integrity

Epilogue: The Boo-Boo Hoax, Blues Blindness, and Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
The comments on the boo-boo hoax post have me so upset that I can't see this...

The comments on the boo-boo hoax post have me so upset that I can’t see this…

Every now and then, and it is never on a post that I am especially keen on or that I expect to catch fire, a link to an Ethics Alarms essay is suddenly being clicked on by a lot of people who have no interest in ethics, but a particular interest in a topic I happened to stumble into, as I am wont to do. Usually these waves of traffic contribute nothing of substance to our ethics colloquy, produce no new regular readers, and  they depress me, as did the so-called “Instalanche” of a few years back when Glenn Reynolds deigned to link to a post.  A bigger group of nasty right wing jerks I have never encountered before or since: I lost a bit of respect for Professor Reynolds that day (His avid followers maintained it was ethical to spread a web rumor that Harry Reid was a pederast in retribution for Reid’s “Romney hasn’t paid taxes” lie. It’s not.)

The current ‘-lanche’ has arrived courtesy of my post of a couple days back about an unlabeled hoax study published by The Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, a (formerly) respectable scientific journal. Of the few new readers who have commented, most have distinguished themselves by making the typical threadbare rationalization used for all web hoaxes, to wit:  “Anyone who didn’t figure out it was a gag isn’t as smart as I am.” If these people typify the ethical acumen of scholarly journal readers, we have trouble my friends, right here in River City.

See, Brilliant Advanced Degree-holders, the problem with respectable journals (if there are such things) publishing inside jokes without proper labeling is that the false studies are read and believed by journalists, who spread the misinformation like an oil slick over the culture and public consciousness. It doesn’t matter if you got a chuckle out of it; what matters is that a lot of people were made to believe false information, and it is the purveyors of that false information, not the oh so gullible and ignorant victims of it, who are at fault. Continue reading →

Most Encouraging Statement Suggesting That There May Be Justice After All: Former U.S. Attorney General Joe DiGenova

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Hope-Dove-Flying

Former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova had this to say on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, speaking  about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary’s intentional mishandling of confidential State Department e-mails—you know, those “stupid e-mails” that nobody cares about:

“They have reached a critical mass in their investigation of the Secretary and all of her senior staff. And, it’s going to come to a head, I would suggest, in the next 60 days…It’s going to be a very complex matter for the Department of Justice, but they’re not going to be able to walk away from it. They are now at over 1,200 classified emails. And, that’s just for the ones we know about from the State Department. That does not include the ones that the FBI is, in fact, recovering from her hard drives. …I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Attorney General Loretta Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an Attorney General.  It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable.”

Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Yet DiGenova is far from a being a loon, a partisan hitman, or one to spin wild theories. He also should know a bit about how the internal workings of the various competing agencies under Justice work. [Full disclosure: I’ve met Joe, and chatted with him a bit, though this was quite a while back. Did you know he is a trained singer? A good one, too.]

I cannot begin to describe how marvelous it will be for the integrity of our government and justice system if Joe’s analysis is proven correct. I don’t even have to consider how much I would enjoy the screams of indignation of the Clinton Corrupted. This scenario is what the Clintons, the Democrats, the DNC, Clintons’ disgraceful mews media defenders and Hillary’s see-no-evil supporters sooooo richly deserve that if it ever comes to pass, Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus might just spontaneously echo from the cosmos, or at least John Kiley’s organ version that he played that immortal night, the best of my life, when Carlton Fisk hit that Game #6 winning home run off the Fenway foulpole, so many years ago.

Let us hope.

__________________

Pointer and Source: Don Surber

 

New Rule For 2016: Elected Officials, Politician And Presidential Candidates Will Be Accountable For What They Say, Not What They “Meant To Say”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
You know that quote time machine that politicians keep using? It doesn't exist. Stop letting them act as if it does.

You know that quote time machine that politicians keep using? It doesn’t exist. Stop letting them act as if it does.

We have a growing mass of public figures in politics and government who increasingly communicate in sloppy, vague, hyperbolic and ambiguous language and assume that they can wait and see how the public reacts to it before they, their spokespersons, defenders, enablers or friendly pundits need to clarify what they “really meant.”

