesn’t place much value on age and experience — and so they feel safe in exercising that prejudice.
Do they realize they’re being stupid? No, generally stupid, incompetent and greedy people are the very last people to realize their inherent bad qualities. And since they are invoking the values, the corrupt and foolish values – mind you, of the larger society, they think they are just making your average “American” decisions.
Here is what should be done.
We need to change the way we educate business majors. Currently we teach them the current beliefs in the field of business largely unvarnished by research. So, we get a whole bunch of people with little real education in any of the human endeavors that make whole human beings. Specifically there should be a Business Law II course which goes into more depth about our laws and society.
We should teach a business profession imbued with human values and ethics. We should teach a business regime where businesses form a partnership, a symbiosis, with our greater society, participants in the health and welfare of the people of the nation.
What we get now in many cases are morally blank pursuers of cash at all costs and over any obstacle. Now, some would deny this – they are wrong – and I know they are wrong because I taught in a business department and running across a student whose one abiding desire was to make a ton of money legally or otherwise was a regular event.
Let’s create a new crop of businessman fit to live among us in a democratic society based on law and ethical virtue.
It is the very least a morally responsible teaching profession should do.
Before we proceed I want to explain that the title is a direct quote from the aircraft in question’s pilot taken from the official report. And I freely admit he was right, they couldn’t stop him.
This is the story of a man who was also a pilot who was in a difficult weather situation. Advised over and over and over again not to attempt a take off, he insisted and took off anyway. Or almost took off. He and one of his two passengers died.
This sounds more like a fable from the time of the Greeks. A man determined on a disastrous course of action is offered help which he refuses, advice which he resents, and expert help which he ignores. And then he goes ahead and dies.
Three people laded at Lake Renegade. They are in an amphibian aircraft. It only lands and takes off on water. There are so many bodies of water in the United States, people wonder why there aren’t more of these kinds of planes. It’s very simple. Calm water is a wonderful surface to land on, but in most of the United States there is considerable wind and you don’t have it. Choppy wind-blown water will kill you. Water landings depend on very calm and stable conditions. And that simply wasn’t the case at Lake Renegade that day.
I’ve read the report twice because it was so hard to believe. A veritable army of experienced and kind individuals virtually begged him not to take off. He went anyway.
Hubris is fatal. I suppose if a man wants to risk his life there is little that can be done to stop him but this man in his overweening pride also killed one passenger and injured another.
This was all a profound failure of ethics.
A man should take stock of expert advice. A man should not without a good adequate reason risk his own life or the lives of others. And above all, a man should respect the forces of nature and make decisions in accordance with weather and terrain.
There is a lot of pseudo-masculine ideology running about these days. I can’t help but wonder if he thought all the warnings were from “snowflakes” and “wimps” — and he was going to show everybody what a real man could do with an aircraft. He did provide us with a useful example of what not to do.
The staff and volunteers at the Airbase are all very clear that they literally begged him not to fly in these conditions. The pilot may have considered the rough conditions to be borderline and it’s true that at least one Lake pilot at the site stated that he thought it wasn’t outside of the ability of a highly experienced pilot. However, the pilot that day wasn’t highly experienced in seaplanes and he chose to risk a tailwind take-off in an aircraft that had required a tow a few hours before because it had taken on water. In his rush to leave, he either forgot or chose not to configure the aircraft correctly for take-off. It is very difficult to interpret his actions as anything other than reckless.
This is more quote than essay but I’m quoting a legal proceeding and the proceeding, a disciplinary hearing, is eloquent beyond my poor command of the English language. They wrote for the ages.
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA COURT OF APPEALS BOARD ON PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY HEARING COMMITTEE NUMBER TWELVE
In the Matter of : Board Docket No. 22-BD-039 : JEFFREY B. CLARK, ESQUIRE : Disciplinary Docket No. 2021-D193
Across the United States, the legal profession is busy removing several Trump lawyers from the profession. The matter referenced above relates to Jeff Clark. But there are others include John Eastman and Rudy Giuliana. Another fourteen attorneys have gotten fines and other sanctions. And there will be more to come as other Trump trials move forward.
Here is a quote from the Disciplinary Hearing referenced above:
The lawyers who contested the 2020 election on behalf of President Trump, far from upholding the nobliest traditions of the profession, betrayed their ethical obligations. At President Trump’s direction, they employed any means necessary to keep him in office. This included frivolous civil rights actions filed in federal court seeking to set aside the results of lawful elections.
