Health and Medicine

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce: Fox News”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments
Bradley then, Chelsea now.

Bradley then, Chelsea now.

Responding sharply to a commenter’s expressed criticism of the argument that convicted classified data leaker Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning, sentenced to Federal prison and seeking treatment as a trans-gendered female, ought to have his treatment needs served by prison authorities at public cost, Ethics Alarms’ own expert on such matters (from Australia), provided this fascinating overview of U.S. law and medical ethics on the topic. Here is zoebrain’s Comment of the Day on the recent post flagging Fox News’ juvenile mockery of Manning’s gender issues, Ethics Dunce: Fox News:

“There are two disputes here. The first is whether prisoners have a right to medical treatment, and if so, to what degree.I’ll deal with that first.

“Brown v. Plata 131 S.Ct. 1910 (2011):  “To incarcerate, society takes from prisoners the means to provide for their own needs. Prisoners are dependent on the State for food, clothing, and necessary medical care. A prison’s failure to provide sustenance for inmates “may actually produce physical ‘torture or a lingering death.’ ” ….Just as a prisoner may starve if not fed, he or she may suffer or die if not provided adequate medical care. A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society.” Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Don Dwyer (R), Maryland House of Delegates

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
Hey, after he leaves politics, Don Dwyer has a future as a cruise captain...in HELL...

Hey, after he leaves politics, Don Dwyer has a future as a cruise captain…in HELL…

How is Maryland House of Delegates Member Don Dwyer unqualified to serve? Let us sing the ways:

1. Call him irresponsible… He piloted his 27 foot power boat, named “The Legislator,” while (allegedly, of course) roaring drunk, causing an accident and a wreck  that resulted in injuries to seven people, including a five-year-old-girl. His trial is in October.

2. Call him unreliable… He also was recently arrested for DUI, resulting in fifteen charges including driving under the influence of alcohol, reckless and negligent driving, displaying expired and suspended registration, and driving 70 mph in a 55-mph zone.

3. Throw in undependable, too…Apparently Dwyer just can’t stand the stresses that go along with his position. He explained his boating accident to the Maryland  Gazette by saying that the incident was caused by his escalation in drinking frequency after he separated from his wife, and as a result of feeling “betrayed’ when colleagues voted to sanction gay marriage.“I felt a tremendous amount of pressure in my family,” he said. “You take those personal issues (and) add betrayal on the professional side, and it really gets to be overwhelming.”

Mostly, call him unaccountable, which isn’t in the song lyrics, but fits this loser to a fare-thee-well.  He’s driven dangerous vehicles twice under the influence, risking lives, and his response is to blame the gay marriage vote rather than his own failure to acknowledge and treat a serious alcohol problem. Law makers cannot be law breakers, especially the laws against operating vehicles drunk, which only require the sense and responsibility it takes to avoid getting behind the wheel.

Too many state legislators are inept when sober; we certainly don’t need drunk ones too.

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Pointer: Rick Jones

Sources: Maryland Gazette, Huffington Post

Exemplary Ethical Conduct I’m Embarrassed I Didn’t Know About Dept.: Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
Salk and Sabin

Salk and Sabin, true professionals. Did you know?

You learn the damnedest things in the damnedest places, which is a good reason to keep your ears open wherever you may be.

Last night I found myself listening to Michael Savage, easily the most offensive of all conservative talk show hosts, and he gives Rush and Mark Levine a run for their money in the ego category, too. I only listen to Savage by accident, and then only in bites of five minutes or less; it frightens me that millions of people might be influenced by such consistently hateful commentary.

But Savage (whose real name is Michael Alan Weiner) is no dummy, and not infrequently goes off on learned tangents about philosophy, history or religion in between declaring that the nation is under Nazi rule. Yesterday, just as I was reaching for the dial, he disclosed that one of his heroes growing up was Jonas Salk, not because he invented the first effective polio vaccine, but because he refused to patent it, and gave it to the world for the benefit of humanity. A bit later, Savage noted that Albert Sabin, Salk’s bitter rival who later invented the oral vaccine, also declined to profit from his invention.

