U.S. Society

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: “Afrochemistry”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The Rice University Course Catalogue:

CHEM 125 – AFROCHEMISTRY

Long Title: AFROCHEMISTRY: THE STUDY OF BLACK-LIFE MATTER

Department: Chemistry

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Lecture

Credit Hours: 3

Restrictions: Must be enrolled in one of the following Level(s): Undergraduate Professional,Visiting Undergraduate, Undergraduate

Description: Students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S. and students will implement African American sensibilities to analyze chemistry. Diverse historical and contemporary scientists, intellectuals, and chemical discoveries will inform personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education. This course will be accessible to students from a variety of backgrounds including STEM and non-STEM disciplines. No prior knowledge of chemistry or African American studies is required for engagement in this course.

“Black life-matter!” Get it?

_________________

Pointer: Stephen Greene

Now THAT’s an Incompetent Lawyer! “Now What?” Asks His Death Row Inmate Client…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Joseph Gamboa, marked for execution in Texas, is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to save his life. His argument is that a court-appointed lawyer was so inept that he killed his chance to challenge his murder conviction in federal court. The Supreme Court is will examine this week whether justice was done in Gamboa’s case even though his attorney made one botch after another. Indeed, he could hardly have done worse if he had the Ghostbusters’ lawyer (Rick Moranis) from “Ghostbusters 2.”

Gamboa was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for two murders during a robbery, but he swears that he is innocent. His court-appointed lawyer, John J. Ritenour Jr., met with Gamboa only once, the condemned man argues in his SCOTUS brief, then filed a habeas petition. At that single meeting, Gamboa says he brought documents that indicated prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence (a Brady violation!) that another man had committed the killings. Ritenour did not take the documents, Gamboa’s brief says. In a sworn statement, Gamboa stated that “Mr. Ritenour told me that he had read the state court record in my case and believed I was guilty.”

It took Ritenour almost a year to filed the habeus corpus petition, and it was a hack job. The petition was cut-and-pasted from an earlier one for another client, even repeating the same typos and grammatical errors. It even featured the name of the other client, Obie Weather, where the lawyer hadn’t quite finished proof-reading. Nor was the document signed by Gamboa, a requirement. Gamboa says that the petition did not include any of the arguments they had discussed…understandable, since the document was basically copied from a different case.

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Reminder: This is Why Ethics Alarms Doesn’t Use Breitbart

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ethics Alarms put the much-admired (by conservatives) website Breitbart on its black list at least as far back as 2016. It might even be earlier, but finding the exact date when I got disgusted isn’t worth the time it would take away from my sock drawer inventory. It would be nice if the site were trustworthy, but Breitbart is as biased and devoted to manipulating public opinion to view conservative agenda items (and conservative figures, especially Donald Trump) in a positive light as the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast are in the opposite direction.

The latest example appeared two days ago at the links provided by Citizens News Daily, the popular conservative news link farm that has taken over the position on the Right once held by the Drudge Report, which was sold, or taken over by Trump-haters, or something. The CND link (still) reads, “Nikki Haley — Climate change is causing Illegal Immigration, ” and went to this story at Breitbart. The typically Breitbart-y headline reads, “Nikki Haley Parroted Leftist Talking Point Suggesting Climate Change to Blame for Mass Immigration.”

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The Entertaining Prof. Jennifer L. Hochschild Car on the Harvard President Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

If you enjoy watching a Harvard professor revealing herself as complete asshole to colleagues, students, the news media, everyone, really—and who doesn’t?—-you’ll love this story.

