Health and Medicine

A Presidents Day Celebration (PART 3): When The Going Got Tough

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

 presidents.

The Presidents really get interesting now, as a political leadership culture in the U.S. matures, the stakes of failure become greater, and technology, labor upheaval, expanding big business and greater influence on world affairs transforms the Presidency into truly the toughest job on earth.

Grover Cleveland

grover

Another one of my favorites, Cleveland was known for telling the truth ( he as called “Grover the Good”), but he participated in one of the most elaborate deceptions in Presidential history.

As explained in historian Matthew Algeo’s 2011 book, “The President Is a Sick Man,”  President Cleveland noticed an odd bump on the roof of his mouth in the summer of 1893, shortly after he took office for the second time. (Cleveland is the only President with split terms, the hapless Republican Benjamin Harrison winning an electoral college victory that gave him four years as the bland filling in a Cleveland sandwich.) The bump was diagnosed as a life-threatening malignant tumor, and the remedy was removal. Cleveland believed that news of his diagnosis would send Wall Street and the country  into a panic at a time when the economy was sliding into a depression anyway, and agreed to an ambitious and dangerous plan to have the surgery done in secret. The plan was for the President to announce he was taking a friend’s yacht on a four-day fishing trip from New York to his summer home in Cape Cod. Unknown to the press and the public was that the yacht had been transformed into a floating operating room, and a team of six surgeons were assembled and waiting.

The 90 minute procedure employed ether as the anesthesia, and the doctors removed the tumor, five teeth and a large part of the President’s upper left jawbone, all at sea. They also managed to extract the tumor through the President’s mouth while leaving no visible scar and without altering Cleveland’s walrus mustache. Talking on NPR in 2011, historian said,

“I talked to a couple of oral surgeons researching the book, and they still marvel at this operation: that they were able to do this on a moving boat; that they did it very quickly. A similar operation today would take several hours; they did it in 90 minutes.”

But the operation was a success. An artificial partial upper jaw made of rubber was installed to replace the missing bone, and Cleveland, who had the constitution of a moose, reappeared after four days looking hardy and most incredible of all, able to speak as clearly as ever. How did he heal so fast? Why wasn’t his speech effected? He endures doctors cutting out a large chuck of his mouth using 19th century surgical techniques and is back on the job in less than a week? No wonder nobody suspected the truth.

Then, two months later, Philadelphia Press reporter E.J. Edwards published a story about the surgery, thanks to one of the doctors anonymously breaching doctor-patient confidentiality. Cleveland, who in his first campaign for the White House had dealt with Republican accusations that he had fathered an illegitimate child by publicly admitting it, flatly denied Edwards’ story, and his aides  launched a campaign to discredit the reporter. Grover the Good never lies, thought the public, so Edwards ended up where Brian Williams is now. His career and credibility were ruined.

Nobody outside of the participants knew about the operation and the President’s fake jaw until twenty-four years later, after all the other principals were dead except three witnesses.  One of the surgeons decided to  publish an article to prove that E.J. Edwards had been telling the truth after all.

This is a great ethics problem. Was it ethical for Cleveland to keep his health issues from the public? In this case, yes, I’d say so. Was it unethical for the doctor to break his ethical duty? Of course. Was Edwards ethical to report the story? Sure.

The tough question is: Was Cleveland ethical to deny the story and undermine the reporter’s credibility? I think it was a valid utilitarian move, and barely ethical: it was better for the nation to distrust one reporter than the President, especially when his secret was one he responsibly withheld, and his doctor unethically revealed. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The President’s Irresponsible And Untrue ‘One in Five Women Are Raped’ Claim”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

numbers_statistics_stats

Rich (in CT) adds a superb and learned enhancement to the day’s post about President Obama’s dubious rape claims during the Grammy Awards.  It raises a question I hadn’t considered before: is part of the problem that researchers are as clumsy in their understanding of language as liberal arts types are in their use of statistics and numbers? The word “rape” has meaning; this is no place for Humpty Dumpty’s habit of using words to mean whatever one pleases. [“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”—― Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass” ] Rich writes, “This data is important, as mental health and sexual disease propagation is affected by such contact, even if the traditional criteria imaged for “rape” is not met. ” I’ll concede that the data is important, but shouldn’t important data be clearly and accurately described? The data isn’t about rape! It’s about a variety of conduct linked by the researchers that they chose to call “rape,” knowing, presumably, that people who never read the data will take the misleading “rape” description and use it to confuse, persuade, deceive, and engage in scaremongering for political gain.

Rich writes that “not enough evidence is given to suggest that either study is unethical in and of itself.” Isn’t using vague, overly broad and misleading terminology for a study that is going to be made public intrinsically unethical—irresponsible, incompetent, untrustworthy?