Could all this be true, I wondered?  If it is true, why did I not know about it? Why doesn’t everybody know about it? Continue reading →

Pssst! Katie McDonough! If A Fetus Is A Human Being, Whether Or Not It Feels Pain When You Kill It Is Irrelevant

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
WOW! What a great straw man!!!

WOW! What a great straw man!!!

There  is a lot of solemn and indignant nonsense written on both sides of the abortion issue, but for mind-numbing  muddle-headedness, Salon’s Katie McDonough deserves some kind of prize. In a jaw-dropping essay titled “Fetal Pain Is A Lie: How Phony Science Took Over The Abortion Debate,” she makes such a throbbing-neon straw man argument that it should be used in textbooks as an example of the technique, beginning with the very first statement under the headline,—“New laws banning abortion after 20 weeks are based on pseudoscience — and real research proves it conclusively.”

Real research “proves” nothing of the kind. The various laws banning late term abortions are based on the argument that there has to be a line where the fetus stops being treated by the law like a mass of cells with no rights or status as an individual, unless we’re ready to proceed down the slippery slope to the point where a woman gives birth, looks the kid over to see if she likes him, and bashes his brains out against the wall, legally of course, if she doesn’t.  Continue reading →

Sorry: I Would Fire Don/Dawn Ennis

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments
Old Don, Dawn, New Don

Old Don, Dawn, New Don

Let me begin by saying that I have no idea what is going on, was going on or will be going on with ABC producer Don Ennis. Unless he has the worst sense of humor in the world, whatever it is isn’t good, or anything I would wish on someone else. I am, to a point, sympathetic. However, if I were his employer, I would tell Ennis today that he will have to work out his unusual identity issues somewhere else, and I believe that would be the right thing to do. It may not, however, be the legal thing to do, which is one of approximately 268 reasons I’m glad that I am not Mr. Ennis’s employer.

Not that it wouldn’t be exciting. If you hadn’t heard, last May Don Ennis, a well-respected ABC News editor and previously unambiguously male, entered his newsroom wearing a cute black dress and an auburn wig and announced to a stunned staff, colleagues and superiors that he was transgender. The ABC News national assignment editor said he was forever more to be known as Dawn Stacey Ennis. “Please understand,” he said in a statement, “this is not a game of dress-up, or make-believe. It is my affirmation of who I now am and what I must do to be happy, in response to a soul-crushing secret that my wife and I have been dealing with for more than seven years, mostly in secret. A father of three, “Dawn” announced that the newly-confirmed she was separating from her wife of seventeen years.

His colleagues were supportive, as was everyone else in the media, which is why you probably hadn’t heard the story. They left flowers on Dawn’s desk; ABC News President Ben Sherwood wrote her a note of support. I would have done likewise. This is a real problem, and exactly the kind of personal, medical crisis that the workplace ought to accommodate, while providing emotional support for the difficult and courageous transition. Thus Ennis continued to work at ABC sporting hormone-induced breasts, make-up, lipstick, skirts and heels. This undoubtedly caused a period of adjustment and awkwardness, but I would expect mature professionals to handle it gracefully.

Today, we learned, along with ABC, that Ennis has had a change of heart, and almost everything else. In a jaw-dropping e-mail to family and co-workers  titled “Not Reportable, Very Confirmed,” Ennis explained that he was Don Ennis again. “That will be my name again, now and forever. And it appears I’m not transgender after all.” Continue reading →

Ethics Corrupter: Yankee Third Baseman Alex Rodriquez; Ethics Dunce: Yankee Manager Joe Girardi; Disgraced: The New York Yankees

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments
Corrupted!

Corrupted!