Well, the hell with that.

Communication precision is more crucial than ever in the new, technology-driven public media, when tweets can be circulated to millions within minutes, and on-camera statements live on YouTube forever. This habit of allowing influential figures to spout lies, nonsense , smoking gun revelations about their character and worse and then insist on a do-over when they are called on the obvious meaning of their own words must stop. Among other things, it appears to be killing the little switch in the brains of these people that is supposed to stop human beings from saying stupid things before they say them. That switch goes by the name Prudence, which  encompasses common sense, respect, responsibility, restraint, honesty in communication, and more. We should want our leaders to have that switch working perfectly. Unfortunately, most of our most prominent leaders and would-be leaders appear not to have a functioning switch at all. Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Carly Fiorina

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

carly tweetThe above New Year’s Day tweet was issued by Republican Presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, now campaigning in Iowa for February’s caucuses, as Stanford and Iowa prepared to do battle in the Rose Bowl. (It was a rout: Iowa got clobbered.)

Fiorina is a  Stanford alum, and the tweet backfired, it seemed, with many on Twitter finding the tweet revealing, and not at all in a good way.

Are there any plausible translations of the tweet that reflect well on Carly’s character? Let’s see: Continue reading →

The Washington Post Drops Its Resident Op-Ed Socialist. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Workers Unite

The Washington Post has jettisoned Harold Meyerson, who has been the leftest of the leftists on the Washington Post op-ed pages for about 13 years…not surprising, as he also serves as editor at large for The American Prospect. Mayerson, according to his last column, was told that he was a goner because he was losing readers and because his columns were repetitious, which they certainly were. How many times, after all, can one read “Workers Unite!”?  From Occupy Wall Street to BlackLivesMatter, there was no revolt of the oppressed and downtrodden that Meyerson didn’t support, nor any standard issue socialist/progressive position that he did not wholeheartedly embrace.

The Post has other kneejerk leftists among their pundits, a disproportionate number in fact (this was also part of the Post’s motivation to let Meyerson go), but I found Meyerson more infuriating than the others because he seemed so much more intelligent than his positions and statements would suggest. He was the epitome of an opinion journalist whose opinions seemed to be calibrated to achieve a grander agenda, rather than honest expressions of truth or even what he really believed. He is a columnist in the Saul Alinsky tradition of liberalism, willing to bend truth for the greater good, to win converts for the Great Worker Rebellion, or whatever it would be.

No newspaper should employ a journalist who is willing to deceive its readers, even on the pretense of saving the world.

Continue reading →

What’s More Unethical Than A Web Hoax? How About A Scientific Journal Hoax?

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

mom-kiss

The Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, a respected scientific journal, published a supposedly peer-reviewed study in its current issue finding that kisses from mommy are not an effective way of remedying children’s boo-boos. Several news outlets fell for the hoax, including The Daily Caller.

“Maternal kisses are not effective in alleviating minor childhood injuries (boo-boos): a randomized, controlled and blinded study“ described the results of research allegedly conducted on 943 pairs of toddlers and their mothers and designed to determine whether a kiss from a child’s mother after a minor injury significantly reduced the child’s distress.

There were plenty of red flags in the study beyond its ridiculous subject matter. For example, the “researchers” wrote that they intentionally constructed scenarios in which children would hurt themselves. In one scenario, the authors claimed that they placed chocolate in an area where a child would bump his head trying to reach the chocolate. In another, they said that the researchers placed a child’s favorite object behind a heated coil so the child would burn herself trying to access the object. Continue reading →

Professionalism Tales: The Hilarious Prosecutor

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Clown lawyerDeputy District Attorney Robert Alan Murray is a funny guy. Having apparently decided that it was too obvious to tell an arrested kid that he would be summarily shot, which is always a gas—you should see their faces!—and a bit too risky to put a whoopie cushion on a judge’s chair behind the bench—those old fogies have no sense of humor—the young California prosecutor hit on the brilliant idea of altering the transcript of the police interrogation of a Spanish-speaking defendant who was charged with lewd or lascivious acts with a child younger than 14 years old.

Murray, the dickens, added this wacky exchange to the transcript:

Officer: “You’re so guilty, you child molester.”

