responsibility

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quote of the Week: Yu Jie”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Michael, fortunately, focuses attention back on the actual meaning of the quote from the Chinese dissident, Yu Jie, that I had posted as an Ethics Quote of the Week. I then confused the issue by expanding my commentary to the dangers (or, as commenter properly corrected me, theoretical dangers) of  U.S. indebtedness to China. My error, and I am grateful to Michael both for returning to the issue and his thoughtful comments.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, Ethics Quote of the Week: Yu Jie:

“…No matter how craven our federal government has been, why are the Universities allowing themselves to be censored by the Chinese? There are two reasons: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Yu Jie

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“I arrived in the United States a month ago, thinking I had escaped the reach of Beijing, only to realize that the Chinese government’s shadow continues to be omnipresent. Several U.S. universities that I have contacted dare not invite me for a lecture, as they cooperate with China on many projects. If you are a scholar of Chinese studies who has criticized the Communist Party, it would be impossible for you to be involved in research projects with the Chinese-funded Confucius Institute, and you may even be denied a Chinese visa. Conversely, if you praise the Communist Party, not only would you receive ample research funding but you might also be invited to visit China and even received by high-level officials. Western academic freedom has been distorted by invisible hands.”

—Yu Jie, Chinese dissident and author recently relocated to the U.S., in an op-ed column in the Washington Post, exposing how America’s dependence on China for trade and financing has not only made the nation vulnerable, but is also eroding its integrity and values.

Every budget cycle that the United States permits to expand its debt makes the nation more indebted to China, and places more power in the hands of its leaders to exert influence over American policies. Yu Jie’s disturbing article shows how our values are being undermined as well. China’s is a repressive, undemocratic and often brutal regime that the United States has foolishly allowed itself to become dependent upon. What will the consequences of this be? How can the United States lead the free world while being under the thumb of the Chinese? Corruption is inevitable. Yu Jie writes, Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Abraham Lincoln (And a Happy Birthday to You, Mister Lincoln!)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that Right makes Might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

— Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, on February 27, 1860 in his Cooper Union Address expounding on the Founders’ beliefs regarding the regulation of slavery.

February 12 is the birthday of America’s most brilliant, bold and eloquent leader, Abraham Lincoln, born this day in 1809. You would hardly know it from the apathy of most of the news media, which is happy in its laziness to defer any honor of the man who saved the Union and ended slavery to “President’s Day,” which is still officially a celebration of George Washington’s birth. No slight against George, but Abe deserves better from us.

Happy Birthday, Abe. The nation can never repay its debt to you, but it can make itself better by striving to meet the aspirations you set for us

Ethics Dunce: Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Well, I can’t say I’m really very surprised.

And another mystery solved: Why was he called "Oil Can"? Because apparently that's what he has on top of his neck instead of a head.

Former Red Sox pitcher Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd, one of my favorite characters when he was active, admitted this week that he was stoked up on cocaine when he pitched more often than not. “Oh yeah, at every ballpark. There wasn’t one ballpark that I probably didn’t stay up all night, until four or five in the morning, and the same thing is still in your system,” Boyd told WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Jonny Miller in Fort Myers, Florida, where the Red Sox are about to start Spring Training.  “Some of the best games I’ve ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night; I’d say two-thirds of them. If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played. I feel like my career was cut short for a lot of reasons, but I wasn’t doing anything that hundreds of ball players weren’t doing at the time; because that’s how I learned it.” Continue reading →

Dear Former Rep. Dahlkemper: Oh, Shut Up!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Actually, this is just a cartoon of the former Congresswoman from Erie, but then a Toon could have cast a vote for a bill without reading it too.

Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, voted for the health care mega-law in 2010. Now she says she would have never voted for the  bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the “week-after” pill .

In a press release sent out while the HHS ruling was still pending, the pro-life Dahlkemper said,

“I would have never voted for the final version of the bill if I expected the Obama Administration to force Catholic hospitals and Catholic Colleges and Universities to pay for contraception,. We worked hard to prevent abortion funding in health care and to include clear conscience protections for those with moral objections to abortion and contraceptive devices that cause abortion. I trust that the President will honor the commitment he made to those of us who supported final passage.”

To which I reply, “Oh, shut up!” Continue reading →

Patch Motto Ethics, or WHO CARES???

