Comment of the Day

Comment Of The Day: “How Can We ‘Trust The Science’ When It’s Distorted By Activist Scientists?” Audubon’s Bird Scam”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

On days like today, taken up by a frantic effort to prepare for an all-new seminar I’m teaching the usual unexpected crisis, plus wasting time dealing with a partisan troll whom I knew from the start was eventually going to get herself banned (and she did), I am especially grateful for thoughtful Comments of the Day in the inventory to keep the quality content coming. Such is Ryan Harkins’ comment on the post, “How Can We ‘Trust The Science’ When It’s Distorted By Activist Scientists?” —and here it is:

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I can certainly applaud the desire to mitigate damage to our native fauna that our cities create, but I would think there are several things that any advocacy group should keep in mind.

1. Sensationalism might spur the gullible, but it trashes credibility among anyone who bothers to investigate. Once you’ve lost credibility, it is an enormous uphill battle to regain trust.

2. In the same vein, even accurate numbers need to be placed in context. A billion birds a year sounds like a frighteningly high number. But it gives no context for how severe the problem is. It could be an imminent threat to all bird populations, or it could be a very minor issue. Killing a billion humans would be devastating to the human race. Killing a billion ants doesn’t even make a dent in their overall population. I Googled around and found that estimates put the bird population in the US and Canada at about 7.2 billion. However, that doesn’t mean that in 8 years, there would be no more birds. Yes, since 1970, that number has declined from over 10 billion, but that means 3 billion overall over 50 years. However, even that doesn’t provide the full context, because people need to understand the various causes that impacted bird population loss (which is largely due to loss of habitat), and they need to understand that killing a billion birds a year doesn’t lead to an overall decline of a billion birds in the total population. Instead, many of those birds will have died of predators, disease, old age, or other accidents, and their deaths often mean resources made available to the remaining birds who will then survive and reproduce. The real question is how quickly the overall bird population is declining, and whether that decline is accelerating or leveling off.

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Comment Of The Day: “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The key question is: “Will any mainstream media pundit have the courage to make the points esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Sarah B makes below, in her Comment of the Day to the post, “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”?

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So I’m going to say something that , at first glance, may sound pretty unethical here, but let me defend it first, before telling me that I’m going all in on Rationalizations. That being said, my TL,DR is “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I do think that it is fair to argue that, for the most part, the people of Lahaina had it coming. This fire was the rather predictable consequence of years of bad judgement and voting practices. First, the sugar cane farming dissolution into non-native dry grassland came because “we couldn’t possibly grow sugar cane there, it was too insensitive to the natives”. Then they didn’t make any reasonable plans to replace the farms with native plants that could handle both the wetter times and the drier times, but instead just let the farms grow over, which led to imported grass and other vegetation taking root off of spreading seeds. This worked out for a bit when things were wet, but these grasses are unable to handle the drier times. That led to a high fire hazard with a high burn interval.

Then they decided that they would go all in on the green energy to the degree that there was a huge governmental push (which often starts with the residents) for green production over safe electric lines, AFTER there was already substantial documentation that the power lines were likely to cause significant fires. Of course, the electric company is nowhere near blameless, but neither are the voters.

The idea that we now have DIE standing in the way of appropriate water being used to put out a fire, because we find that DIE is more important than lives and property (after all, we are founded on the notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion right, not that old fashioned life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), well, that is a conscious choice by the Hawaii electorate too.

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Comment Of The Day: “Painkiller”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Most of the comments on EA posts come from a solid base of experience and knowledge, but it is especially welcome when a commenter enlightens us on a subject he or she really knows well. Thus Tom P.’s observations on the pharmaceutical industry in light of the EA post on the Perdue Pharma/Sackler/ OxyContin horror as dramatized in “Painkiller” is a special pleasure. Here it is, a Comment of the Day:

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I apologize for the length of this post, but the topic is complicated and does not lend itself to sound bites. What follows is my experience and opinions based on working in the pharmaceutical industry and extensive reading on my part.