That’s the facts surrounding the decision to remove this man’s license to practice law. But this is the steel edge of the decision:
It is not enough that the efforts of these lawyers ultimately failed. As a profession, we must do what we can to ensure that this conduct is never repeated. The way to accomplish that goal is to remove from the profession lawyers who betrayed their constitutional obligations and their country. It is important that other lawyers who might be tempted to engage in similar misconduct be aware that doing so will cost them their privilege to practice law. It is also important for the courts and the legal profession to state clearly that the ends do not justify the means; that process matters; and that this is a society of laws, not men. Jeffrey Clark betrayed his oath to support the Constitution of the United States of America. He is not fit to be a member of the District of Columbia Bar.
I share that opinion.
Let justice be done.
James Pilant
This is a month old but discusses the Jeff Clark Disbarment Process.
We’re talking about advice that, although theoretically convenient to integrate into our lives, catches us unable to digest it in the moment in which it is offered. If that wasn’t enough, its attempt to lighten up a negative situation leaves us feeling silenced, judged and misunderstood. This phenomenon of subjecting a negative experience to a filter of optimism and vitality is known as whitelighting. Although the person who uses the tactic doesn’t mean to devalue or dehumanize the other’s experience, paradoxically that’s precisely what happens when someone tries to put a positive spin on negative or traumatic feelings and experiences experienced by another person.
We Americans live in a self help culture. And most of us think that is a good thing. It’s not. A realistic assessment based on accurate information is the best choice when dealing with reality. But many prefer the idea that all adversity is a challenge and anyone, anywhere, anytime, no matter what, can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It’s enough to drive me to deep abiding anger and rage. This Horatio Alger just never seems to die.
But whitelighting people when they’re sad – having lost loved ones, pets, jobs, relationships, etc. is just cruel. “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” “Every dark cloud has a silver lining.” “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” “The school of adversity leads to success.” “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Countless times both I and people I know have been serenaded with these nuggets of folk wisdom. I’m reminded of the Monty Python movie, “The Life of Brian,” in which the crucified multitude join in a chorus of “Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
Being a friend, a relative or just a fellow human being demands patient listening and comfort freely given when someone you know is suffering. Happy talk has its place, not very many places but some places. Whitelighting is very much akin to gas lighting. Don’t do it.
Let me give you a simple example. The other day I ran into a woman with a medical boot on because she had injured her ankle. I told her I was sorry she was in pain. I did not tell her the leg would heal back stronger, that her suffering would ennoble her or that we all get hurt and it would be best to get over it quickly and get back to work. None of that. What I did add was because I’m an attorney. I noticed that she was parked pretty far out in the supermarket lot so I told her that she was entitled to a handicapped sticker while she was in recovery and if she didn’t want to go to the doctor to get it, she could call and they would mail it. That’s useful information.
I suppose what really gets my goat is corporate happy talk. I once gave a carefully considered and reasoned statement about the difficulty in getting new clients in the county where I worked and my boss’s boss said I should be more positive. Corporate culture in the United States believes that in general lying is wrong unless dealing with business prospects in which case, a false and nonsensical optimism is the chosen means of communication. God help us all.
An essay in Vox suggests that there is real hope for climate improvement provided we don’t see a second Trump Term. (From the article:)
Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history. More electric vehicles were sold worldwide than ever. Energy efficiency is improving. Dozens of countries are widening the gap between their economic growth and their greenhouse gas emissions. And governments stepped up their ambitions to curb their impact on the climate, particularly when it comes to potent greenhouse gases like methane. If these trends continue, global emissions may actually start to decline.
Climate change is a critical business ethics issue. The danger of rising temperatures calls into question the social utility of many common industries and business practices. We are at a critical point. The article is optimistic but very guardedly and there are dozens of caveats. We are in dangerous waters with very few sure ways to go on these matters.
Ellen DeGeneres is back on the comedy circuit.
Now she tells it as a joke but back in the day, while the show was running, it was a classic case of power corrupting a celebrity.
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday voted 3-2 in favor of adopting a historic and far-reaching ban on noncompete agreements, potentially giving more leverage in the job market to millions of U.S. workers. The agency has said that the agreements, in which workers are forbidden from seeking a job with a competing business for a certain period of time, lead to an “unfair method of competition” and violate federal law. The vote by the agency’s five commissioners this week means the ban will move forward.