Today, Major League Baseball announced that it was suspending Alex Rodriquez, the New York Yankees aging superstar, for the remainder of the 2013 season and the 2014 season for  using banned performance enhancing drugs, and impeding baseball’s investigation of his cheating. This was the climax (but not the end) of a long, drawn out, messy process and investigation involving a sleazy Miami drug lab, called Biogenesis, now closed down, which had records indicating that many professional baseball players had obtained banned substances.

Former National League MVP Ryan Braun (who I keep calling “Steve”) has already been banned for the rest of the year by the evidence obtained from Biogenesis records. The process has been marred by serial leaks from MLB  (unfair to the players involved, including Rodriquez) and ugly maneuvering between Rodriguez, who has been recovering from a serious hip issue, and the Yankees, who owe him approximately a gazillion dollars (thanks to an idiotic career contract signed in 2007 after he had already admitted to using steroids once), would like nothing more than for him to vanish in a puff of smoke and sulfur.

To explain the baroque ins and outs of baseball’s steroid wars, its player union relations, and the various intersecting agreements, special clauses and other things that have an impact on Rodriquez’s suspension would take too long here and would even bore the baseball fans. What you need to know now is this: Continue reading →

When Bloggers Screw Up

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
Hey, who said that? (It's a trick question!)

Hey, who said that? (It’s a trick question!)

Ann Althouse is a quirky, well-respected blogger, a Wisconsin law professor who is liable to write wittily and perceptively about anything from dogs to politics from her barely right of center political perspective. Recently she banned all comments from her blog, meaning that she now pontificates without the safety net of informed readers being available to tell her when she’s jumped the track of rationality, which, without exception, we all do. This means that on the rare occasions that the erudite and perceptive Ms. Althouse is full of beans, there is no way to let her or anyone else know.

So I’m letting her know.

For some reason, Althouse is indignant over the $800,000 the Interior Department is spending to erase the incorrect quote negligently carved into the Martin Luther King Memorial. She writes with a sneer,

“Martin Luther King said “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” which we will remember, even through it’s now off the memorial. It’s off the memorial because, in the “drum major” speech, there were some other words around it — as is always the case with snappy lines in speeches — and Maya Angelou and others felt some shades of subtlety were lost, making the man sound arrogant.” Continue reading →

Well, Let’s Kill All The Lawyers, Then!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

One reason why democracy doesn’t seem to be working very well is that the public is becoming increasingly ignorant about what makes it work at all. Evidence of this trend comes by way of a provocative study by the Pew Research Center, which polled the public regarding which professions it believes contribute the most to society.

The results can be found in this press release, this summary, and this article in The Careerist, but here is a snapshot:

Worth study

Continue reading →

“Yeccch!” Ethics, The Saint’s Excuse, and Shotgun Shock PSAs

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

crap poster

The above poster is being used by the Bristol, England, city council to get dog owners to pick up after their pets.

My reaction:

Yecccch! Ack!!! Gag!

Also this: What a lazy, inconsiderate, unfair and unethical assault on the majority in order to make an impact on a minority. Given the choice between wiping dog poop off my shoe or having my stomach turned by the image of a child eating it, I’m not sure which I’d take, or who I hate more, the inconsiderate dog owner, or the jerk who is willing to sicken me to get at him.

Good, noble, arrogant, self-righteous advocates for responsible behavior increasingly behave as if any collateral damage is acceptable, while their dubiously effective advocacy gets more shrill and ugly. Every time that current TV ad featuring the croaking, hideously disfigured ex-smoker talking while a photo of her lovely pre-cancer visage shows us the ravages of tobacco, I literally dive for the remote, just as I do when the animal cruelty spots begin bombarding me with images of sad-eyed, neglected and abused cats and dogs.

(I also do this when Piers Morgan, Nancy Grace, Donald Trump, Sean Hannity or Al Sharpton flash on the screen, but I digress.) Continue reading →

Actor Patrick Stewart (“Captain Picard”) Is A Father’s Day Ethics Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The video is self-explanatory.

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Pointer: Alexander Cheezem