An Untrustworthy Study About Perceptions Of Untrustworthiness That Shows Something Else Entirely

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Research is frequently polluted by confirmation bias; personally, I believe this is the case more often than not. A particularly vivid example is the work on “vocal fry,” described as “slowly fluttering the vocal cords, resulting in a popping or creaking sound at the bottom of the vocal register.” Supposedly a 2011 study determined that two-thirds of college women were doing it, and now a paper by Rindy C. Anderson, Casey A. Klofstad , William J. Mayew, and Mohan Venkatachalam announces the results of further research showing how harmful it is. I admit: I’ve now read a lot of stuff about vocal fry, which I had never heard of until recently, and I’m still unclear on exactly what the hell it is, other than “talking in an annoying fashion.” The Atlantic tells us that this is vocal fry, which means it consists of talking like Zooey Deschanel does here:

Got it? OK, now you can explain it to me.

Anyway, what the exact phenomenon is doesn’t matter to the ethics issue; all you have to know is that a respected, serious, scholarly study has spawned lots of media attention by claiming that its data shows that women and men who exhibit vocal fry in their speech patterns will tend to be hired less often than job interviewees who don’t, because employers view them as untrustworthy, among other things. (The study’s catchy title is “Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market,” because, as we know, women are all that matter these days, having had war declared on them and all.) Continue reading →

No, There Is No “Absurdly Bearded Sociology Professor On A Beer Can Principle”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

follicle beer

This is just unfair, that’s all.

 Paul Roof, a professor of sociology at Charleston Southern University, a Christian school, learned that a photo of him taken by a professional photographer at a beard contest was about to appear on “Chucktown Follicle Brown” beer cans.  “I’m not compensated for the image, I don’t own the image, and the use of the image was a surprise to me,” the Roof told the media. His (amazing/ outrageous/ ridiculous—choose one) four-section beard has been used for other promotions, including for Christian services. Charleston Southern University never expressed any objection to its employee looking like an escapee from “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” Nevertheless, the school fired him, saying that a professor having his image on a beer can “was not representative of a Christian environment.” Continue reading →

Birding Ethics vs. Education Ethics: One Applies Common Sense, The Other Doesn’t Apply It, Or Sunscreen Either

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
"Don't worry, Mr. Sapsucker---the birders are looking out for you. Just be grateful you don't go to public school in San Antonio."

“Don’t worry, Mr. Sapsucker—the birders are looking out for you. Just be grateful you don’t go to public school in San Antonio.”

In the intense avocation of bird-watching, a code of ethics reminds practitioners of common sense. In public school education, there is no accepted code of ethics. And there is precious little common sense.

Cornell University’s Macaulay Library contains more than 200,000 bird call recordings, and 150,000 of them can be downloaded onto smartphones and other electronic devices. This allows canny bird-watchers to play the calls in the wild, attracting rarely-seen species.

Unfortunately, these realistic calls, experts say, can stress birds, including endangered species. Thus there is a code of ethics for the recreation of birding, The American Birding Association’s Principles of Birding Ethics, and it states,

 “Limit the use of recordings and other methods of attracting birds, and never use such methods in heavily birded areas, or for attracting any species that is threatened, endangered or of Special Concern, or is rare in your local area.”

It’s a well-conceived code that gives behavioral guidance where guidance is needed.

Now let’s look at a profession where most of us would say common sense is essential, and where the lack of it leads to  unethical and unacceptable conduct born of institutionalized incompetence. No, this time I’m not talking about our government. I’m talking about the educational profession, and the public schools. Continue reading →

D-Day Ethics: Honoring The Strange And Courageous Duty Of Bill Millin, “The Mad Piper of D-Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Millin statue

If you watch “The Longest Day” this weekend, as I am sure to do, you will see a portrayal of Bill Millin, though only fleetingly and without his character being identified. Although I have seen the film countless times over many decades, it was only recently, this morning, in fact, that I focused on this remarkable warrior and the unusual brand of courage he showed the world on D-Day.

Bill Millin is the apparently daft bagpiper you can see leading the troops of Lord Lovat (played by Peter Lawford) ashore on Sword Beach, and later blowing his infernal instrument as the 1st Special Service Brigade relieved the troops holding the crucial strategic crossing known as the Pegasus Bridge. Lovat, who, like Millin, was Scottish, defied the British War Office orders banning pipers in battle (too many of them had been killed in World War I), and directed his friend to play traditional tunes, including marches and bawdy drinking songs (including one with a chorus that ended with the shout,“Up your arse!”) , as the rest of his comrades were engaged in battle and under fire. His only weapon was a ceremonial dagger, and except for an incident when the men were in the sites of a sniper’s rifle and forced to take cover, he never stopped playing.

