Citizenship

Ethics Dunces: Professor Robert Donald Weide, And Any University That Employs Him

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

crushing dissentThe results of the Curmie Award vote are up at Curmudgeon Central, where blogger Rick Jones tracks episodes of supreme embarrassment for his profession, education. I think next year’s winner may have already arrived. It’s not that I can’t imagine worse conduct by an educator—I have a lively imagination—it’s just that the conduct California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) professor Robert Donald Weide is an apt symbol of why U.S. higher education is no longer a solution to anything, but a tragic problem in itself. There is no reason, none, why any school shouldn’t immediately sack a faculty member who behaves like this. If the issue is tenure, then tenure needs to be abolished. Tenure should not shield campus fascists.

What did Weide do? CSULA’s branch of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative political organization, dared to invite Ben Shapiro to give a lecture called “When Diversity Becomes a Problem” about such emerging issues as Black Lives Matter, “microaggressions,” “safe spaces,”  trigger warnings and other assaults on free speech on campuses and elsewhere. Naturally, since the topic is an important and legitimate one, many at CSULA are attacking the event and arguing it should be blocked by the university, citing trigger warnings, safe spaces,  microaggressions, and, of course, the ever-useful censorship concept of “hate speech.”

Perhaps here is as good a place as any to note that I wouldn’t cross the street to listen to Ben Shapiro, and wouldn’t do so even before his website, Breitbart, decided to shill for Donald Trump. That, however, doesn’t alter the fact that he is every bit as worthy of a campus speaking gig as Lena Dunham, Bernie Sanders, Sean Penn, or the Pope. Continue reading →

Ethics Update: The Frontrunners

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

the-three-stooges6

There was ample evidence over the past week that all three of the candidates currently leading their respective party’s races for the presidential nomination are unqualified for the office by virtue of their deficiencies of competence, character, and principles. Hillary Clinton had the most spectacularly revealing week, but first, the other two….

Donald Trump: Hubris, incompetence, disrespect and unfairness

1. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump boasted at a campaign rally yesterday. I know, it’s a joke. It’s also an astoundingly stupid thing to say, even in jest, and reveals massive hubris, the quality that brought down many a Greek king and the worst and most dangerous of all Trump flaws. This is what will get him, sooner or later. 3000 years of history and literature teach us that. The comment also reveals utter contempt for his supporters; he is essentially calling them blind morons. The crowd in Iowa laughed….because they are.

2.“Our great veterans are being treated terribly,” Trump says in a new campaign video. “The corruption in the Veteran’s administration, the incompetence is beyond. We will stop that.” Then critics pointed out that the clips used showed Russian veterans, not Americans, and he pulled the ad.

This is the man whose only claim to legitimacy is his management wizardry. Such an error, however, is proof of sloppy oversight and incompetent delegation. Moreover, this is the second time a Trump campaign ad  included mislabeled material: his illegal immigration ad earlier this month used footage of people crossing the Moroccan border to represent the U.S.-Mexico border. Conclusion: he’s faking it, “it” meaning everything. This is all posturing and bluffing, like a student taking an exam for a course he never studied for. Continue reading →

From The “Ethics Isn’t Easy” Files: The FBI, Child Porn, And “Playpen”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

key-computerIn order to probe “the dark web” and to apprehend those partaking of the pleasures of child pornography, the FBI emulated the illegal conduct of hackers, using a warrant to surreptitiously place malware on all computers that logged into a site called Playpen. When a user connected, the malware forced his computer to reveal its  Internet protocol address. Next a subpoena to the ISP  yielded his real name and address, and a another warrant allowed a subsequent search of the user’s home. Incriminating evidence, indictments and trials followed.

The problem of tracking computer related crime is far ahead of the law, and in the vacuum, ethical principles are being nicked, mashed, or ignored. Ahmed Ghappour, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, says, “It’s imperative that Congress step in to regulate exactly who and how law enforcement may hack.” If hacking is illegal, and wrong as an uncontested intrusion on privacy, when is it ethical, and thus legal, for law enforcement to do it? Continue reading →

Ethics Musings While Sitting In Line At The Gas Station

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments
My future, if I don't figure this out...

My future, if I don’t figure this out…

In the middle of a 20 minute errand that became a 90 minute ordeal today, I found myself sitting in an unexpected long line at the gas station I usually patronize.  Maybe it was because people wanted to top off tanks before the blizzard hits tomorrow, but I was really almost out of gas, and the second I moved into the “tank on the right” line, I was socked in. Finally I had only  one car ahead of me, and an absurdly long line of automobiles behind.

