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Competition No 3911

Set by Terry Goodhill, 5 December

White House staff have been ordered to take an ethics refresher course.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Superb! How I laffed. I was very sorry to lose J Seery (Bush: "It is not fair to do a favour to someone who has promised a campaign contribution. Until that contribution has been paid, he is in default and that's unethical"). £20 to the winners, the best of whom is Keith Norman, who hasn't won for quite a while and who also gets the Tesco vouchers.

Next week: the annual top 20.

The course on ethics for White House staff will be based around a series of animated films originally created for the series Sesame Street. Two squirrels, one red and one grey, named Give and Take, are seen in situations that portray various philosophical concepts. An Ivy League professor will supply a commentary. The course will be "eclectic and user-friendly". The president is particularly impressed by the Pythagorean school's view that the individual should subordinate himself to the state, and by Aristotle's distinction between good and bad states. "Those old Greeks knew a thing or two," he said. He did, however, admit that he may have misunderstood Aristotle's advocacy of "the Mean". A final talk will bring the course right up to date, with footage shot on a trawler to illustrate Cantona's Doctrine of Incentivisation, which Bush has summarised thus: "They do what you want, you throw them a sardine; they don't, you kick ass." Contrary to rumour, the lecture on environmental ethics has not been dropped, merely revised.

Keith Norman

Ethics Training Awayday for Staffers

9am-12 noon. Morality. Students will learn the importance of respect for public property. A strategic action plan will be developed and specific targets set for a reduction in the unfortunate spate of petty pilfering at the White House, which has involved the disappearance of significant quantities of self-adhesive envelopes, colored plastic paperclips and Blu-Tack. Session to include a ballpoint pen amnesty.

12 noon-3.30pm. Lunch.

3.30pm-4pm. The ethics of climate change. Students will learn the importance of proper consultation before adjusting the air-conditioning or central heating thermostats in the Oval Office.

4pm-4.30pm. Ethical foreign affairs (and how to have one). Group discussion. An opportunity to share experiences, photos, etc in strictest confidence.

4.30pm. "Just war" theory.

4.31pm. Close.

David Silverman

The course draws its inspiration from the undoubted grandmaster of White House ethical strategies, Ron Ziegler. As President Nixon's press secretary and indispensable aide he faced a hostile media with incomparable dignity during Watergate. His historic declaration of 17 April 1973 - "This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative" - set a benchmark for transparency in government, and it was Ziegler who awed the press, pronouncing: "If my answers sound confusing, I think they are confusing because the questionsare confusing and the situation is confusing."

Ziegler recognised long before it was fashionable that language consists of rules of discourse rather than reliable definitions and that reality is not a given but a construct. He was unswervingly committed to those principles, even in the face of mass derision.There is little doubt that a suitably updated application of the Ziegler approach will help restore public faith in the presidency. Above all, the course will stress that morality pays - it isn't an expensive add-on but a valuable investment. The proof of that is that though a president resigned and some of his closest associates went to jail, Ron Ziegler was never indicted.

Basil Ransome-Davies

No 3914 Set by Leonora Casement

"The marvellous adaptations of means to ends in organisms, whether at the level of whole organisms, or at the level of various subsystems, ensure that they are the product of an intelligence." So sayeth the adherents of "intelligent design". Choose any "whole organism" (George W?) and make a case.

Max 150 words by 19 January. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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