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Bear with me—this story has a point, and besides, it’s funny.

George S. Kaufman had the right idea.

Playwright George S. Kaufman  (“The Man Who Came To Dinner”, “You Can’t Take It With You”, and many more) was a panelist on  the long-forgotten early TV  program, “This is Show Business.” One of its features was to have a celebrity consult the panel members about a personal problem. On one show, singer Eddie Fisher ( father of Carrie) complained to the panel that some women refused to go out with him because of his youth. Kaufman replied with this immortal expression of complete disinterest:

“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope.  The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope.

“Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”

This is how I feel about the controversy over the removal of a reference to God on an Air Force unit’s patch, and it is how, I believe, everyone should feel, from the atheists who agitated for the patch to be changed, to the ridiculous Republican House members who are opposing the change. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Judge Barbara Jaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Yes, it's true this teacher wrote on Facebook that she wished her fifth grade students DEAD, but the comment was only meant for her friends to see, and hey, just because she hates them doesn't mean she can't teach them...so it's OK. Right, Judge?

New York Judge Barbara Jaffe disagrees with me on the issue I discussed here regarding Natalie Munroe, the elementary school teacher who still has her job despite professing her contempt and dislike for her elementary students and their parents on her blog. Thanks to Jaffe, Christine Rubino, whose online comments about her students were infinitely worse, has won a court challenge to her firing from her job teaching at PS 203 in Brooklyn, New York. The judge is wrong, and I am right. The judge is also a fool.

Imagine: last March,  the day after a 12-year-old Harlem schoolgirl drowned during a class trip to a Long Island beach, Rubino posted a vicious rant about her fifth-graders on her Facebook page. “After today,” she wrote, ” I’m thinking the beach is a good trip for my class. I hate their guts.”

A Facebook friend quickly asked, “Wouldn’t you throw a life jacket to little Kwami?” Kwami was the child who drowned. The 38-year teacher replied: “No I wouldn’t for a million dollars.” 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 →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.”

—-Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, a retired professor from Cal State East Bay, addressing a rally this weekend of the Occupy Oakland  group, which fought police in a pitched battle that ended with 400 arrests.

I said that the Occupy movement would end badly, and it is, not that it should have taken advanced psi-powers to divine that a protest based on ignorance, envy and anarchy with no practical and constructive proposals to offer would eventually end in violence, anger and ugliness. Hate is what it has come down to now, and the party and supporters of the President who came to office promising hope are now pinning their hopes on a sad movement fueled by hate. To say that the protests are also unethical is to flog the obvious. They have cost communities millions of dollars that will be made up in cut services; they have soiled parks and public places, they have provided a meeting place for thugs, vagrants, criminals, and worse ( an Occupier was arrested over the weekend for strangling his parents), and they have embodied a cultural rejection of personal responsibility.

Not to mention an escape from reality.“The fact that everyone now talks about the 99 percent, the 1 percent – that shows Occupy’s won,”  Carter Lavin, 23, of Oakland told the press. “The debate was about debt, not jobs. Now it’s about jobs.”

Sure, Carter. Continue reading →

Freddie Mac’s Conflict of Interest and the Betrayal Of The American Homeowner

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Possible, but expensive.

Though the political implications of this disturbing story, which broke today on NPR, are wide-ranging, this isn’t a political blog.  I will avoid the temptation  to wade into them. That’s fine: the ethical implications are bad enough.

Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, has been doing a Goldman Sachs, betting against the very homeowners it is pledged to serve by making multi-billion-dollar investments that will profit Freddie Mac only if homeowners can’t get out of  expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates. Of course, Freddie Mac’s job is supposedly to do the opposite…to help homeowners find cheaper, fairer mortgages. And we were told, by the Obama Administration, that this what it was working to do.

This is called a conflict of interest. And since Freddie Mac, along with its cousin Fannie Mae, is owned by U.S. taxpayers, this is also a massive breach of trust by the Federal government. Freddie and Fannie were bailed out in 2008. The companies insure most home loans in the United States, making banks able to lend at lower risk, and the companies’ rules determine whether homeowners can get refinanced and on what terms. Now we know that Freddie Mac, at least, profits when they fail.  Continue reading →