The lady in the car ahead, however, was unbelievable. She wasn’t elderly, but she was obese, had something wrong with one leg, and apparently had never filled a gas tank before in her life. She dithered, she paused, she disappeared and returned. She punched in so many characters at the pump that her Debit card password must have been a chapter of “Martin Chuzzlewit.”

Finally she replaced the pump, after pausing and contemplating it like it was Yorick’s skull, walked around to the driver-side door, then decided to walk back—S-L-O-W-L-Y— and make sure she had replaced the gas tank cap, then again s-l-o-w-l-y  limped and waddled back to the door. She opened the it, stared, then decided to unzip her coat, started to take it off, changed her mind, paused again. The line of cars behind me now reached to Falls Church.

I was just a smidgen of impulse control away from getting out of my car, which was turned off, and walking up to her, whereupon I would have said, not especially nicely: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

mikulski

“So let’s solve the problem. Let’s not get involved in constitutional arguments, and let’s help our American people be safe and secure in their home, their neighborhood, their school and their house of worship.”

—-Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) in her opening remarks ahead of a Senate Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing, prior to testimony from Attorney General Loretta Lynch regarding the Administration’s proposed gun control measures.

Mikulski, who is mercifully retiring, has been a relentless opponent of gun rights, and if you wanted a poster child for Democrats who would ban guns in a heartbeat if they could, Mikulski’s perfect.

“Let’s solve the problem and never mind what the Constitution says” could be the motto of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party as it is evolving. The quote is signature significance: no elected officials who take their oath of office seriously—you know, the like one taken bu U.S. Senators in which they swear to “support and defend the Constitution?—-would ever say, “Let’s not get involved in constitutional arguments…” in considering any legislative act or Presidential order, because the Constitution must be followed and respected in everything the government does.

This is the arrogant, lawless, totalitarian mindset that the hard-left progressive establishment represented by Mikulski now embodies. Why didn’t any mainstream media journalists immediately expose this? Why was it only the conservative bloggers and news sources who found her statement outrageous? And why didn’t any other Senators have the wit, integrity and sense of responsibility to lay her out for saying such a stupid, arrogant, un-American thing?

Constitutional arguments are what keep us free. Those who sneer at them like Mikulski have other plans.

Mission Accomplished: Hillary Corrupts The Human Rights Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

corrupted2

Hillary Clinton’s dishonest spinning of her gay rights positions received an endorsement today, as the U.S.’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization chose her as its choice for President. The Human Rights Campaign’s  board of directors, made up of community leaders nationwide, voted to endorse Clinton, and said in a statement:

“All the progress we have made as a nation on LGBT equality — and all the progress we have yet to make — is at stake in November…Despite the fact that a majority of Republican and independent voters today support federal protections for LGBT Americans, the leading Republican candidates for president have threatened to halt progress as well as revoke, repeal, and overturn the gains made during President Obama’s two terms…”

This statement means, in essence, that the largest group of LGBT advocates have openly endorsed the Joy Behar approach to civic responsibility. Behar, on “The View,” you may recall, said brazenly (well, she says everything brazenly) that she’d vote for a proven rapist as long as he “voted” for issues that were important to her, a.k.a. abortion rights. Single issue voters of this low ethics threshold are irresponsible and breach their civic duties by making democracy itself incoherent and too easily manipulated—by cynical, ethics-free, power-mongers like Hillary Clinton. Are they even aware, I wonder, that openly associating a group with a candidate of proven ethical bankruptcy—even on the issue they think she embraces!–calls into question their own integrity, trustworthiness and values?

The disconnect between conservatives and LGBT Americans stems in part from a false belief that gays and other Americans of non-traditional sexuality aren’t as red, white and blue as they are. Being American means caring more about, say, the economy, unemployment, the debt, the collapse of schools, the miserable state of colleges, terrorism, racial distrust, the still burgeoning cost of health care and the welfare of your neighbors, children and fellow citizens than about narrow, single issues of special concern to you or your “tribe.”  I think this way; so do most of the LGBT people I know.  It is the ethical value of citizenship in action. Could I respect someone who found Donald Trump appropriately nauseating, knew he would be a human and cultural disaster for the nation, but supported him solely because he swore he would protect LGBT interests? No. Of course not.

This endorsement of Hillary Clinton is exactly as irresponsible. Continue reading →

Ethical Quote Of The Week: Washington Post Columnist Ruth Marcus

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Frank Costanza

“So when you hear arguments over whether Cruz can be president, don’t worry about the senator from Texas. Think instead about the little girl adopted from China, learning about civics in her second-grade classroom and being told that she can never become president of the only country she has known.”