Harvard professor Jennifer L. Hochschild was one of the scholars ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized on the way to academic infamy. She was also one of those who lacked the integrity to agree to what should have been obvious, which is that having a record of serial ethical misconduct was something no president of Harvard could or should weather. Like many on the DEI side of the culture, her response to the revelations of Gay’s lack of fitness for her job was to attack the conservatives, notably gadfly Christopher Rufo, who uncovered the damning evidence that Gay was a cheat. Rufo cites among his own credentials“a master’s from Harvard,” and Hochschild set out to tar him as a hypocrite for this, tweeting,

Even if the criticism of Rufo were justified—more on that in a nonce—this was a damning tweet…for the professor. Attacking the messenger who carries unwelcome but accurate information is a logical fallacy, an ad hominem attack, and exactly the kind of weak reasoning and unethical practice the world’s most self-congratulatory university is supposed to purge from its graduates. But those determined to protect Gay, Harvard’s diversity-hire, “historic” female president “of color” by any means possible, stooped to this gutter tactic en masse and almost the second Gay’s embarrassing performance at a congressional hearing focused national attention of her deficits and the sick university culture she represented. Her performance was just fine because conservatives criticized it.

The tweet was especially odd for Hochschild, who teaches at the very same Harvard Extension School whose students she slammed as “not really Harvard grads.” The “X” community quickly slapped a “context” note on the tweet…

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“So… it didn’t work to change the culture temporarily, to deal with Trump, that horribly abnormal President. The old culture didn’t just pop back into place when Trump was gone. You have to take care of a culture and maintain its values in good times and bad.”

—Retired law professor and active blogger Ann Althouse, reflecting on how the cultural norms violated by the Left to “get” Donald Trump didn’t recover once he was out of the White House.

Ann warrants a Super Bingo for this. It neatly fits in with the EA post about what we are facing once the courts make it official that Presidents can be prosecuted for their acts while in office. Her observation—spot on—was prompted by the Politico piece, “Bosses in the Biden admin are pressed over young staffers’ anonymous letters/Protest letters, like those over Israel, were rare in past administrations. White House veterans can barely contain their disdain over how times have changed”. Ethics Alarms posted many articles about how members of Trump’s staff and other officials in his administration, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, behaved unethically by abusing their positions of trust, leaking confidential information, and working behind the scenes to sabotage their superiors. The government simply cannot function without government staff and subordinates accepting the basic principle that while they are employed, as Paul Begala (the loyal Clinton henchman) says, “If confronted with a decision that crosses one’s ethical, moral, social, political lines, the choice is clear: Shut up and support it, or resign.”

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The Rest of the Story: One of Biden’s Ridiculously Unqualified Judicial Nominees Has Been Forced Out.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Last March, Ethics Alarms reported on the stunning lack of ability and expertise being demonstrated by some of President Biden’s appointments to federal judgeships. At least Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) had some fun exposing their incompetence, though Democrats and pundits in the mainstream media mocked him for what they termed his “gotcha!” questions….you know, horribly unfair queries like “What’s a Brady motion?,” which any first year law student should know.

The worst of Biden’s dim legal bulbs was probably Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren, nominated to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Washington. Kennedy’s questioning revealed her to be almost completely unfamiliar with the U.S. Constitution. Kennedy asked her, “Judge, tell me what article V of the Constitution does?”  “Article V is not coming to mind at the moment, she replied.  “How about article II?” he asked, Her response: “Neither is Article II.” I wrote of the judge’s performance a year ago,

This is more than evidence of incompetence, it shows arrogance. The woman is going to be vetted in a Senate hearing; wouldn’t you think she would at least do a little bit of preparation? Nah…she knows she’s assured of being confirmed, because no Democrat would dare vote against a female nominee “of color” no matter how unqualified she appeared to be, After all, as Senator Murray said, Murray said, what matters most is “a judiciary that reflects the diversity of this country.”

And indeed,  Sen.  Murray really did say she was very qualified for the job and “truly exceptional”—as in exceptionally not-white and exceptionably female. Well, it turns out that Murray was wrong, and so was I. Bjelkengren was informed that she wasn’t going to make it after all, and is one of five nominees whose nominations to the bench expired at the end of 2023 who was not among 18 nominees the White House resubmitted to the Senate this week.

Good.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Reason’s Liz Wolfe

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“If debates had been forums where legitimate policy differences were explored in a long-form, meaningful way, then I’d probably be frustrated by this chaotic turn. But they weren’t, they sucked, and now they’re (mostly) dead.”

