ignorance

The Pink Slime Debacle: Is Anyone To Blame?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

YUM!!!!

The maker of so-called “pink slime” filed for bankruptcy last week as the direct result of a public furor and public relations disaster related to “finely textured beef.” As a result, upwards of 650 people are losing their jobs, perhaps many more. Ground beef and other beef-based food will be more expensive, and quite possibly less healthy. Who, if anyone, is at fault?

The “pink slime” controversy was launched by cable TV chef Jamie Oliver, a healthy eating advocate who urged his viewers to reject ground beef that included the commonly-used filler. It is all meat, you know. In fact, it is virtually fat-free beef that begins as slaughterhouse trimmings, is then heated and spun in a centrifuge to separate tiny particles of meat from fat, and subjected to a puff of ammonium hydroxide gas to kill bacteria. Then it was mixed with ground beef. The process sounded unappetizing, and the nickname, coined in an e-mail by a USDA official, made it seem especially disgusting. The internet and social media got a hold of it, and the next thing you know, there were petitions and outrage. And the net result…jobs lost, beef made more expensive, no improvement in taste or health…a complete loss.

Good job everybody!

And almost everybody’s to blame too.

In rough order of culpability:

  1. The meat industry, for using unnatural, treated meat as filler and hiding it with the deceitful label “100% beef.” Consumers should have known what was being added and how it was produced, and it should have been on the labels.
  2. The clever USDA official. His cute name was a food slur, and in these days of viral tweets, YouTube videos and emails, coming up with a disgusting name for a safe food was reckless and irresponsible.
  3. The news media and websites, for not adequately defusing the controversy by explaining exactly what the substance was, indulging the anti-meat agenda of certain writers and reporters.
  4. Consumers, for being naive, emotional, irrational, and too easily stampeded. Most processed food can be made to seem disgusting,  especially anything to do with meat. So is a lot of food preparation. The public won’t take the time to distinguish between genuinely unhealthy foods and those that just involve processing that isn’t suitable for the squeamish, so they go overboard on the random targets of attention-seeking, half-cocked activists, and often the government and regulators follow the hysteria. This is the tragedy of DDT; this is Alar; this is cyclamates. Industries are destroyed that don’t deserve to be; lives are ruined, and the public health isn’t improved.

Was Jaime Oliver’s conduct wrong? I don’t think so. He’s a natural foods advocate; he has philosophical objections to processed food, and he  performed a public service by letting the public know something about its food that it should have been told about sooner. The story of “pink slime” could and should have been explained truthfully by someone who approved of it; it’s not Oliver’s fault that the job fell to an opponent.

Incompetent Elected Officials Of the Month: Oh, Brother!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

My mood after I wrote this...

As more and more observers predict that the individual mandate, a cornerstone of Obamacare, will be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, I found my mind returning to the topics that have bothered me from the beginning. Why didn’t Congress make certain that it was on sound constitutional ground when it passed the law? Did they really understand what they were passing? Is it possible that our elected officials could spend so much time and occupy so much of the nation’s attention on an issue they didn’t understand? Surely our highest elected officials entrusted with devising the laws of this great nation must understand the powers and limits that relate to their duties in the Constitution. Don’t they? Isn’t that a minimum qualification for office?

George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein has provided clues to the answers to those question, and you’re not going to like them. He writes: Continue reading →

Our Untrusted Professions: Another One Bites The Dust…Or Should.

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Come to think of it, Mr. Gower would have put poison in a boy's medicine if it hadn't been for George Bailey...

America’s trust crisis, which has seen virtually all its institutions decline precipitously in public trust, hasn’t left the professions unscathed. Far from it: Gallups’ annual poll of the public’s regard for the professions, the most recent of which was released last December, showed accountants trusted by only 43% of the public (abysmal for a profession whose only mission is to accurately determine the truth and to relay it—funeral directors are trusted more), journalists at just 26% (which is more than they deserve), bankers at 25%, lawyers at an insulting 19% (for a profession that includes honesty as a core ethical requirement), business executives slightly less at 18% (but no lower than those champions of the 99%, labor leaders, also at 18%). Stockbrokers, who figure to have fallen even lower after Greg Smith’s anti-Goldman Sachs diatribe, came in at a “can’t be trusted to deliver the water bill payment” 12%, and then we’re really in the pits of utter distrust, with lobbyists, used car salesmen, and members of Congress, all tied for last place at 7%.

