2018 MLB play-offs

Late Night Ethics Refresher, 10/20/18: Bad Art And Baseball Roshomon

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Having a nice weekend?

Literally nothing can spoil my mood now that the Red Sox are going to the World Series…and playing the Dodgers.

1. White House art ethics? I’ve been wanting to post about this all week.  Here is the painting President Trump has hung in the White House:

I love it. It makes me smile every time I see it. But because there is nothing President Trump could do that the news media and the “resistance” wouldn’t mark as shameful; and scandalous, he is actually being attacked for his choice of art.

Well, to hell with them, which I’m sure is Trump’s attitude. Sure it’s a tacky painting; I’m pretty sure the artist knows that, and doesn’t care. Called “The Republican Club,” it is the work of Missouri artist Andy Thomas. Trump is President and for at least four years he’s living in the White House: he can put up whatever art he likes. If it makes him smile like it does me, then that’s a good enough reason to hang it. It’s bad art, but so was Obama’s official portrait showing him being slowly devoured by plants with the sperm on his face, and that one didn’t make anyone smile, except the artist.

 

By the way, CNN displays its ignorance by writing that “Chester Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes and James Garfield are presumably in the crowd, but impossible to identify.” I could identify Arthur easily. Can you? Garfield, Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison, whom CNN’s reporter apparently never heard of, were all similarly bearded, and there are two bearded faces near Arthur that could be two of them. I can’t find McKinley anywhere, so maybe the artist was minimizing the presence of the murdered Presidents—given the tenor of Democratic rhetoric,  that might be prudent—which means the bearded figures are Hayes and Harrison. Also missing is the only impeached Republican President, Andrew Johnson. Yeah, poor Andy would be a skunk at the picnic too. Continue reading →

Sports In The Ethics News!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Gynnastics and Football! Mary Bono, yes, Sonny’s widow, resigned as the interim CEO of the USA Gymnastics Federation after a tweet in which she dared to express disapproval of Nike, presumably because of its decision to elevate renegade NFL kneeler Colin Kaepernick to role model status.  The tweet pre-dated her agreement to serve as an interim head while the embattled organization tries to dig out from a sexual molestation scandal. Nike is being sought as a major sponsor of women’s gymnastics, as several fled after the Federation was disgraced in the Larry Nasser scandal. Simone Biles and other gymnasts used social media to questioned whether Bono was fit to lead the organization and whether it was wise to alienate a potential sponsor. Chalk this one up to another set of timid bureaucrats being more terrified of social media than they are interested in running their organization competently. Nike now politicizes everything it touches, and has taken up permanent residence on the Left, because it thinks that where the market and the money is. Surely there are potential corporate sponsors that aren’t fond of using divisive messages to sell merchandise.

Is the new cultural standard going to be that impulsive tweets from the past, recent or distant, are legitimate reasons to can qualified people from jobs in which they have done nothing wrong? Bono’s fatal tweet just said that she had crossed out the “swoosh” on her own shoes.

Boy, when President Trump’s tweets come out, he’s going to be in BIG trouble…

On the other hand, Bono is an idiot. Her post resignation tweet suggested that both the kneeling NFL players and her swoosh censorship were protected free speech. She was a member of Congress, and she doesn’t understand the First Amendment. Worse, every time a presumed authority repeats that dead wrong “the players have a right to protest on the field” canard, America gets a little dumber.

Fire her for THAT.

Baseball! (Of course…): Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/15/18: Overthrowing The Government, Replacing Umpires, and Fooling Some Of The People Who Never Did Their Science And Math Assignments [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 100 Comments

Good morning…

1. Baseball Ethics: Again, Robocalls, please! Last night, Game #2 of the American League Championship Series between the 2017 World Champion Houston Astros and some team from Boston again showed why Major League Baseball must install automated ball and strike calls and automatic video review if the game is going to have any integrity at all. Regarding the latter, there was a play in which a Houston batter’s swing and miss for strike three was erroneously called a foul ball by the home plate umpire, and the replay claerly showed that the bat had missed any contact by inches. Nonetheless, the batter got another chance. He struck out (“no harm, no foul” literally) a second time, but that was just moral luck. If he had hit a home run, altering the game’s outcome, the system would have been changed with lightning speed: Ye Olde Barn Door Fallacy.