Here is Rich (in CT)’s enlightening Comment of the Day on the post “The President’s Irresponsible And Untrue ‘One in Five Women Are Raped’ Claim”: Continue reading →

The President’s Irresponsible And Untrue “One in Five Women Are Raped” Claim

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

In a video that aired during the Grammy Awards on Feb. 8, President Obama stated, as President of the United States and a certifiable hero to the kind of citizens who watch the Grammy Awards, this:

“Right now, nearly one in five women in America has been a victim of rape or attempted rape.”

Let’s begin with the fact that this is false, or at least, there is no reason to believe it is true, or even close to true. (More about this in a minute.) Was the President’s statement a lie? We can’t tell. If the President believes that rape is so common that 20% of all women are raped, then what he said is not a lie (a false statement knowingly made by the speaker in order to deceive), which leads to some uncomplimentary conclusions:

a. He has a remarkably low opinion of his own nation and culture…but then we knew that, didn’t we?

b. He believes what he is told without challenging it or examining an assertions’ origin, methodology and assumptions. Really? This guy is supposed to be brilliant. I would think such a jaw-dropping and frightening statistic would mandate some examination, but see a.

c.  Why hasn’t this been a major focus of his administration? Isn’t the President alarmed about this? Why is the Attorney General running around the country holding the hands of parents of dead kids who attack police officers and fighting attempts to make voters prove who they are at the polls if women are being raped like The U.S. is the Congo? Why is the Presidentusing his time to make faces on videos to sell Obamacare? Isn’t this clearly a reason to make one of his “I will not rest” speeches, in this case not resting until the rape frequency in the Land of the Free is lower than that of a Columbia ghetto? He believes 20% of the women in the country under his stewardship  being raped in their lifetimes doesn’t rate mentioning in his “if wishes were horses” State of the Union, and relegates this horrendous health and crime emergency to…the Grammys?

If Obama doesn’t know if the stat is true, but said it anyway, then he was irresponsible. He’s President of the United States; people believe him, even after the shattered pledge of transparency and “If you like  your health care plan…” and the “red line” and all the rest. He can not fairly, honestly, ethically state that something is true when he doesn’t know whether it is true or not. That is a lie, then: not the statistic itself, but the implication that he believes it.

Or he knows the statement is false, and made it to deceive, because the ends justifies the means.

In the discussion following last week’s post about the persistence of the false narrative that Bush’s 2000 electoral vote victory was “stolen,” I briefly referenced the now mostly abandoned fake “1 in five” statistic  on campus rape, the one that prompted the 2014 Unethical Quote of the Year from Senator Claire McCaskill when it was debunked. This prompted blog warrior Liberal Dan to re-state the President’s proposition, since he is one of those people who continue to believe the President despite all evidence to the contrary. “One in 5 women are raped,” he wrote, unequivocally, linking to a 2011 New York Times study.

I wish I had the time and space to muse about what it says about an intelligent American when a stat like that one, whether it is used by the Times, the President, or Lena Dunham, doesn’t set off his or her ethics alarms, Fake-Stat-O-Meter and bullshit buzzer. This is what happens, though, when the President makes a factual assertion. I knew the stat was crap; I just don’t have the time to prove it’s crap to people who want to believe it. I assumed someone would pretty quickly, and sure enough, the Washington Post’s hard-working, liberal-biased but diligently trying to compensate Fact-checker Glenn Kessler came through.

In his Washington Post column today, Kessler gives us the results of his research into Obama’s lazy/irresponsible/dishonest claim. His findings? Continue reading →

The Demon Barber Of Snelville

/ Jack Marshall / 75 Comments

shamecut

A barbershop in the Atlanta suburb of Snelville offers parents the opportunity to give their misbehaving little boys a punishment they’ll never forget.  A-1 Kutz will give the boys a “Benjamin Button Special,” free of charge, a haircut invented by Russell Fredrick and his team of barbers that makes tykes look like balding progeria victims.

Gee, what a good idea.

Fredrick  is a 34-year-old father of three, and first tried the disfiguring haircut on his 12-year-old son, Rushawn, last fall. He claims it was a great success, since Rushawn’s grades“dramatically skyrocketed” after he was humiliated. And we all know the ends justify the means. Now, he claims, there has been a surge of interest from other parents.He told the Washington Post that he thinks African-American parents are looking for alternative ways of discipline after the uproar over Adrian Peterson—yes, that other NFL role-model–leaving bruises and welts on his four-year-old with a tree branch. All right, I’ll concede that humiliating a child among his peers and using childhood cruelty as a tool of discipline might be preferable to putting your child in the hospital because you beat the crap out of him. I will not concede that those are the only options, or that African American parents are so devoid of imagination and compassion that the only forms of discipline they can envision are forms of cruelty.
Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Someone Explain To Senator Tillis That It’s Unethical To Make People Sick On Principle”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

hand-washing

Refusing to rest on his laurels, recently crowned Ethics Alarms “Commenter of the Year” texagg04 delivers a helpful, clarifying, erudite examination of the balancing process brought into play with the regulation of businesses for health and safety reasons. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post “Someone Explain To Senator Tillis That It’s Unethical To Make People Sick On Principle”:

Let’s unpackage this.

