Around the World

Paterno, Hoover, and Jones’s First Law

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Would Uncle Walt have resisted the curse of Jones's First Law?

Jones’ First Law, one of many useful corollaries to Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong, will.”) is usually stated:

“Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress – in direct proportion to the importance of his original contribution.”

This week was a good one for Jones (whoever he was; I can’t seem to find out) if not for the rest of us, because two classic examples of his principle were on display:  Penn State coach Joe Paterno, who managed to stay coach long enough to unravel his legacy and help lay the groundwork for an ethical, moral, legal, public relations, and financial catastrophe for the institution he had dedicated his life to, and J. Edgar Hoover, the subject of a newly-released Clint Eastwood directed film that shows how he too stayed long enough as the key figure of an institution he built—the FBI—to become an embarrassment to it. Continue reading →

Penn State Primer: 15 Ethics Alarms on the Duty to Rescue and the Bystander Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Tiring of the smug and remarkably vicious Paterno defenders who have designated Mike McQueary for infamy because he failed to stop the Penn State child rapist in action, and who have accused me of supporting such inaction in rescue situations when my position, record, writings, belief and life experience proves the opposite, I offer these previous Ethics Alarms posts on the topics of rescue and bystander inaction. It is a useful, if sometimes disturbing review of various aspects in a complex issue. I don’t really expect the commenters previously referenced to allow rational thought to interfere with their certitude and vendetta, but most visitors here are not so wired.

A new post, focusing especially on McQueary, will be along soon, but today is Veterans Day, and I have my own duty to attend to: honoring Maj. Jack Marshall, Sr., 1920-2009, WWII veteran, Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart veteran, a true hero his entire life, in every way imaginable.

I am quite confident that he would not only have stopped Jerry Sandusky from molesting the boy, he might well have shot him.

Here are the 15 selected essays: Continue reading →

Hitler’s Paintings, Dirty Money, and an Ethics Quiz

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A Hitler masterpiece during the artist's controversial "Care Bears" period

As readers here probably know, I don’t do much commentary on Swedish ethics, but this intriguing story touches on a couple of Ethics Alarms topics of continuing interest: so-called dirty money and political correctness.

Sweden’s debt collection agency had planned to sell seven paintings by that noted 20th Century artist Adolf Hitler to bring the government some extra cash to pay off debts. A genuine Hitler can fetch $40,000 or more on the global art market. The intended sale never happened, because the agency concluded that the paintings were fakes, but never mind: what is ethically provocative is that Stockholm’s Jewish association protested that it would be morally offensive for the government to make money off of Hitler’s artistic labors. “It is symbolically unfortunate that people earn money on these items,” said the group’s spokesperson. Continue reading →

Stupid Religion Tricks

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

Efforts by religious and anti-religious interest groups to push their beliefs and agendas are unavoidable, if often annoying. When their machinations threaten real harm, they ought to be condemned, opposed, and told to behave. In its response to two recent incidents, our government is batting .500.

The Memorial Power Play

The Obama administration announced its objection to a Republican-backed proposal to add President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer to the World War II Memorial in Washington. This would block the intent of Congressman Bill Johnson’s bill, the “World War II Memorial Prayer Act of 2011.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Charles Krauthammer

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Let's see...nope! Still too good for Gaddafi!

“Under the normal rule of law, truth is only a means for achieving justice, not an end in itself. The real end is determining guilt and assigning punishment. But in war and revolution one cannot have everything. Justice might threaten peace. Therefore peace trumps full justice. Gaddafi could have had such a peace-over-justice compromise. He chose instead to fight to the death. He got what he chose. That fateful decision to fight — and kill — is the prism through which to judge the cruel treatment Gaddafi received in his last hours. It is his refusal to forgo those final crimes, those final shellings of civilians, those final executions of prisoners that justifies his rotten death.”

—- Charles Krauthammer, revered conservative columnist and pundit, in his column rebutting the complaints of human rights activists regarding the rebel execution that took Moammar Gaddafi’s life.

Krauthammer is right, and he is wrong. He is right that no one should feel any pity for Gaddafi, a brutal and inhuman despot who had it entirely within his own power to both save his own life and refrain from killing even more of his countrymen than he had killed already. He is wrong that Gaddafi’s crimes and cruelty suspend civilization’s principles of justice and ethics. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Naming Your Kid After Hitler: 100% Legal, 100% Child Abuse”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Moon Unit Zappa: Only in America!

Site quotemaster and resident pedant Tom Fuller comes through with a rare comment of his containing no quotations whatsoever! (Tom is, among other things, a contributor and researcher for The Yale Book of Quotations.) He adds some useful perspective on the issue of naming children, in his Comment of the Day to yesterday’s post, “Naming Your Kid After Hitler: 100% Legal, 100% Child Abuse.”  I must point out that “Choo Choo” was not the 1962 Mets catcher’s real name, any more than Red Sox pitcher Dennis Boyd was really named “Oil Can.”