It will not surprise you to know that he was the only one who did this on June 6, 1944. Continue reading →

Liar of the Year: Susan Rice

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Liar-of-the-Year-2014

I would have laid odds that Jay Carney would win this award, or perhaps Debby Wasserman Schultz. But no, it is Susan Rice, National Security Advisor and designated Obama Administration Sunday Morning Lackey who wins the prize. And yes, I’m awarding the 2014 honor in June, because you can’t be more deceitful than this.

Deceit, remember, is when you say something using phrasing that is literally accurate in some, often technical or tortured, respect,  in such a way that you know a listener or listeners will understand it to mean something very different that is not true. This is a kind of lie, a very effective kind. It is the official language of Washington D.C., however, (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky [because where I come from we don’t regard oral sex as sexual relations, but go ahead and think I mean sexual relations in the common usage sense, and I’ll explain the confusion once I’m caught].”) and politicians think it is perfectly acceptable.

As I commented upon earlier, Rice reprised her infamous Sunday morning talk show tour of last September, when she told America that the Benghazi attack was a spontaneous uprising over a YouTube video while the White House knew very well that this was a misleading and incomplete version of what had occurred, this time saying on ABC that  Bowe Bergdahl“…served the United States with honor and distinction…”This description, of course, was and is contradictory to what is known about Bergdahl, who either went AWOL, deserted, or assisted the enemy of the United States. There is no doubt that he at very least left his unit without leave, precipitating his capture. The White House, the military and the national security apparatus had been aware of this for not just days or months, but years.

Rice, however, maintained to CNN that her description of Bergdahl was not intentionally false and misleading, telling an interviewer,

“…what I was referring to was the fact that this was a young man who volunteered to serve his country in uniform at a time of war. That, in and of itself, is a very honorable thing.”

Incredible. Continue reading →

“It’s Not The Worst Thing”: Slate’s Jamelle Bouie Delivers A Virtuoso Performance Of The Worst Rationalization Of Them All

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
"Obamacare is a success, and even if it's not, it's not worse than nuclear war. So there."

“Obamacare is a success, and even if it’s not, it’s not worse than nuclear war. So there.”

This is excellent: I always am looking for the most extreme example of any kind of misconduct, lie, rhetorical fallacy or rationalization, so I have something to measure all others against. Jamelle Bouie, the resident Obama flack at Slate, just delivered a dandy for my future scale of infamy for Rationalization #22 on the Ethics Alarms list, the Bottom of the Barrel, the favorite excuse of the shameless, the ethics-challenged and the desperate sociopath, “It’s not the worst thing,” or “The Comparative Virtue Excuse.”

It’s a deft turn, and a welcome one: so much attention is being lathered on the prisoner exchange fiasco that the parade of other Obama Administration-created ethics train wrecks are being ignored for the nonce…and perhaps that was the objective. The late Mike Kelly, the sharpest conservative political analyst the Washington Post has ever featured on its pages, half-seriously suggested that seeding so-called scandal fatigue was a conscious strategy of the ethically corrupt Clinton White House, and Obama has taken this to levels then unimagined. Among other, the Obamacare Ethics Train Wreck barrels on at an impressive clip. Yesterday, for example, it was revealed that yet another flaw in the enrollment process has left 2,000,000 Americans who think they have insurance at risk of finding themselves uncovered.

To unconscionable fake-journalists like Bouie, however (a real journalist is one who follows the facts to where they lead; a fake one cherry-picks the facts that take him where he wants to go), it doesn’t matter: the Affordable Care Act, he tells his gullible or retching readers…

“…looks like a success. Between the state exchanges, healthcare.gov, and the Medicaid expansion, an estimated 17.2 million people have received health insurance under the law. In turn, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans without health insurance has dipped to 13.4 percent, down 3.7 percentage points from where it was at the end of last year.”

This species of argument, which has become the standard practice for the Obama Is A Great President Despite All Evidence To The Contrary League, is one of two things, and two things only: proof of mental deficiency, or conclusive evidence of dishonesty. Either one, I would argue, should disqualify someone from writing commentary in Slate, or for that matter, Weekly Reader. Continue reading →

June 6, 1944

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

D-Day-facts-Landing-on-Beach

If a Terminator wanted to get rid of me and Ethics Alarms, all he would have had to do, perhaps, would be to go back to June 2, 1944, and throw himself on the hand grenade that exploded and blew a hole in Jack Marshall, Sr.’s foot that day. The wound kept my dad in an Army hospital when he was scheduled to hit the beaches at Normandy, 7o years ago today. (He recuperated sufficiently to request a return to active duty, and ended up in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge.)