Regarding the constant missed call and strike calls that risk changing the outcome in every game, the previous game in the serious contained a classic example. In a close contest with the two runners on base and a 3-2 count, Red Sox batter Andrew Benintendi was called out on a pitch about six inches outside the strike zone. Instead of the inning continuing with the bases loaded and the AL season RBI leader, J.D. Martinez, coming to the plate, the inning was over. Listening to the ex-players like TBS color man Ron Darling babble excuses and rationalizations is almost as infuriating as the obviously wrong calls. “Well, the ball wasn’t too far off the plate” and “That pitch has been called a strike earlier tonight” and “The umpires have a difficult job”: Shut up, Ron. The strike zone is set by the rules; a ball is either a strike or it isn’t, so a call is either correct or it’s botched. Blatantly missed calls were “part of the game” in an earlier era when nothing could be done about them, but that’s not true now. Baseball is supposed to be determined by the skill and performance of the players, not by random, unpredictable mistakes by the bystanding officials. Can you imagine a criminal defendant sent to prison in a trial where the judge repeatedly allowed inadmissible evidence against him because he misinterpreted the law, and the appeals court shrugging and rejecting an appeal with a unanimous opinion that said, “Hey, mistakes happen! It’s part of the system’s tradition and charm!”

2. Run, Fauxahontas, Run!  Fake Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) announced that she finally did have her DNA tested. No cheapie home test for this aspiring Cherokee: she had the DNA test performed  by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor (and Democrat) and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.  He concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an “unadmixed Native American ancestor,” and calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That’s a big range: six generations would make her 1/32nd American Indian, but ten generations would make her 1/1024th Native American. Nothing in the test proves she has the Cherokee ancestry she claims.

UPDATE: Apparently the Globe reporters and editors are among the math-challenged. Mid-day, it issued a second correction:

“Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 6th to 10th generation relative. The generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American,” the Globe explained.

This means Warren is somewhere between 0.09 and 1.5 percent Native American, not between .19 and 3.1 percent as originally claimed.

Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up. 10/9/18: Ecstatic Because The Red Sox Clobbered The Yankees 16-1 Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 80 Comments

GOOOD Morning!

1. Unwritten and incoherent rules…During last night’s ALDS Game #3 between the Yankees and Red Sox, won by Boston by the historic score of 16-1, color man Ron Darling, former pitcher and Yale grad, repeatedly alluded to “unwritten rules” that the Red Sox either were or were not observing. Bad, said Ron: a Sox player stealing second when the score was 10-1. Bad: A Sox player swinging away when the count was three balls, no strikes. (Darling: “I’d find that offensive.”) Good: a Sox base-runner at third not scoring when his team was ahead 15-1 and the ball bounced away from the Yankee first baseman. (“A veteran move,” said Darling.) Acceptable: when the same runner eventually did run home when the pitcher threw the ball past the catcher to the backstop. Darling’s concern was the observance of the  professional courtesy not to try to embarrass an adversary once the game was clearly out of reach.

My view: it’s nonsense. The obligations of both teams is to play their hardest at all times, regardless of the score. That means doing nothing different whether one’s team is winning 5-4 or 10-1. On baseball, no game is certain until the final out. Not only have I seen a team lose a game after leading 10-0, I’ve seen the Red Sox do it. What would completely humiliate any team is losing after having such a huge lead, but no “unwritten rule” says that it’s offensive for a team in the Yankee’s position last night to keep trying to pull off a miracle until the fat lady sings.

This is what’s wrong with unwritten rules; people make them up as they go along.

In Darling’s defense, he went to Yale…

2. Confession: I don’t get it. I understand why  Democratic officials and operatives are claiming that the conduct of the Republicans was reprehensible during the Kavanaugh hearings: they were embarrassed, defeated, and exposed, and now are spinning and lying to save face. I do NOT comprehend how any citizen of either party can honestly make similar claims, often in the most intemperate and unhinged manner. (Dave Hogue, a design lead at Google, tweeted, “You are finished, @GOP. You polished the final nail for your own coffins. F–K. YOU. ALL. TO. HELL. I hope the last images burned into your slimy, evil, treasonous retinas are millions of women laughing and clapping and celebrating as your souls descend into the flames.” I have previously sane Facebook friends who are only slightly less furious.)

Democrats and their allied protesters tried to disrupt the hearings from the opening gavel. The questioning of the judge by Senator Booker and others was intemperate, unfair, and disrespectful. Senator Feinstein’s handling of the Blasey-Ford letter was indefensible by any logic, and her later demonstration of  contrived outrage was transparent in its dishonesty. The desperate anointment of Dr. Ford indicated that the Democratic Party has officially rejected basic standards of fairness and decency, as well as the core democratic concepts of due process, equal justice, presumed innocence, while embracing the loony idea that “all victims should be believed” as long as they are women and they are accusing men, who, if they deny the accusations, should be disbelieved based on their gender. (This is bigotry, in case you have been confused by #MeToo demagogues.)

In related news, independent voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the Democrats’ handling of the Kavanaugh nomination by a 28-point margin according to  a new CNN/SSRS poll (I know, I know: polls), or put another way, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Continue reading →