Here it is Tom’s comment:

“This is a good illustration of how America’s concept of free speech is such an unusual legal and cultural norm. In many countries, including Germany, a child’s name must be legally approved in advance (in Germany, by the Standesamt — office of vital statistics).

“By German law, a child’s name has to meet two conditions: (1) it must reflect the sex of the child, and (2) it must not endanger the ‘well-being of the child.’ No “Moon Unit” Zappa, no “Choo Choo” Coleman, and — especially — no “Adolf” anybody, unless the local office says “OK”.

“According to wire service reports, hundreds of Algerians wanted to name their babies “Scud” during the 1991 Iraq war, but the local officials nixed the idea.

“My point? Only that Americans are often more likely than those in other countries to regulate speech and behavior in ways other than by prior legal restraint — like ethics, which is what this odd corner of the Web is all about. Sadly, as history has shown, when ethics fails, many people turn to the law to fix things. It doesn’t always work.”

Ethics Quiz: Should the State Department Be Buying and Distributing the President’s Books?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It's a State Department...and a nifty literary agent too!

It’s a little early for another Ethics Quiz, but this one is tailor-made.

The Washington Times reported today that The State Department has bought more than $70,000 worth of  books authored by President Obama. Hillary’s folks have been sending out copies as Christmas gifts, and stocking  libraries around the world with “Dreams from My Father.”  For example, the  U.S. Embassy in Egypt spent $28,636 in August 2009 for copies of the best-selling 1995 memoir, six weeks after it had placed another order for the same book for more than $9,000. At the same time, the U.S. Embassy in South Korea spent more than  $6,000 for its copies of “Dreams from My Father.” All of this comes from federal purchasing records.

The Times points out that the previous  State Departments resisted the impulse to buy books by former Presidents George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.

Are you ready for your Ethics Quiz? It’s a multiple choice:

For the State Department to spend $70,000 on its boss’s book is…. Continue reading →

Climate Change Ethics: Prof. Muller’s Study and Media Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

At  issue is not whether global warming is occurring, or even whether it is man-made. The issue is how incompetent, biased and astoundingly uncritical the media coverage of the issue has been and continues to be. Now major news publications and respected columnists are participating in yet another global warming ethics train wreck, which helps nobody and nothing.

Here’s is Prof. Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist, toward the conclusion of his 2003 paper on global warming data:

“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.”

Now here is the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer, on a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Muller announcing the results of his research:

“Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. …So what are the end results? …As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.” Continue reading →

Time For The Government To Say Good-Bye To Religious Holidays

/ Jack Marshall / 96 Comments

I'd rather celebrate Ganesh's birthday than L. Ron Hubbard's, but that's just me.

South Brunswick, New Jersey schools have announced that they will henceforth close for two days every year in honor of…Diwali. Quick—what religion celebrates Diwali? The answer is the Hindu faith.

That does it, I think. The canary has officially croaked, and there is no way to sugar-coat it, not that anyone wants a sugar-coated dead canary anyway. State, local and national governments need to cut all ties with religious holidays now, before Americans who observe  Gantan-sai, Dia de los Reyes, Maghi, Timkat, Imbolc, L. Ron Hubbard birthday,  Ostara,  Khordad Sal, Ramayana,  Visakha Puja,  Declaration of the Bab, Ascension of Baha’u’llah and somebody’s god somewhere knows what else start suing every city council in sight, Bill O’Reilly starts screaming about the war on Christianity, and Michele Bachmann gives speeches about how everyone knows America is a Christian nation, because the Founders, you know, like Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln and Jerry Falwell, wanted it that way. Continue reading →

Hilary Swank Gets Nelly Furtadoed. And It’s Still Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

What's that, Mr. Kadyrof? You want me to give you a private ethics seminar for a half-million bucks? What!!! I am outraged! I spit on your filthy lucre! KIDDING!!!!!

I seriously considered taking the Ethics Alarms post on singer Nelly Furtado posted here in March and substituting actress Hilary Swank’s name for Furtado, and Chechen despot Ramzan Kadyrov for now-deceased Libya dictator Muammar Gaddafi. It is the same controversy and issue with the same result: an American performing artist sells her performing talents to a brutal foreign leader, and is bullied and shamed by human rights advocates and media critics into apologizing profusely and donating the large fee ( a million dollars in Furtado’s case, a reported half-million for Swank) to charity.

This was wrong in March, and it’s wrong today.

Earlier this month, Swank and other celebrities attended Kadyrov’s birthday bash in Chechnya. She was working. But while every other corporation and contractor, as well as the United States itself, can do business around the world without being held to the impossible standard of only accepting morally exemplary customers, Swank, like Furtado, Mariah Carey and others before her, was targeted for not doing the bidding of human rights activists and sacrificing her livelihood to be their billboard. The bully in this case in the Human Rights Foundation, which unethically brutalized Swank to achieve publicity for its own mission—a worthy one to be sure, but not so worthy that it justifies a PR mugging with a $500,000 loss to its victim. Continue reading →