Full disclosure: I am a retired pharmaceutical company executive. During my career, I worked for various cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies. I held positions in R&D, manufacturing, quality control, and supply chain management. For most of my career, I was responsible for a major Pharma manufacturer’s anticancer and biologics global supply chains. As a point of reference, I have not seen “Dopesick” or “Painkiller”. I am familiar, however, with the travesty the Sacklers perpetrated on the sick and society. The best summary of their unethical and probably criminal behavior I have read is in an LA Times May 5, 2016, article: https://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/

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The Ethics Zugzwang Of Trump vs. The Democrats, Part I: Comment Of The Day On “Today’s Res Ipsa Loquitur Donald Trump Moment”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

In his Comment of the Day, Chris Marschner, among Ethics Alarms’ most articulate and astute commenters, writes, “Please excuse my rambling rant.” No excusing is necessary: Chris was using a stream of consciousness technique to express that frustration many—I’m tempted to say anyone paying attention—feel as they face the prospect of having to choose between the reckless and untrustworthy creep who is the likely Republican nominee, and an insatiable, power-lusting Democratic Party that in its has made it crystal clear that it no longer respects the American mission, the Constitution, or much else.

His post was well-timed: I’ve been planning an examination of the ethics zugzwang Donald Trump’s legal problems (and the Democratic Party’s criminalizing of politics) citizens like Chris now find themselves in. That’s Scylla and Charybdis above: Odysseus had an easier choice deciding which would be more disastrous than what we might face in November of 2024.

Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day will be Part I of a three part series, and here it is, triggered by the post, “Today’s Res Ipsa Loquitur Donald Trump Moment.”

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You have changed my mind: I will not vote. Screw it.

There are no suitable candidates. You have lying Biden, who tells a gold star mother he brought his own son back in a flag draped coffin during the dignified transition of remains, and the other candidates are just asking for money and not giving me a different alternative. We have D.C. judges sitting in on Trumps arraignment. Why did Judge Amy Berman Jackson and other federal judges feel it necessary to be present in the courtroom for this arraignment other than to send a message? But all we seem to focus on is the stupid shit Trump says.

How ethical was it for Trump’s legal team to be given 1 day to respond to a late Friday motion to prevent Trump from getting discovery by Jack Smith’s team when the typical time frame is apparently 14 days and Trumps team pleaded for 3 days? Why are we not discussing the ethical dimensions of such judicial conduct? I don’t care if Trump is a mass murderer; when our judicial system is abused against the rights of an accused we have bigger problems than Chris Christie’s feelings. If it is unethical to behave as Trump does when his adversary makes a point to harm him, then we should also be discussing the ethics of Christie, who starts the fights.

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Comment Of The Day: “First Open Forum Of August!”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Michael West, who used to weigh in here far more frequently than he has been able to in recent years, issued a well-timed commentary in last week’s Friday open forum. It’s a perfect intro, if a bit ironic, to a post I’ll get up today if climate change doesn’t kill us all about the intractable reaction some have had to yesterday’s heresy that Donald Trump has officially jumped the legitimate Presidential candidate shark. The recent ban-ee actually sounded like Trump, warning me of dire consequences should I not succumb to his arguments and dance to his off-key tune.

Here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the most recent open forum:

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On the widening worldview dichotomy, objectivity and debate:

Can a progressive commenter ever last here anymore?

The complaints that this is a conservative echo chamber have some practical merit – in that most of the commenters here have a libertarian or conservative lean. The progressives all left, mostly of their own accord, many because their own assertions painted themselves into logic corners from which all they had left was the vitriol that eventually got them banned.

Therein lies the question – can a progressive commenter last here without admitting that their entire train of thought has gone off the rails? And once a progressive commenter does have that realization – can they honestly remain progressive anymore?

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Comment Of The Day: “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am proud to present an epic Comment of he Day by A M Golden on the post, “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President? Because He Can’t…Ever.” It is wise, wide-raanging and nuanced, so I’m not going to waste your time with an introduction. Just read, think, and enjoy.