In contrast, one of the professions that always is on top of the list or near it is pharmacists. In 2011, the friendly neighborhood druggist scored a trust rate of 73%, better than doctors and second only to the perennial champs of the last decade, nurses.

Well, all that trust in pharmacists appears to be misplaced. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Indiana State Senator Dennis Kruse

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Time to reconsider the Greek Gods...because the oldest theories are the best theories.

Indiana State Senator Dennis Kruse is responsible for Senate Bill 89, recently passed by the Indiana Senate, which would allow schools to teach “creation science” — the oxymoron that really means “The Bible” —as an alternative to the scientific Theory of Evolution. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court specifically outlawed this fundamentalist aganda in the 1987 court decision Edwards v. Aguillard. Kruse however, thinks that the bill could lead to a court challenge, and a Supreme Court reversal. “This is a different Supreme Court,” he has said. “This Supreme Court could rule differently.”

It isn’t that different, Senator. They all have law degrees, they’ve all read the Constitution,they’ve all seen “Jurassic Park.” They all have IQs above freezing, unlike…well, never mind. By the way, Kruse is a Republican, as if you hadn’t guessed. Continue reading →

Where Should The Alarms Sound For THIS?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

I have little to add to the video above, which is nearly self-explanatory. A student took a video camera to the halls of his Washington State high school to quiz  class mates on basic U.S. history, geography and civics. I’m sure—I hope—that the answers shown on the video were atypical, but never mind: they are scary enough.

The blogger Kevin DuJan on Hillbuzz uses the video to attack teachers unions, writing,

As I watched the video above, two thoughts immediately popped into my head:

1. Why do teachers’ unions claim they deserve more pay and endless benefits when this is the result of their “hard work” in the classroom?

2. I honestly can’t remember anyone this dumb in my Catholic high school back in Ohio when I was going to school in the mid-90s. Continue reading →

Occupy Brain Pans

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Allow me to translate: "Duh!"

The latest, dumbest and most telling of the endless Occupy group protests occurs today, as 111 Occupy Wall Street spin-offs across the country engage in “Occupy the Courts,” a protest to mark two years since the 2010 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that the government cannot ban organizational spending on political campaigns. Move to Amend, the group that is sponsoring the protests, says that the goal is to build support for a constitutional amendment that would abolish corporate constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, and declaring that political campaign spending is not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

If I were optimistic and naive, I would assume that this nonsense would finally shame the imprudent members of the media, Democratic Party and Obama administration who cynically hitched their wagons to the Occupy Wall Street anvil, hoping that eventually the groups would do or say something that justified all the attention and expense lavished on them. Instead, the Occupy movement has featured rapes, robberies, beatings, riots, obscenity, anti-Semites, homeless hangers-on, demonstrators defecating on cars, a woman placing her baby on railroad tracks, another child being abandoned to shiver in a tent, a pseudo-bomb being thrown at the White House, a demonstrator shooting a rifle at the White House, violated permits, squalor, disease and rats….all while the news media showed its stripes by maintaining with a straight face that this display was no different or worse than the comparatively dignified, focused and streamlined Tea Party demonstrations. Nonetheless, the facilitators of this embarrassment in the annals of civil protest seem determined to keep the faith until it blows up into a genuine tragedy or slinks away. If Occupy the Courts won’t convince the pols and journalists that they made an epic mistake, nothing will. But at least it settles the matter. These people have no idea, none, what they are doing. Continue reading →

Poll: 84% Don’t Have a Clue What “Ethical” Means

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Was Norman Bates unethical or sentimental? Well..wait, WHAT?