From time to time, the world of business ethics coughs up a good story, a positive story. The Federal Trade Commission has approved a ban on noncompete agreements. This has been long overdue. Originally non-compete agreements were targeted at employees whose inside knowledge of the company would give an unfair advantage to any company that hired them. Unfortunately, many employers realized they could use the agreements to make it difficult for employees to leave since the agreement made it very difficult for them to get a job in the same field. They argued that knowledge given in fast food places like how to make a sandwich were proprietary and required a non-compete agreement. This legal bufoonery did not disguise the intent of making life more difficult for employees and empowering the company to treat them badly since the workers had difficulty finding new jobs with the agreement in place.
Musk on Tuesday responded to an interim court order from Australia’s eSafety Commission requesting that X hide graphic and distressing videos of the recent Sydney stabbing within 24 hours with a Wizard of Oz meme: it’s all shits and giggles over at X. In further posts, he took aim at the eSafety commissioner, claiming she wants “authority over all countries on Earth”, after labelling her a “Commissar” for requesting the removal of the video in the first place, which depicted an attack that the NSW police have since classified as a terrorist incident.
The idea that freedom of speech is served by these horror postings of crimes and other savagery is just nonsense. Media has the power to exalt, to educate and to entertain. But here it is simply a horror fest in which demented criminals are given free publicity encouraging copycats and universal cynicism from the nihilistic values on display by these internet companies.
We have a right to see that evil deeds not be celebrated, to not see vicious anti-social clowns in action and absolutely a right to not ever have to be treated to the half wit, degenerate manifestos of mass murderers and terrorists.
If the auto company has your car connected to the internet, your driving can be monitored and your insurance costs can increase.
Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums. I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who were spied on.
People were led to believe that OnStar got you help when you had car or travel problems but that is not all that the program does. Get a load of this:
My husband’s LexisNexis report had a breakdown of the 203 trips we had taken in the car since January, including the distance, the start and end times, and how often we hard-braked or accelerated rapidly. The Verisk report, which dated to mid-December and recounted 297 trips, had a high-level summary at the top: 1,890.89 miles driven; 4,251 driving minutes; 170 hard-brake events; 24 rapid accelerations; and, on a positive note, zero speeding events.
Once they’ve got your data, it can be sold to anyone at anytime and it never goes away. It can raise your insurance rates. It has raised insurance rates on many individuals. Your data is in real way, digital currency and when stacked with other such digital data, you pay the costs of that knowledge.
Google is going to delay its plan to eliminate cookies. I find this a depressing development. We consumers should have the right to not have our internet choices tracked and reported. However, Google still plans on eliminating cookies, just when is still up in the air.
Quote below from the link above from Yahoo Finance:
Google has spent years preparing to get rid of cookies following similar moves by Apple and Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser. It has promoted the change as a way to improve consumer privacy and developed an alternative set of technologies known as the Privacy Sandbox to replace many of their features. The plans have encountered several roadblocks from industry participants. Google first announced plans to block cookies in early 2020, targeting the end of 2022 for their elimination.
Gateway Pundit is seeking bankruptcy protections as it attempt to deal with a flood of lawsuits.
Quote from the link listed above:
For two decades, the site has published falsehoods and conspiracy theories on everything from vaccines to election fraud. Donald Trumpfrequentlyshares its material. The most notable lawsuit against the website is from Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. In 2021, they sued the Gateway Pundit, Hoft and his twin brother, and website contributor Joe Hoft in St. Louis Circuit Court for defamation and emotional distress. The website had falsely alleged that the mother-daughter pair had purposefully manipulated the vote count in Joe Biden’s favor.
I won’t miss them. They deserve the economic penalties derived from their misbehavior.
An Iranian court sentenced outspoken rapper Toomaj Salehi to death after his arrest over songs that criticized the government, his lawyer said Wednesday.
This is an extremely sad story, a tragedy. Civilizations advance along a number of different avenues simultaneously although often at different speeds. Artistic movements are often less noticed than economic or technological or even political developments but it can be argued that artistic developments are the most important in the long term. Songs are strong indicators of the health of a society. If songwriters have great freedom to create, that says a lot about the creative environment in which they function.
We may safely conclude that Iran is a zone devoid of progress for artistic expression. This is a sure sign of a fearful, incompetent and reactionary government. The United States even with its turbulent political activity and struggling factions is a far more healthy environment for art. That is a good sign for the nation’s future and its effect on the larger development of worldwide civilization.
