incompetence

“Walking Dead” Ethics: The Worst Leader Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments
Follow this leader at your peril...

Follow this leader at your peril…

“The Walking Dead’s” resolution of the ethical dilemma facing Rick Grimes—give up a member of his group to be tortured by a deranged sadist, on the basis of a dubious promise by said deranged sadist not to attack Rick’s group with a superior force if he receives the sacrificed member as his torture-toy, or resolve to fight said superior force despite the likelihood of defeat—was consistent with what we know of Rick as a leader from past episodes. He is hopeless. With this crucial decision, however, he forged new ground in fecklessness, stupidity and incompetence even for him:

  • He made the wrong decision, deciding to turn over the sword-weilding Machonne as the Governor demanded;
  • He did not tell his group what his decision was;
  • He confided in the most untrustworthy member of the group, the cynical, homicidal Merle, because Rick knew he would have no compunction with executing such a twisted choice;
  • After doing so, Rick changed his mind, but not before Merle, being certain that Rick couldn’t follow through on his decision, went ahead and subdued Machonne on his own and began transporting her back to the Governor’s lair for the trade.

In the end, Machonne wasn’t handed over to the Governor, and Merle ended up dead, but that’s irrelevant here. “The Walking Dead,’ in addition to being a handy primer on how ethics evolves when civilization collapses and zombies outnumber human beings, is a tutorial on leadership do’s and don’ts. Sheriff Rick, who has been the leader of the central band of survivors from the start, is the George Constanza of leadership: to be successful, do the opposite of what Rick would do. Continue reading →

Tell-Tale Signs Of An Incompetent Government: Rationalization # 32, Star Trek and Chairman Who?

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

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One of the common rationalizations that leads to both unethical conduct and an unethical organizational culture is “The Management Shrug,” often verbalized as “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”  (It is #32 on the Ethics Alarms ever-lengthening Rationalizations List; it really should have been in the top ten.) This is a favorite excuse of self-anointed big thinkers of the arrogant and incompetent breed, and is an attitude at the core of a much more sinister ethical fallacy, “the ends justify the means.” The Obama administration has been habitually guilty of the Management Shrug, as has a national news media that largely refuses to hold it accountable, and the U.S. public, which pretty obviously doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

Here’s a ridiculous example: some idiot paid  with your tax dollars thought it was appropriate to place a quote from Chairman Mao on the Kids’ Zone page at the National Center on Education Statistics website. Continue reading →

James O’Keefe Gets What He Deserves…Just Like ACORN

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments
That will be $100,000, please,

That will be $100,000, please,

James O’Keefe is a darling of the right who has executed, with varying levels of success, deceptive, unethical and sometimes illegal vigilante ‘stings’ (using hidden cameras) to prove various conservative targets like NPR and Planned Parenthood are secretly as bad as the right thinks they are. Everything about this is wrong, of course, beginning with his methods, which would be unethical journalism if he were a journalist (rather than a partisan hit man), and ending with his targets, which, if O’Keefe had integrity, would include both right and left. That wouldn’t be good for business, though.

O’Keefe’s biggest hit was on ACORN, the progressive, many-armed community-organizing non-profit that was operating on considerable taxpayer largesse. In 2009, O’Keefe and a female colleague dressed as a young prostitute secretly videotaped themselves seeking help from several ACORN offices, including those in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Diego ( actually National City), and San Bernardino. O’Keefe spun various versions of a tale about a cruel pimp importing underage girls to stock his inventory, and and O’Keefe’s  plan to house them in secret and safety, but the sham’s goal always was to gull ACORN employees into giving advice regarding how to hide  illegal activities and how to get financial assistance for the prostitutes.  In San Bernardino, an ACORN employee told O’Keefe and the woman that the girls could classify their underage brothel as a “group home” to avoid detection, or maybe they should open a massage parlor. The Brooklyn office gave advice to the “prostitute” about how to hide her money, including opening multiple bank accounts.  D.C.’s  ACORN staffer provided advice on how to file tax returns without revealing her true trade. The Baltimore ACORN employee opined, “Well then, you know what, you can always claim them as dependents” and suggested, “You are gonna use three of them; they are gonna be under 16, so you is eligible to get child tax credit and additional child tax credit.” When O’Keefe asked, as the helpful friend of the girls,”What if they are going to be making money because they are performing tricks too?”,  the ACORN employee replied, “But if they making money and they are underage, then you shouldn’t be letting anybody know anyway.”

In National City, near San Diego, however, O’Keefe’s luck ran out.  Continue reading →

Rand Paul’s Dumb, Wasteful and Irresponsible Fillibuster

/ Jack Marshall / 102 Comments
The sequel, "Mr. Smith Gets Stupid" was not a success.