Thus it is that I have special appreciation and reverence for the American, Canadian* and British soldiers who risked, and in many cases lost, their lives winning a crucial battle in a war about freedom and human rights on June 6, 1944, and empathize with all the sons and daughters, and grandsons and grand-daughters, whose chances at existence were ended that day, while mine, by the sheerest luck, was not.

And I find myself wondering, as America retreats from its traditional ideal as the nation that stands up to evil, chaos, persecution and tyranny in the world, and as our government devalues “hero” and “service with honor” to the status of gratuitous application to a soldier who voluntarily abandoned his comrades on the field of battle, if our culture, our young, and our increasingly self-absorbed society would support the equivalent of a Normandy invasion today.  If not, the world is in greater peril than it knows.

I’m an optimist, and a firm, though shaken, believer in the unique cultural values of the United States of America. I believe that we are one admirable, wise, courageous leader of character away from getting back on the ennobling course charted by Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan.

I just wish that I could see, even faintly, such a leader coming over the horizon. I wish he…or she…would hurry the hell up.

* I stupidly omitted mentioning our Canadian allies when I first posted this, and was properly corrected. No slight intended. My apologies.

Funny! But Wrong…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
"Hey! It works!"

“Hey! It works!”

Yes, I would say this was an unethical business transaction.

According to a complaint filed with Malaysia’s Public Service and Complaint Bureau, a man paid the equivalent of  $139.00 to a scamster promising to send him a device that would dramatically enlarge his penis.

When the alleged package-enhancing package arrived, it contained only…a magnifying glass.

The directions said only “Do not use in sunlight.”

Ethics observations:

  • It was very wrong to fool an idiot like that and take his money.
  • Rubbing it in with the directions was gratuitously cruel, if inspired.
  • The reporter who wrote the story undoubtedly will say that the name of the local lawyer he consulted about the case—Mr. Kok—was a coincidence, and not a cheap joke.
  • Sure it was.

________________________

Pointer: Above the Law

Source: The Star On-line

 

 

Ethics Dunces: The Republican Un-Tweeters

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
"Ha! They'll NEVER find it now!"

“Ha! They’ll NEVER find it now!”

Several Republican politicians leapt on the “Welcome Home Bowe!” bandwagon without bothering to a) learn the details and more importantly to them, sadly, b) gauge the reaction of their constituents, contributers and supporters.  Thus they tweeted praise for his release, perhaps echoing Obama’s designated liar Susan Rice’s unsupported assertion that he has served with honor, or evoking the Administration’s now discarded spin that he was a hero. When the transaction was revealed to be an utter botch by the Obama Administration (but I repeat myself), and the GOP officials realized that it would be partisan feeding time in the  shark tank, these brave public servants had neither the forthrightness to admit their errors, if errors they were, nor the courage to face the consequences.

Nor, unfortunately for them, the technological savvy to realize that trying to cover up what you put on the internet doesn’t work.

And makes you look like an untrustworthy sneak.

The Sunlight Foundation has a service called “Politwoops,” which collects elected officials’ tweets and makes them available if they are deleted in an effort to remove feet from mouths. It uncovered this, from Republican Senator Thad Cochran…

 

Bergdahl tweet2

and this, from GOP Congressman Jim Renacci… Continue reading →

Signature Significance For A Ruined U.S. Education System: The Tasteless School Drama Awards Ceremony

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

high_school ruin

How could this happen? I’ll tell you…but first, let’s be horrified together, shall we?

In Bellingham, Washington, the High School’s drama club held an evening awards ceremony.  A parent who attended the ceremony in the school auditorium with her 17-year-old daughter,  who was nominated for an award, reported to a local TV station that the ceremony was, to understate the case, “inappropriate.” In an email to KOMO News, the mother said the teacher, Teri Grimes, a 30 year veteran who is retiring after this year, repeatedly used profanity and told a vulgar joke.  Sex toys were given for one of the awards; the category was “Horniest Stud.” She  wrote:

“I sat there with my mouth open in shock and the final straw was when a joke was told on stage about a teacher, a lawyer and a priest on a plane. The plane was going down and the teacher says we have to save the children. The attorney says ‘Fuck the children!’ and the priest says “Ooooh..Do we have time for that???”

She left after that. Continue reading →