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As the saying goes, “When someone tells you who they really are, believe them.” We have enough evidence to see with our own eyes and ears who Trump is and who he is not and that should not be relevant to who Joe Biden is and who he is not.

This entry, the previous one in the latest installment of the “Nation of Assholes” series and the one before that about Rudy Giuliani’s untrustworthy secret recorder have all coalesced in my mind this weekend as I have spent several days wearing myself out over planning for a pop-culture convention next week by following other conventions in other cities on social media to determine how the shows are accommodating the guests’ requirements under SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules and what that means for how I should approach any celebrity guest I wish to meet.

I get tired of holding the hands of new convention-goers who don’t understand the rules, ask for clarification and end up not following my advice. I get tired of veteran convention-goers who think they have the right to get around the rules. For entitled people who cut lines, who try to sweet-talk the guest into extra perks and who make little to no effort to ask polite, intelligent questions. They make everything harder on everyone else. Celebrities won’t want to attend these things if people don’t understand or respect boundaries. I have too many stories to recount of fans acting like inconsiderate asses and those stories are from before the pandemic.

We are already an entitled enough culture that treats celebrities like commodities, as if buying a movie ticket or following a TV program requires that anyone who appeared in the same owes us unlimited time, an autograph, a selfie, a kidney… One of the best things about the strike is that it’s finally becoming somewhat public knowledge that most actors aren’t millionaires.

We treat others like us even worse. Not only do we not put most of our fellow citizens on pedestals, but we don’t even afford them the basic respect of treating them the way we would want to be treated. As long as there’s something in it for us, I guess…

Somehow, qualities of character, such as honesty, integrity, patience, kindness, self-control (sorry, I think I wandered into the Fruits of the Spirit from the Bible) seem to have been lost very quickly. We are a mess as a culture and there’s a lot of blame to go around, not least because we have forgotten the Golden Rule.

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Comment Of The Day: “I’m Sick Of Hearing These Arguments That College Admissions Favor The Wealthy And Privileged…”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Humble Talent has provided a nicely provocative snapshot of the frustrating and weird state of the quest for fair college admissions. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “I’m Sick Of Hearing These Arguments That College Admissions Favor The Wealthy And Privileged Because The Problem Is Easy To Fix. So Fix It.” (It also touches on the “disparate impact” scam, discussed here in another context.)

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What I have trouble dealing with is how incoherent some of the positions some of the people are taking are.

Legacy admissions are a great example. We all know why they’re happening: Legacy admissions are a great way of enticing future philanthropy out of donor parents. While I’m sure there are some racists in admissions, that’s financially driven, not racially driven. But we pretend it’s a racial issue because of disparate impact.

In fact, we’re supposed to pretend that legacy admissions are a resource of white supremacy, despite the fact that legacy admissions are almost perfectly proportionate, at least for white applicants (hovering very close to 70%). I don’t know about you, but if I were designing a system that was supposed to privilege my race over others, I might devise a system where my race isn’t almost perfectly proportionately treated.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: “The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Here is yet another Comment of the Day regarding climate science, junk science, propaganda…you know: “Climate change.” It is also yet another excellent entry by Sarah B. Here is her Comment of the Day on the post, “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis” but it applies equally well to this one (from today), this one, and this one too:

Many people who question anthropogenic global climate change have good reason to do so. Here are a few of the facts that make believing the anthropogenicity of climate change difficult for me.

This “hottest days ever” claim has been shown to be mostly false. For example, the Rome data point was from a model, not actual data. Indeed, while the temperature measured was almost two degrees Celsius below what the high was claimed to be, that high was under previous highs from the last few decades recorded in Rome. The actual temperature of the day in question was 40C, measured at the Urbe airport, not 41.8. Rome’s highest temperature ever recorded is not 40.8C as claimed, but instead 42C. This high temperature was recorded at the Ponte di Nona bus station in 2005.

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Comment Of The Day: “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ah, how I love it when readers send in superb and informative Comments of the Day when I am strapped for time and have ProEthics deadlines to meet! This post in particular has generated several COTD-worthy responses. I may re-post them all.

