incompetence

An Ethics Riddle: What Do You Get When You Cross The Oklahoma Valedictorian Flap With The Delta T-Shirt Controversy?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Give up?

Pure evil.

The answer is that you get kindergarten student Cooper Barton of Oklahoma City being forced by his teacher and principal to turn his T-shirt inside out under threat of discipline because it celebrated the University of Michigan, and the city’s Soviet dress code requires that school children may only wear apparel supporting Oklahoma colleges, such as Oklahoma University or Oklahoma State University.  Cooper’s mother told the news media that her son had to hide behind a tree to turn his shirt inside-out, and that he was embarrassed by the affair. “They should really worry about academics. It wasn’t offensive. He’s five,” she said.

Gee, ya think? Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Officials of the Month: The California State Legislature

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

California knows what’s best for your maybe-gay child, not your child’s therapist. Resistance is futile…

California’s legislature is poised to pass legislation that would ban state doctors, counselors and therapists from offering sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) treatment for minors, and parents from seeking them. The rationale is a tangle of research, opinion, politics, ideology and political correctness that makes distinguishing legitimate reasons from illegitimate ones impossible. The end result, however, is a law that tells counselors and therapists what is appropriate treatment regardless of their expertise and the wishes of parents, because, of course, the typically moderately IQ-endowed legislators know best, or rather the gay rights advocates who dictate to them do. Either way, this is a serious intrusion of government into the counseling profession, free speech, parental authority and individual freedom, and any competent elected official would see that the second such an over-reaching and presumptuous bill reached his or her desk. Continue reading →

A Frightened Little Girl, and a Frightening Culture Of Incompetence At United Airlines

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ernestine works for United now! Heck, maybe she RUNS United now….

Bob Sutton’s blog post is titled “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn’t Care”  and I believe every bit of it. I also believe this was not an isolated occurrence, because my own experience with United indicates that the airline doesn’t care, or at least allows its employees to adopt that attitude.

First, I’ll  summarize Sutton’s horror story (and then on to mine): Continue reading →

The Pasco School District (Florida) Flunks Its “Cone of Shame” Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Isn’t this hilarious? The student looks just like that funny animated dog!

Laurie Bailey-Cutkomp is, among other things that I will enumerate as we go, a  science teacher who until recently was employed at Zephyrhills High School in Dade County.  The Pasco School District fired her for devising and employing a unique form of punishment for misbehaving students: she placed them in a wide plastic collar of the sort used by veterinarians to keep dogs from licking their stitched up wounds, what the talking dogs in Disney’s  animated film “Up” amusingly called “the Cone of Shame.” But they were dogs, and they were animated. The Cone of Shame isn’t funny on kids, except maybe to Ms. Bailey-Cutkomp.

Then the same school district that fired her, following negotiations and a settlement agreement, allowed another school in the same district, Middle School, to hire her to teach science there.

Oh, darn…my head just exploded all over my computer screen! There…it’s wiped off now. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Bill, a frequent commenter here whom I am proud to call my friend, contributes this story to the recent post about the Boy Scouts and their negligent handling of pedophiles in the leadership. Here is his Comment of the Day on The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America.

“When I was ten years old a man tried to snatch my little brother, who was then seven, off the street. The only thing that stopped this from happening was that the two gay men who lived next store saw it happening, ran out into the street, grabbed my baby brother and apprehended the married pedophile who tried to snatch him. They also gave him a pretty good ass-whipping in the process, as they were both bodybuilders.

“A while later another neighbor asked my father how he could stand living next to those two “faggots” my fathers response was, ‘If it wasn’t for those two men, my youngest son would have been raped and most likely dead. Don’t ever call them faggots in my presence again or question their manhood.’”

“The BSA needs to come into the 21st century and recognize that homosexuality doesn’t equal being a pedophile . That’s is an ignorant and outdated belief and by continuing to follow it they are putting their members at risk.”

The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

“Follow me into those bushes, boys! You won’t need your pants.”

The Boy Scouts of America, who recently re-affirmed its policy of refusing to accept homosexuals into its ranks because to do so would supposedly undermine the organization’s moral values, have been unconscionably lax in protecting its young participants from child molesters in its ranks.

From the Los Angeles Times:

“A Los Angeles Times review of more than 1,200 files dating from 1970 to 1991 found more than 125 cases across the country in which men allegedly continued to molest Scouts after the organization was first presented with detailed allegations of abusive behavior. Predators slipped back into the program by falsifying personal information or skirting the registration process. Others were able to jump from troop to troop around the country thanks to clerical errors, computer glitches or the Scouts’ failure to check the blacklist.In some cases, officials failed to document reports of abuse in the first place, letting offenders stay in the organization until new allegations surfaced. In others, officials documented abuse but merely suspended the accused leader or allowed him to continue working with boys while on “probation.” In at least 50 cases, the Boy Scouts expelled suspected abusers, only to discover later that they had reentered the program and were accused of molesting again.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Redstate Blogger Moe Lane

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The other Moe, the one who probably COULD use a search engine…

Redstate blogger Moe Lane is offended that I think emulating Harry Reid to get even with Harry Reid is as despicable as Harry Reid, and since Lane hasn’t the wit or diligence to make a coherent argument against the position articulated in my recent post, which has flushed out a covey of mouth-foaming right-wingers, he plays the hypocrisy card, and like most players, doesn’t really know what hypocrisy is. Unlike many players, however, he doesn’t even bother to get his facts right, apparently because the Ethics Alarms search engine is too tricky for him. As I opined that the Right was attempting to “santorum” Reid by associating his name with something unsavory (in his case, pederasty), Lane fulminates that I didn’t express similar objections when Santorum himself was santorumed. He writes:

“…Hence the aforementioned shocked, shocked response from this Ethics Alarms site, which is very disapproving of the whole thing, and goes so far as to call it ‘santoruming.’ For those unfamiliar with the concept, Ethics Alarms provides a footnote: “Thanks to blogger Dan Savage, the former GOP Senator’s name is now a synonym for a disgusting bodily discharge.” And that, of course, is just as bad when it happens to Harry Reid as it was when it happened to Rick Santorum.”…which, given that (as near as I can tell) this seems to be the first time that Ethics Alarms has bothered to mention to the world that, hey, attacking Rick Santorum like that was bad, just indicates to me that the “Reid is a Pederast” meme is having the desired effect. It’s getting self-absorbed, pretentious websites that hate hardcore social conservatives** to stand up for those self-same social conservatives! Without prompting, even! Lo, indeed, truly we live in an Age of Wonders.”

Well, no, Moe, in fact this was not the first time that I expressed disapproval of Dan Savage’s successful effort to slime Rick Santorum, and if you could search the web or my site with the deftness of the typical Special Ed teen, you would have seen that over a year ago I wrote a post entitled, Dan Savage’s Curse on Rick Santorum: Funny! But Wrong. Note that the title was specifically evoked by the heading for the recent Reid post, which would have been a big fat clue for anyone who cared about being fair and accurate rather than being snide and obnoxious, like Moe Lane. Continue reading →

Massachusetts: A State Lottery Shows Its Corrupt And Irresponsible Core

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Hey! No fair! Smart people aren’t supposed to play the lottery!”

On one level, I love this story, for it confirms what I have been arguing for over a decade. State lotteries represent an unethical capitulation of governments to laziness, cowardice and greed, as they choose  emulate casinos to entice the poor, desperate and stupid to give away their money rather than do their duty and make hard political choices about taxes. The inherent corruption this engenders was beautifully demonstrated by the lottery scandal recently revealed in Massachusetts.

A group of science and math whizzes, many of whom had MIT credentials, formed a gambling syndicate to beat the lottery, and did, generating almost $8 million in winnings after exploiting a flaw in the lottery rules to execute a system that virtually guaranteed profit. Their domination of the lottery continued over seven years, and was known about by lottery officials, who did nothing. Why? Because the money was coming in, and they didn’t understand that they were facing a net loss. Continue reading →

Yet Soon We Will Be Missing Ann Curry On The Today Show

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Pretty, perky, biased and incompetent—yup, perfect for NBC.

Fresh from highlighting the lack of professionalism exhibited by Ann Curry as she was booted off the Today Show, I was jostled by another blog’s link to this one reminding me that I already had an ethics run-in with her replacement, the fresh-faced, cute as a button, proudly biased and ignorant Savannah Guthrie, who continues the devolution of the female liberal mouthpiece co-anchor position on the show that began with Barbara Walters.

The hard conservative site Freedom Report alerted me that I had blown the whistle on Guthrie’s incompetence in an April, 2011 post, after she tried to “gotcha!” Donald Trump and exposed her own Constitutional illiteracy instead. I had forgotten the episode, perhaps because it forced me to defend The Donald, which was and is about as appealing to me as snorting skunks. You can read the post here. A quick summary: Guthrie attempted to argue against Trump’s pro-life views by asking the Constitutional equivalent of the automobile-tuning query asked of expert witness/hairdresser Marisa Tomei in the climax of  the classic,”My Cousin Vinnie,” to which she replies, “It’s a bullshit question!”: Continue reading →

How Parents Are Playing Russian Roulette With Their Children

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Whenever I discuss an incident of astounding incompetence and idiocy by school administrators, I receive indignant protests that such incidents tell us nothing about the trustworthiness of the schools generally, and that any system, even the very best, have anomalous examples of misconduct and poor judgment. Admittedly I am somewhat conditioned by the experiences of my son, which convinced my wife and I to home school him, not for religious reasons, but because we were horrified by the inflexible, often cruel conduct of his teachers, the deceit and cowardice of various school administrators, and the accumulated impact of the inept teaching and oversight on our son’s attitude toward education, authority, institutions, and life in general. Yet even that was before I began recording the steady drumbeat of teachers seducing their students, teachers indoctrinating their students in their own ideological beliefs, schools punishing students for technical violations of badly written and overly broad rules and harshly disciplining children for their communications and activities outside school grounds, in their private lives.

I now believe that any parent who entrusts the welfare and upbringing of their children to today’s schools is playing the equivalent of Russian Roulette, allowing people who have inadequate standards, inadequate training, inadequate judgment and inadequate values to have an opportunity to warp, debase, confuse or otherwise harm the young. I believe this because I am convinced that the public and media are aware of only a small percentage of the misconduct schools and their employees engage in daily.

Take, for example, the experience of photographer Jess Michener. Two of his children were going on a school field trip. It was a sunny day, and his children are fair-skinned and prone to sunburn—one especially, because she has a mild form of albinism. When they came home, the two were so painfully sunburned that he had to take them to the hospital. He writes: Continue reading →