Purchasing Products and Services

When we buy a product or service, we don’t just buy the end result. We buy a long string of tasks leading up to that final product and sometimes we buy even more things than just the final product*. In this instance, that doesn’t just mean the food on your plate, as tasks, upon deep consideration are actually HUMONGOUS things that are composed of the Time necessary to complete, Material either used up in preparation or as a component of the end item, Personnel Knowledge needed to perform, Equipment which facilitates, and Space needed to complete the task.. You don’t purchase just the food. You purchase the time and care EACH employee puts into the process. From Day 1, you purchase the time a procurer makes a deal with a vendor OR personally hand selects the ingredients of your meal. You purchase the time and quality of the food storage in the pantry/refrigerator. You purchase the chef’s level of knowledge. You purchase the time he devotes to ensuring the burners are a certain temperature. You purchase the manager’s level of knowledge in keeping things efficient and cost effective. You purchase EACH AND EVERY action the server takes that could affect the final, tangible product or service. Continue reading →

Someone Explain To Senator Tillis That It’s Unethical To Make People Sick On Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Thom Tillis

Where do Republicans find these people?

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) was taking questions this week at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and described how he fought health and hygiene regulations when he was in the state legislature. “I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,'” the U.S. Senator said.

Tillis said he was then asked whether he thought establishments serving food shouldn’t be required by law to have employees wash their hands after using the restroom, and that means using the bathroom in ways that require them to handle their genitals and be in close contact with urine and fecal matter. (Sometimes euphemisms just won’t do.)

Tillis said he responded that that would still be preferable to having the government dictate policy, saying ‘”I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.”

Then, he said, the market would work.

Sen. Tillis was serious.

Did I already ask where Republicans find these people? How about why they find these people? Or why anyone with sufficient IQ to play a can of okra to a draw in Stratego would vote for these people?

So we must conclude from this hilarious anecdote that this high-ranking Republican doesn’t just oppose excessively burdensome regulations, but even regulations requiring conduct that no sane and responsible person could possibly oppose, because it is preferable as a matter of ideological principle for the almighty market to work its magic instead, however long it takes and however much projectile vomiting results in the meantime. Right, Senator? And if it takes three, or ten, or a thousand instances of serious illness or death for the “How about some bacteria with your muffin?” establishments to be run out of business, well, that’s just the price of freedom.

I don’t even know if “unethical” is an accurate description of this position.. It passes irresponsible, laps it ten times, and goes right on to insane. Will there be regulations requiring that sign telling customers that they can expect the delightful taste of turd with their meals be printed in large enough type to read? Or mandating that it be on all pages of the menus, and not on the back? Well, that would be silly: if you are going to pass a law about having to inform your customers that you hire human pigs as cooks and servers, you might as well just pass the law saying they have to wash their hands, and that’s an affront to liberty. So we should also let the market favor the restaurants with servers dripping urine from their fingers that prominently warn diners about their yellow food enhancement over those who put the information in fine print on the napkins. That seems consistent with Senator Tillis’s principles.

Hey, how about dental hygienists? Should they have to wash their hands or wear gloves? If a patient gets sick and dies because they missed seeing the sign, does that bar a lawsuit? It might, since there was a warning, like on cigarette packages. Should laws make nurses and hospital employees wash their hands? Presumably Tillis wants the market system to work in hospitals too, wouldn’t you think? My mother was in the hospital for a minor urinary infection, some employee didn’t wash his or her hands, and she was infected with a bug that ate her colon away and killed her. I have to say, Tillis is right, though: the market system works; I won’t send my mother to that hospital again.

Of course, I don’t have a mother now.

After the session, the moderator joked to Tillis, “I’m not sure I’m gonna shake your hand.” HAHAHAHAHA!!! Funny! What isn’t funny is that we elect people as doctrinaire, rigid, dim-witted, smug and dangerous as Thom Tillis to make our laws and protect our health, safety and welfare, elected officials who really think American citizens dying unnecessarily is less of of a burden on society than reasonable government regulations.

The rule often cited here is “When ethics fail, the law takes over.” “When ethics fail, the market takes over” is not a rule, because the market doesn’t care about right and wrong.

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Facts and Graphic: Talking Points Memo

 

Rand Paul, Anti-Vaxxing and Signature Significance

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments
"Got it, Senator. NEXT!!!"

“Got it, Senator. NEXT!!!”