Suspect: “I know. I’m just glad she’s not pregnant like her mother.”

He kills me, he just kills me! Inexplicably, though, the assistant public defender complained about the altered transcript, told a judge, and the judge dismissed all charges against the accused child molester.Who would have guessed the public defender would use the gag to defend his client? What a party pooper. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The New York Yankees

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yankees

Ah, thaaat’s better: the old, values-free, win-at-any-price New York Yankees we’ve grown to know and hate.

The Yankees today announced the acquisition of left-hander Aroldis Chapman from the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for four minor league prospects of no great note. Chapman is arguably the most dominating late inning closer in baseball, as well as its hardest throwing pitcher: the left-hander averaged  99.5 mph on his fastball last season, and threw more balls in excess of 100 mph than all other major league pitchers combined. So why were the Yankees able to acquire him so cheaply?

Well, it’s because Chapman was regarded as virtually untradable due to his being investigated  by MLB for choking his girlfriend, and this was not the first instance where he was involved in alleged domestic violence.  The Dodgers had a trade for Chapman in place earlier this month, but pulled out when the team learned the details of the choking incident. (As usual, the girlfriend refused to press charges, and is gambling that she’ll end up rich rather than dead.) Most believe that Major League Baseball will suspend Chapman for up to 40 games under its new domestic violence policies.

Hey, but after that little hiccup, Yankee fans, the Pinstripes will have three beasts in the bullpen to close out games, with the three highest strikeout percentages in all of baseball from 2014-15 in Chapman (46.3 percent), Andrew Miller (41.6 percent) and Dellin Betances (39.5 percent)! What’s a little girlfriend choking when you can get talent like that? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Nazi Scientist

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
Scientist, genius, Nobel Prize winner, Nazi. Now what?

Scientist, genius, Nobel Prize winner, Nazi. Now what?

Konrad Lorenz, 1903-1989 ,  was an acclaimed Austrian zoologist regarded as the founder of modern ethology, which is the study of animal behavior. His research  explained how behavioral patterns may be traced to through evolution,  and he made major contributions to the study of aggression and its roots. Lorenz shared a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with the animal behaviorists Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen.

It seems that documentation surfaced proving that Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938, however, and for that, Austria’s Salzburg University last week posthumously stripped him of his honorary doctorate.

Your Day Before The Night Before Christmas Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is…

Is this the right thing to do?

Continue reading →

Marco Rubio’s Unethical Concept Of “Doing Your Job”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Senator Marco Rubio at work in the Senate this week.

Senator Marco Rubio at work in the Senate this week.

It would be nice if the most viable alternatives to Donald Trump didn’t go out of their way to show that they aren’t qualified to be President of the United States either.

Marco Rubio, who was already under well-earned fire for saying that he hated being a Senator and  not bothering to vote on Senate bills, a rather substantial part of the job he was elected to do, thought about it, shrugged, and then became the only Senator who couldn’t be bothered to cast a vote on massive $1.8 trillion spending and tax package engineered by new House Speaker Paul Ryan. There’s just no excuse for this, and Rand Paul was not being unreasonable to suggest that if all Rubio wanted to do was run for President–and many have commented that unlike Trump, Cruz, Bush and the rest, he isn’t even doing that very hard—he should resign and let someone else represent the people of Florida.

“It’s a trillion dollars in spending and I think earlier this week he talked about having some activity and then wasn’t here,” Sen. Paul told POLITICO. “So yeah I think it’s important to show up to your job. I think that really he ought to resign or quit accepting his pay if he’s not going to come to work.”

How can anyone argue with that?

For his part, Rubio offered a weak, weak, weak excuse for his no-show, saying, “In essence, not voting for it, is a vote against it.” No, not voting is also not voting against it. As Thomas More pointed out before he lost his head, the law’s assumption is that “silence gives consent.” If Rubio is correct, then a bill could be voted down by more Senators abstaining than voting for a measure. Is he correct? No.

But then he doesn’t show up to work that often, so it’s understandable that he’s confused.

Rubio’s conduct demonstrates arrogance, lack of diligence, integrity and trustworthiness, laziness, and it doesn’t encourage me about his judgment, either.

Somewhere, Donald Trump is smiling.