As technology moves forward with often amazing speed, the law struggles to keep up. New offenses never even thought of before are happening every day. One tragic trend is the posting of fake nudes of high school students and there are many others. The internet is a massive information super highway of fraud, deception and filth. I don’t need to tell you in any detail because you see and experience yourself the horror of what the internet has become.
This case detailed in the links below alleges that Dazhon Darien used AI technology to imitate the Pikesville high school’s principal. The fake recording had the principal disparaging minority students and teachers. It was spread about on the internet. Darien was under accusation of having billed the school illegally for about $2000. It seems the motive was revenge.
Using cloning technology, Darien forged an audio clip in which it sounded as if the principal was frustrated with Black students and their test-taking abilities, police wrote. The recording also purported to capture the principal disparaging Jewish individuals and two teachers who “should never have been hired”.
The AI attack was very successful. The principal was temporarily replaced as complaints flooded in. This was a truly vicious unprincipled attack. There are many disturbing elements, the main one being this is a first use case. There will be others and the results are likely to be at least as tragic and probably much, much worse.
We must as a society find ways of dealing with these issues of technological criminal innovation much more quickly. AI is a revolutionary technology. To say that it could be used to kill is not an exaggeration. And I while I am seeing a great deal of concern and discussion, I’m not seeing much legislative and administrative action.
Our legislatures, our Governors, our federal system are all creatures of the past with long and storied histories. But they were developed in the age of the horse as the main instrument of travel and the written letter, the primary medium of communication. Let me just give you an example, in the great majority of states, Corporate law requires the Board of Directors to meet annually and keep records of that event. This is directly from an era in which they traveled by train and horse. Isn’t it obvious that the corporate board be regularly involved, meeting often and having some kind of regular contact with the company? Yet the law requires no more than that single meeting a year. And we’ve had the internet, automobiles and telephones for quite some time now and we have not adapted the the statutory law to mandate more contact in an ongoing business. And that is the story across the board in the United States. The laws are based on circumstances that have become obsolete.
I suggest that the Justice Department create a division devoted to technological innovation and crime. This will give the government a slim chance of getting ahead of the curve of these new kinds of crime. We really don’t want to wake up one morning and find that AI had killed, destroyed reputations, collapsed companies and crashed infrastructures without legal recourse for the victims or the government.
We need to act. We must act now. Because the wicked actors both here at home and overseas are not resting. They are actively plotting and will given any opportunity take advantage of these new technologies.
On January 16, a Gmail user known as TJFOUST9 sent an email to three teachers, including Darien, at their school email addresses. The subject line said, “Pikesville Principal — Disturbing Recording.” A sound file was attached. A man could be heard speaking. Among other disparaging comments, including one about two teachers and another about Jewish people, the man said Black students couldn’t “test their way out of a paper bag.” The recording proliferated. A teacher who didn’t get along well with Eiswert admitted to sharing it with a student “who she knew would rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” the report said. The teacher also sent the recording to media outlets and the NAACP.
I’m sure most of my kind readers are of the law abiding type. I would like you to imagine what it would feel like to be surrounded by heavily armed policemen who believe that you are a dangerous felon right in the middle of committing a crime. Watch the film below to get the details of what happened to Jamie Rodgers in that same situation. God forbid anything like this should ever happen to you!
Rodgers’ car was in the shop at the dealership. He was given a loaner car so he could drive to work. The dealership mislaid his paperwork and reported the car as stolen. The police stopped him on the highway, surrounded his car with heavily armed officers. He was finally released when the situation was clarified. It is only a matter of chance and luck that he wasn’t killed or seriously injured.
I’m flabbergasted at this error. Is it just routine to report cars as stolen? I did some internet searches looking for dealerships who had reported loaners as stolen but all I got were references to the current case. So, apparently this is far outside the norm.
In my opinion the dealership is liable for pain and suffering. It was a very serious error and they have to be responsible for what they did.
The more I thought about the case, the more I saw the similarities to “swatting.” A bad actor can use the police to harm enemies with this kind of report. Fortunately, there was none of that here. But the strategy of “lets you and him fight” has been a regular ploy throughout all recorded history. Of course, I’m just a cynic. Let’s hope that nothing like this every happens again.
Rodgers, who was on his way to his job as an athletic trainer, told KTLA, “I’m thinking I’m going to get shot. I’m a Black man being pulled over in Orange County. … I’ve heard too many stories of this happening.” A fleet of sheriff’s patrol cars had tailed him, leading to suddenly being stopped and faced with about a dozen officers aiming their guns at him, as they had been mistakenly informed that Rodgers was armed and dangerous.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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