OK, that was a somewhat misleading headline. According to a poll run by ABC News, 84% of the public thinks that cloning dead pets is unethical. But since there is absolutely nothing unethical about cloning dead pets, I think the headline above is accurate. Well, maybe 84% accurate.

The story is over at Sodahead, which is dedicated to dumb polls. The analysis of the poll, if one can call it analysis, is almost totally bereft of anything remotely connected with ethics or ethical theory. In a previous poll on the subject, Sodahead asked those polled to choose whether the practice was “unethical” or “sentimental”, which is a choice akin to, “Do you like baseball, or can you swim?” Of course cloning a pet is sentimental—why else would someone do it? Who came up with the boneheaded idea that sentimental and unethical were mutually exclusive? Norman Bates dressing up as his beloved mother and killing people was sentimental, but I’d also say it was less than ethical. Continue reading →

The Incompetent, Iowa Stubborn News Media, Wasting Our Time and Theirs

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

IOWA!!!!????

I kid you not: I have been waking up with “The Music Man” ditty “Iowa Stubborn” ringing in my head two days running [ “We can be cold as our falling thermometer in December if you ask about our weather in July; And we’re so by God stubborn, we could stand touchin’ noses for a week at a time and never see eye-to-eye….You really ought to give Iowa a try!”] and I am not happy about it. The reason I am suffering from Meredith Willson-itis, of course, is because the network and cable news shows will not shut up about the Iowa caucuses, and have been allowing their endless, pointless, non-informative, inside-baseball, useless analysis of nothing (analyzing polls is the definition of “nothing”) for how long now? A week? A month? Forever? Continue reading →

The “Your Right To Engage in Ignorant and Dangerous Speech Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Unethical For Me To Help It Be As Loud As Possible” Dept.: ABC Full Circle and WordPress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Defending free speech doesn't mean you have to put dangerous speech where it will do the most damage...like 100 feet tall in Times Square.

As the New Year dawns, we see two companies in the communications business, and two situations raising the question, is it ethical or unethical to allow someone to use your product or service to broadcast harmful speech?

They took different paths, and both are being criticized. One company is ethical, the other is not.

The ethical company is WordPress.

A few days ago it took down one of its sites, Bare Naked Islam, after The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) complained that the site promoted violence against Muslims, which it surely did. When Muslims placed comments on the site, Bare Naked Islam published the IP and e-mail addresses of the commenters and suggested reprisals. Nonetheless, because it was CAIR’s complaint that triggered the removal, WordPress was criticized mightily in the conservative blogosphere for doing a Comedy Central—censoring legitimate free speech out of fear of Muslim violence. There is a very large distinction, however, between abandoning free speech in response to threats, as Comedy Central did in the infamous “South Park” incident, and responding responsibly to a legitimate complaint. Continue reading →

The Damage Incompetent Pundits Do: Criminal Defense Misconceptions

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

See? I WARNED you not to listen to Mercedes Colwin!

A couple of months back, I flagged some outrageously mistaken commentary on Sean Hannity’s radio talk show given out by Mercedes Colwin, who is a lawyer but prone to howlers whenever she shows up on Hannity or Fox News, which I suspect favors her for qualities that have nothing to do with her law practice. On the occasion that roused my ire, Colwin suggested that she could not defend a criminal client who told her he was guilty, because she was “an officer of the court.”

This is pundit malpractice grafted to legal incompetence: a defense attorney MUST maintain a client’s legal innocence whether the attorney knows the client is guilty or not, and being an officer of the court has nothing to do with it.

Colwin, who was discussing the Casey Anthony trial, represented herself as an expert and then reinforced the most persistent and most damaging popular misconception about the legal system, which is that there is something unethical about defending guilty criminal clients. The system has to be held to a high standard of due process, and even an “obviously” guilty defendant must be proven guilty with admissible evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Defense attorneys are there to make sure the state meets its burden of proof by making the strongest argument for their clients’ innocence as possible, whether the defendant has confessed his or her guilt or not. For one thing, a defendant often doesn’t know if he is legally guilty, even if he “did it.” For another, even if he did it, the state still has to prove it.The defense’s job in to make sure it does, Continue reading →