—-Washington Post editor and op-ed pundit Ruth Marcus, concluding a column titled, “Abolish the ‘natural born citizen’ test”

I love this quote, in no small part because it provides a neat exception to the general rule that an advocate using “Think of the Children!” as an argument is usually as sign that the advocate doesn’t want us to think at all. In this case, however, it is appropriate to think of that Chinese orphan, or my Russia-born son (rather than, say, George Costanza’s Italian born father on “Seinfeld,” who ignored politics on the grounds that he felt unfairly prohibited from running for President, shouting, “They don’t want me, I don’t want them!”), as well as figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger. The requirement for Presidents to be not just citizens in good standing, but “natural born” citizens, is the epitome of a Constitutional provision that once made sense but now does not. Marcus: Continue reading →

Here’s What Was REALLY Wrong With Bill Cosby’s Sweater…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Cosby sweater

Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan set off a lively controversy by alleging that the “grandpa” sweater Bill Cosby wore to court was a calculated and manipulative ploy to gain public sympathy. “Bill Cosby’s perp walk was striking for its overwhelming lack of grace and power. It was an exploitation of our assumptions of fragile old age,” she wrote.  “It was the explicit manipulation of a studiously unattractive sweater.”

Was it? Lawyers often micro-manage a clients’ appearance in court; when it amounts to deception, I have written that it is unethical. Cosby’s attire seems hardly deceptive; after all, he is famous for his sweaters. There is even a pop song called Cosby’s Sweater. Ann Althouse agrees with Givhan that it was “a con,” but suggests that it’s an ethical con because “everybody does it.”

I don’t understand either Givhan’s logic or Althouse’s, and if Cosby’s lawyers talked him into this costume, they did him no favors. Cosby’s best armor against the verdict of public opinion is that Cliff Huxtable would never do the horrible things he’s being accused of.  There is no better, more benign, more appealing image of Bill Cosby than “TV Bill Cosby” as we fondly remember him. In court, he looked like a dirty old man, which is what he apparently is. Cliff Huxtable wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a sweater like that to court. (Bill would have also been well-advised to shave.) Continue reading →

The Ted Cruz Eligibility Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Cruz birthSenator Ted Cruz was born to an American citizen mother in Canada. The Constitution says that to be eligible to be President, a citizen must be “natural born.” Donald Trump, who also challenged the birth place and eligibility of President Obama, has raised the possibility that the circumstances of Cruz’s birth might be a “problem.” Cruz laughed the issue off saying that it is “settled law” that a citizen born of an American citizen abroad qualifies as “natural born” under the Constitution, following the definition in the British Common Law.

What’s going on here?

Weeeelll…

1. Trump is being a jerk, but as has been the case before, somebody needs to be one, because it is not—exactly—“settled law.” It is way past time that this controversy was settled once and for all. Continue reading →

Most Encouraging Statement Suggesting That There May Be Justice After All: Former U.S. Attorney General Joe DiGenova

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Hope-Dove-Flying

Former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova had this to say on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, speaking  about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary’s intentional mishandling of confidential State Department e-mails—you know, those “stupid e-mails” that nobody cares about:

“They have reached a critical mass in their investigation of the Secretary and all of her senior staff. And, it’s going to come to a head, I would suggest, in the next 60 days…It’s going to be a very complex matter for the Department of Justice, but they’re not going to be able to walk away from it. They are now at over 1,200 classified emails. And, that’s just for the ones we know about from the State Department. That does not include the ones that the FBI is, in fact, recovering from her hard drives. …I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Attorney General Loretta Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an Attorney General.  It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable.”

Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Yet DiGenova is far from a being a loon, a partisan hitman, or one to spin wild theories. He also should know a bit about how the internal workings of the various competing agencies under Justice work. [Full disclosure: I’ve met Joe, and chatted with him a bit, though this was quite a while back. Did you know he is a trained singer? A good one, too.]

I cannot begin to describe how marvelous it will be for the integrity of our government and justice system if Joe’s analysis is proven correct. I don’t even have to consider how much I would enjoy the screams of indignation of the Clinton Corrupted. This scenario is what the Clintons, the Democrats, the DNC, Clintons’ disgraceful mews media defenders and Hillary’s see-no-evil supporters sooooo richly deserve that if it ever comes to pass, Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus might just spontaneously echo from the cosmos, or at least John Kiley’s organ version that he played that immortal night, the best of my life, when Carlton Fisk hit that Game #6 winning home run off the Fenway foulpole, so many years ago.

Let us hope.

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Pointer and Source: Don Surber