But first, here’s Michael R.’s Comment of the Day on “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”:

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One of my big problems with the whole ‘climate change’ agenda is that the people who are pushing it don’t believe it, either. If they believed it, they would push agendas that would further the goal of counteracting global warming, but they don’t. They push agendas that are outrageously expensive, damaging to the economy and the well-being of people, and don’t do much, if anything, about the warming of the planet.

(1) Electric vehicles. This is an easy one. The demand to eliminate cars and trucks and replace them with electric vehicles is a high-profile and telling example. First of all, electric vehicles are not capable of replacing many of our vehicles, such as semis. Secondly, we probably lack the resources to replace even most of our cars (alone) with electric vehicles, especially since we oddly won’t allow the mining required to obtain the materials. Thirdly, of electric grid is completely incapable of powering this massive addition to the electric load, especially since we are making it more unreliable with renewables. Most importantly, however, THEY DON’T REDUCE CO2 emissions significantly or at all. Their increased energy involved in production and the battery replacement cycle makes them worse or marginally better than today’s gasoline powered cars (depending on your assumptions). For my use, my gasoline powered cars are better for the environment.

(2) Meat. There is a big push to eliminate meat from our diets for ‘global warming’. However, anyone with half a brain realizes that the ‘fake meat’ they are creating takes vastly more energy to produce than a cow does. Lets take a large vat of rhizobium and extract a few hundred milligrams of leg-hemoglobin so we can make our soybean patty taste like meat? Sure, that’s so much more efficient than a cow or chicken. Of course, a lot of our beef is grown on western grazing lands where you are ONLY allowed to graze cattle. Removing the cows from that land, without opening it up to other agriculture (as the Biden administration has done) only reduces the amount of food produced, increasing the world starvation we are facing.

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Comment(s) Of The Day: “Not This Issue Again! Arrest These Parents For Child Endangerment, Please…”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

My position on parents endangering young children by seeking “all-time youngest” records for them and forcing them into unnecessarily dangerous recreational activities the kids can’t possibly understand or consent to is, I fear, unalterable. (Above is the 1996 wreck of the plane piloted by 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, whose parents had her attempting to become the youngest trainee pilot to fly a light aircraft across the United States. Local, national, and international news media cheered on Dubroff’s story until she, her training pilot and her father died in the crash. )

However outdoors enthusiast Sarah B. mounted as strong a case against my position as I can imagine, in two successive comments combined here as Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Not This Issue Again! Arrest These Parents For Child Endangerment, Please…”:

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I think there may be a misunderstanding on how Wyoming papers handle kid stories which I think changes a few things.

In small towns like most of Wyoming (not the urban hell that is Casper, Cheyenne, or Laramie), a story with a kid gets written long before a story about Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney. I made the front page of our local paper at least a half dozen times as a kid, and made the paper dozens of times. Every year, the middle school and high school band/choir concerts would make the front page the day after they were held. If you consider that we did three concerts a semester for each of band and choir in high school, and two concerts a semester for each of middle school band and choir, that is ten days where the kids make the front page each school year. The high school homecoming royalty would make the front page on Thursday after the Wednesday reveal, the parade would always make front page on Friday, the game on Saturday, with the dance making page two. Prom was front page material. When four kids from our school got the best scholarship to the University of Wyoming one year, we made the front page. Every semester honor roll for every level of school made about third page. Placing in a math competition, debate competition, etc would always get a name in the paper, usually a picture too, and often on the front page. High school sports covered the front page every week.

I say this to emphasize my belief that this shouldn’t be considered as bad as you think. Newspapers gush over “youngest” this and “oldest” that. It makes people read the paper. National news is a page six or eight item and international news, like a war between Ukraine and Russia, is usually found below the fold on the comics page, under the Sudoku and Dear Abby.

People want the stories with the kids. Front page news is preferred to have a picture of a kid. A kid doing something good, like winning the coupon for a free pizza at the drawing at the library book fair, is a great front page story. Getting to the top of Devil’s Tower is just as good, and should be considered with the same gravity.

This is just standard newspaper fodder, nothing to get so excited about.

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