—Reason’s Liz Wolfe reviewing the Haley-DeSantis debate along with Trump’s counter-programming “town hall” on Fox News

She adds elsewhere in her article,

“Has the old-school debate format been broken? In the past, debate stages were crowded, debates were relatively few, and nobody really dared opt out of them—even during primary season. Now, it’s all just chaos… if you didn’t watch any of the debates or counterprogramming, you probably made a good choice.. it’s actually kind of awesome how the pageantry of debates has been cracked open, how more formats than ever before are being experimented with…and how candidates such as Trump are making unconventional campaigning choices—opting out of all primary debates—in lieu of playing the game.”

It’s too bad, but Wolfe is right. From the very beginning, debates have injected random, misleading factors into the election process. For every instance where a debate legitimately illuminated something important about one of the candidates, there have been 20 where they had a disproportionate effect on public opinion. The main problem is that debating skill, or even public speaking skills, are not necessarily markers of leadership competence. Vivek Ramaswamy has been giving a master class on that.

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Ethics Dunce: “Face the Nation” Host Margaret Brennan

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ooooh, I would fire Brennan for this if I were in charge of CBS news.

Brennan tried to cross-examine Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on last weekend’s “Face the Nation” about his stance on the 2020 election. “Back in 2021, you were the lawmaker who circulated the legal brief known as the “Texas Amicus Brief [actually Texas v. Pennsylvania] challenging the 2020 election outcome in a number of states,” Brennan stated, “which by CBS editorial standards makes you an election denier.”

“That’s nonsense,”Johnson replied, and when Brennan said: “Can I get you on the record on that?,” he continued, “I’ve always been consistent on the record. Did you read the brief? Did you get a chance to read what we filed with the Supreme Court?”

Her shocking answer, a veritable huminhuminhumina if ever there was one:”Well- I have read extensively some criticisms of that…”

Oh! She read some criticisms of the brief by her biased, propagandist colleagues, so that was sufficient preparation, she believed, to call someone who supported the brief’s arguments an “election denier.” That’s like using a book review to write a book report on a book you never read.

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What Is the Ethical Reaction to “Urn Boy”?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Social media-user “Casual Thursdays” reported on this story as it unfolded:

Connor Padgett was the name eventually attached to the unforgettable image. It has yet to be explained how or why Padgett got himself wedged into the urn. In her long reign as TV’s top comedienne, Lucille Ball’s writers got her head stuck in a loving cup and her whole body trapped in a suitcase, but never an urn. It is clear, however, that Padgett was not inclined to stay in good humor during his ordeal. Moreover, thanks to the inevitable cell phone video, his humiliation has “gone viral” and will either haunt him until the end of his days, or become a treasured piece of family lore.

He was eventually broken out of his restraints with a hammer. The urn was reputedly worth thousands of dollars, which Connor presumably has to pay to the owner. Some of the social media reactions were clever: “He should have to live his life in there like a hermit crab” was my personal favorite.

But back to ethics: what is the ethical response to Connor? The Golden Rule tells us that we should treat him like we would want to be treated, except that if I did something this stupid, I would be abasing myself mercilessly, particularly after getting the bill.

My verdict is that this is a Nelson:

What do you think?

Three Ethics Failures Almost Kill a 12-Year-Old and Make a Seven-Year-Old A Killer

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My son, a gun-lover from an early age, collected airsoft gun replicas. They are very realistic, though they shoot plastic pellets, not bullets, except for their orange tips. Once I was approaching our house at night after walking the dog and found police surrounding our back-up car. A neighbor had reported someone appearing to hide guns in the back seat. After I explained that the “guns” were toys, my son gave the police their introduction to airsoft, showing off his whole collection. They were impressed.

In Monroe County Georgia, a seven-year-old picked up a real revolver thinking it was an airsoft replica, and shot his 12-year-old sister. Fortunately she was wounded but not killed, and a greater tragedy was averted. The pro-Second Amendment website “Bearing Arms” astutely identifies the two breaches in gun safety that led to the episode:

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