The sequel, “Mr. Smith Gets Stupid” was not a success.

Sen. Rand Paul proved to my satisfaction that he doesn’t have the intellectual chops to be a U.S. Senator with his foolish argument in 2010 that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional, while suggesting that he would have voted against it. (For the record, Paul’s been targeted on Ethics Alarms for various ethics transgressions five times since 2010. He is not our favorite Senator.) You can hide IQ inadequacies a long time on Capitol Hill—look at Joe Biden—but those missing points are telling at the moment, as Paul stages an embarrassing, silly, and wasteful filibuster in the old style, doing his best “Mr. Smith” impression to block the inevitable confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director.

Sen. Paul says he’ll talk until he drops or until the Obama administration states definitively that it doesn’t have the right to “kill an American on American soil.” Why is this such a high priority for Paul? Eric Holder answered his office’s query on the topic with this eminently reasonable response, which Paul has managed to completely misconstrue. Holder said in part, Continue reading →

The Washington Post Gives Up On Independent Ombudsmen: 1) Too Bad, Because It Needs One Desperately and 2) No Wonder, Since Its Last One Was A Bozo

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Agreed: He's an improvement over the last ombudsman. But the Washington Post readers deserve better.

Agreed: He’s an improvement over the last ombudsman. But the Washington Post readers deserve better.

The Washington Post, which in 1970 became the first newspaper to employ a full-time “independent ombudsman” to explore reader complaints and exercise ethical oversight, has given up on the concept, pronouncing it a device “created decades ago for a different era.” You know–that era when people trusted the news media, and occasionally were given good cause to do so. Now the Post will rely on a “reader representative” named from the newspaper’s staff.

So much for “independence.”

Giving up on ombudsmen after having Patrick B. Pexton filling the role for the last two years is a little like giving up eating after Thanksgiving at my late Aunt Anna’s house. Her green, slimy, Wonder Bread turkey stuffing had to be tasted (but, oh God, never swallowed!) to be believed. Similarly, Pexton was an utter disgrace as an ombudsman, making excuses for unethical Post excursions into partisan hackery, and apparently completely unaware that his own biases mirrored those of his paper, which supposedly placed him in his job to offer perspective, not cover. And just as I seriously considered never again taking the risk of putting food in my mouth after that memorable holiday dinner in 1966, I can understand the Post thinking, as Pexton’s two year contract mercifully expired last week, thinking, “If we can’t do better than this clown, why have the position at all?” Continue reading →

Of Pastry Guns, Fear-Mongering, And Bad Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
What made the Doughboy attack the school? No one knows. He had been fired, that was plain. But luckily, Josh was ready for him...

What made the Doughboy attack the school? No one knows. He had been fired, that was plain. But luckily, Josh was ready for him…

In a day that will live in infamy, I took to my keyboard one December morn in 2011 and wrote, “Can political correctness “no-tolerance” idiocy in the schools get any worse than punishing a child for the shape of his pizza slice?” The presumptive answer was “No!”, but as any observer of the national scene now knows, I was dead wrong. Now it appears that I was not only wrong about how deranged the phirearmophobics could become, I was even wrong about the limits to irrational terror caused by arguably gun-shaped foodstuffs wielded by children.

WBFF Fox in Baltimore reported that

“Children at Park Elementary School went home with a letter late today explaining there was a disruption in school. 7-year-old Josh Welch was sent home from school for accidentally sculpting his breakfast pastry into a gun. The school suspended Josh for two days because he “used food to make an inappropriate gesture.” Continue reading →

Our Sick, Sick, Untrustworthy Schools

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
And you thought Hogwarts was dangerous...

And you thought Hogwarts was dangerous…

The easiest place to render oneself disconsolate regarding the pit of warped values we must send our public school children into every day is Fark.com, which cheerily documents the child predators in the teaching ranks and their exploits. Let’s see, I haven’t checked in a while…I wonder what the tally is for February? Hey, February’s a light month! I have to go all the way back to the 19th to find the first, LaShawn Simmons, a 41-year-old former Pasadena middle-school math teacher who had sex with four students. She’s charged with sexual assault of a child, two counts of improper relationship between an educator and a student, online solicitation of a minor and possession of child pornography.

Actually, February was a terrible month to go to school, just not one with a bumper crop of child-molesting teachers. For example, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, we had a female teacher who didn’t have sex with a male student, she only purchased drugs from him and went drinking with him. It would be hard to top the teacher who poured pencil shavings in the special ed student’s mouth (and who wasn’t fired), but I think the Linden, California gym teacher who was caught on video stealing money from her students’ backpacks gets the prize. She was caught when a suspicious student and aspiring Nancy Drew hid in a locker to see if she could solve a string of thefts, and recorded the teacher’s larceny on her phone. It gets worse: when she brought the video to the attention of the principal, he told her to destroy the evidence. Luckily, she had already sent the video to her father. Continue reading →

Picking Through The Wreckage of An Ethics Tesla Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
The wreck participants. Not pictured: the Tesla.