It would be nice if a genuine, rational libertarian candidate could be part of the national political debate. The problem is that there are no genuine, rational libertarians. To be genuine, a libertarian has to decide on his or her policy positions based on the dictates of the ideology, which is backwards: as a leader, rather than a professor or theorist, one must figure out what is going to work, and what you wish would work or what a pre-determined formula says should work are not germane to the issue. For proof of the flaw in the latter approach, all we have to do is consider the past seven years.

Thus libertarians are prone to saying things like, “The United States should never have entered World War II.” This has been a staple of Rand Paul’s deluded father, Ron Paul, and properly places pure libertarianism with pacifism, also known as Cloud Cuckoo Land. The Berrigans used to say the same thing, you know. I believe it was Philip who said that nobody tried passive resistance to defeat Hitler, so we’ll never know if it would have worked. When you say things like this for public consumption, you forfeit the privilege of being taken seriously. It is signature significance: your judgment can’t be trusted.

For me, Rand Paul’s libertarian moment of signature significance was when he questioned the need for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, essentially saying that the nation would have been just fine allowing people like Lester Maddox to chase African-Americans out of his restaurant with an axe handle, or bus drivers to force Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus until change occurred naturally, you know, like after the race war. Such statements are not isolated instances of momentary madness; they are markers of serious ethical and cognitive problems, and it was inevitable that the source of that opinion would have more of the same, and perhaps worse. Continue reading →

Wait–What Idiot Thought We Wanted A Sequel To The Idaho Walmart Shooting?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments
Does this graphic look familiar? It should: I used it only a month ago, and for the exact same reason.

Does this graphic look familiar? It should: I used it only a month ago, and for the exact same reason.

From the Washington Post:

“A toddler reaching for an iPod in his mother’s purse grabbed a loaded gun instead before shooting both his parents in an Albuquerque motel room on Saturday, according to news reports. Police said the bullet hit the father in the buttock and the mother, who is eight months pregnant, in her right shoulder, but did not strike a 2-year-old child who was also in the room, according to Fox News.”

Gee, I guess Monique Villescas and John Reynolds, the lucky parents in this near tragedy, were so amused at the death of Veronica Jean Rutledge at the hands of her toddler that they just couldn’t resist trying the old “let’s leave a loaded gun where a small child can reach it” trick themselves. Or, I suppose, they might just be irresponsible fools.

Observations:

1. Two of these incidents in a little more than a month ?! What are the odds that Rutledge and these boobs were the only Americans leaving loaded guns within the reach of young children? Continue reading →

Some Final, Hard Words Before Kick-off

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

cteliving

I made this comment to the main post on the Super Bowl, and decided that the point is important enough to elaborate on a bit and post here.

I’ve  become depressed talking to people on Facebook and elsewhere about the post. They don’t even pretend to have a real argument. Some fall back on the same rationalizations I explored in the post: one guy on Facebook’s rejoinder consisted of writing, “why worry about this when Congress and the White House are full of liars.” And people “liked” that response, which makes no sense at all.  The rest of the determined Super Bowl fans say, “Yeah, you’re right, but I like football and don’t want to think about it.”  That just is not a rational, ethical response to learning that your support is perpetuating a corrupt system that is exploiting and hurting people. It isn’t.

The NFL is not on the same scale of evil as slavery (yeah, I know, but we need the slaves to keep our lifestyle, so I don’t want to think about it) or the Holocaust (Yeah, but I don’t know any Jews, and the country’s doing well, so I don’t want to think about it) or a daughter-molesting husband (Yeah, but he’s a good provider, and I love him, so I don’t want to think about it). Sure, this is a game, but the process of self-delusion, corruption and passive acceptance of evil is exactly the same. Tell me how it isn’t.

And you know, it takes a lot less sacrifice to stop making it profitable for the NFL to lie and pay young men unto dementia and suicide than it did to reject slavery in the South, or Nazism in Germany, or even for an abused wife to report her husband for raping their daughter…because it is just a game. You can live a very happy life, a full life, a fun life, without the NFL being part of it. It’s corrupting American society and you. Don’t you they see that?

I guess slavery and the Holocaust didn’t have cool commercials, so that’s something…

CNN’s Pippification Of Kate Bolduan

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Pipp and kate

CNN’s New Day  original co-host Kate Bolduan finally went on maternity leave in September after a long-on air pregnancy, and was replaced by stand-in Alisyn Camerota, long a feature on the Fox News Channel. Camerota’s  teaming with Chris Cuomo and Michaela Pereira saw New Day finally move ahead in the ratings over MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and now Bolduan, still home being a full-time mommy, is out, and Camerata has her job.  Bolduan, when she returns, will have another, less prestigious assignment.

Is this fair?

Kate was Pippified. Continue reading →