The wreck participants. Not pictured: the Tesla.

There was questionable ethical conduct galore in the recently-stilled ethics wreck sparked by a New York Times review of the new Tesla electric car, the Model S. Times reporter John Broder test drove the car from Washington, D.C., to Boston, using the  charging stations Tesla has opened along the way.  Broder’s Tesla ran out of juice, and the article concluded with a sad photo of the highly-anticipated Model S  on a tow truck. In short, it was not a positive review.

In response to the review, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk called it a “fake” on Twitter, then wrote a rebuttal using the data logs of the vehicle Broder tested. Broder wrote a rebuttal to the rebuttal, and eventually the Times “public editor” (others would call her its ombudsman), Margaret Sullivan, was drawn into the battle, performing an investigation and concluding that…

“…I am convinced that [Broder]  took on the test drive in good faith, and told the story as he experienced it. Did he use good judgment along the way? Not especially. In particular, decisions he made at a crucial juncture – when he recharged the Model S in Norwich, Conn., a stop forced by the unexpected loss of charge overnight – were certainly instrumental in this saga’s high-drama ending. In addition, Mr. Broder left himself open to valid criticism by taking what seem to be casual and imprecise notes along the journey, unaware that his every move was being monitored. A little red notebook in the front seat is no match for digitally recorded driving logs, which Mr. Musk has used, in the most damaging (and sometimes quite misleading) ways possible, as he defended his vehicle’s reputation…People will go on contesting these points – and insisting that they know what they prove — and that’s understandable. In the matter of the Tesla Model S and its now infamous test drive, there is still plenty to argue about and few conclusions that are unassailable.”

Perhaps realizing that his vigorous defense of his car had triggered the Streisand Effect, Musk took to Twitter again, this time saying that the ombudsmadam’s article was “thoughtful” and that his faith in the Times was hereby restored. This put a nicely disingenuous spin on the whole episode.

Here is the final ethics tally: Continue reading →

Manatee Reflections: How Can We Tell Right From Wrong When We Can’t Think Straight At All?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
Interestingly, not the slowest participant in this situation...

Interestingly, not the slowest participant in this situation…

I think the greatest impediment to building an ethical culture is the relentless dumbing down of the culture, a process now driven as much by political factors as educational ones and Honey Boo-Boo. The last election showed that ours politicians fhave decisied that they only benefit from misleading and frightening the ignorant and logically impaired among us—all the better to persuade them to elect leaders not much smarter than they are, but probably more ruthless and dishonest. In so many corners of our society, there are no consequences for demonstrated intellectual incompetence.

The news media is a prime example. CNN’s Deborah Feyeric actually asked, on the air, whether the approaching asteroid last week was “the effect of, perhaps, global warming.” She is too ignorant to be on television: this is signature significance. I know science isn’t her usual beat, but nobody this incapable of basic logic should be interpreting news on the airwaves about anything. If she had announced the moon was made of cheese, or asked if anyone had ever found that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it could not have been any worse. CNN doesn’t care: she still has a job. Being jaw-droppingly stupid—the worse kind of stupid, so stupid you don’t even know how stupid you are—is no longer a bar to permanent employment in national media, in teaching, in business, in government.  Probably Feyeric’s bosses thought she asked a reasonable question. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Have We Achieved The Ultimate No-Tolerance Insanity At Last?

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

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Wow, were kids sick back then, or what!

Wow, were kids sick back then, or what!

Could it be? Is it possible? Has school administrator incompetence, fearfulness, power abuse and cruelty finally reached its apotheosis?

In Loveland, Colorado, 7-year-old Mary Blair Elementary School student Alex Watkins was suspended by the Thompson School District for going through the motions of throwing an imaginary hand grenade at an equally imaginary box that contained “something evil,” with the admirable purpose of saving the world, doing so on what is anachronistically called a “school playground.” The imaginary grenade caused the imaginary box to be vaporized in an imaginary explosion.

The Horror.

The imaginary minds of one or more teachers who witnessed this carnage ignited in fear and anger. Of course, an overly-broad, incompetently drafted, utterly stupid no-tolerance rule was involved: Mary Blair Elementary School bans imaginary fighting and imaginary weaponry. The only bright side of this disgraceful abuse of an innocent child and blatant attempt at thought-control is that it might finally provide the absolute end point on the spectrum of school administration no-tolerance incompetence. Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz question for today is..

Is it? Continue reading →