stupidity

Our Untrustworthy Public Schools, Part 2: The Fool and the Indoctrinator

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
When Alex met Kendra...

When Alex met Kendra…

There are bad apples in every barrel, but no apple barrel should contain poison apples. When it comes to teachers, these two make me regard the entire barrel as a bad risk.

The Fool

At Summerville High School in Summerville, South Carolina, a teacher caused a 16-year-old student named Alex Stone to be arrested and suspended because he wrote a passage on his Facebook page, as part of an assignment, that described using a gun to kill a dinosaur. Never mind that dinosaurs are extinct: guns are real; the teacher, a hysteric, a child abuser and a fool, notified school officials, and the school notified the police. They in turn,  searched Alex’s  book bag and locker for the dinosaur murder weapon, and came up empty. Police said that when Stone was asked by school officials about the his post, he became “very irate” —as would I—and so they handcuffed and arrested him.

Look at the bright side: at least they didn’t shoot him. Then Stone was suspended for the rest of the week. Continue reading →

CNN’s Carol Costello, Making CNN Viewers Dumber Yet Again

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Lauren-Bacall-To-Have_l

The least we should be able to ask of the news media, since they obviously can’t be trusted to report the news competently, objectively or fairly, is to not make the public more stupid and ignorant than it already is. CNN’s Carol Costello, a prime offender in the incompetent and biased, can’t even clear this low bar.

This morning, as the networks interrupted their around the clock Robin Williams death coverage to note the passing of famed screen siren Lauren Bacall at the ripe old age of 89, Costello led her report by referencing Bacall’s “beauty, talent, and wit.” Her wit was represented by a clip of her famous line as “Slim” in “To Have and Have Not” (1944):

“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow. “

But this quote has no relationship at all to Bacall’s wit, and she was indeed witty. The line was written by Jules Furthman, or perhaps William Faukner, both credited with the screenplay, inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who wrote the novel and created the character Bacall was playing. A seven-year-old could have been just as witty, with these guys putting words in her mouth.

Incredibly, a ridiculous number of people really think actors are responsible for the lines they say on stage or on screen. This is, you’ll agree, idiotic and an embarrassment, and CNN should not be encouraging such a misconception.

And yet it did.

Unethical Quote of the Month: Michelle Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

“Time is short. Change is needed. And women are smarter than men. And the men can’t complain because they are outnumbered today.”

—Michelle Obama, during the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit “to a laughing audience,” according to White House press pool reports.

stupid2

Nice!

Misandry.

Bigotry.

Divisive.

Arrogant.

Double-standard. Continue reading →

Zombie Ethics, Spoiling Things For Everyone, And The Barn Door Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

With so many terrible news stories going on around the world, it is not surprising that a bumper crop of strange and stupid ones this week went almost unnoticed. In Indiana, a truck crashed and spilled 45,000 pounds of butter, whipped cream and other dairy products on an interstate. In the skies, an elderly woman went berserk on an airplane and began beating everyone is sight with her artificial leg. This, however, wins the prize: the annual Comic Con  “Zombie Walk” in San Diego went horribly wrong when a group of rogue zombie portrayers, dressed like rotting corpses and moaning, carried their method acting too far and swarmed a car containing a family with young children—a deaf family with deaf children. Ignoring the obvious alarm and terror on the faces of the car’s occupants, the Walking Dead Wannabes pounded on the car, broke its windshield, and one zombie jumped onto the hood. At that point the driver panicked, and tried to pull away from the crowd, running down a 64-year-old woman who was seriously injured as a result. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce….And Hoping That A Jury Lets Everyone Know How BIG A Dunce: Heritage Park Care Center in Carbondale, Colorado.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

hostage-negotiationA typical set up for “Scare Tactics”—the unethical hidden camera cable show that terrifies its victims for laughs  by placing them in fake but real-appearing horror movie or action movie scenarios—would be to stage an armed hostage situation that everyone but the butt of the joke knows is a sham. I keep waiting for one of the hapless innocents in these vicious stunts who think they are about to die to pull out a concealed weapon and blast an actor or five to oblivion. That might teach the producers that creating fake life and death situations for any reason is cruel, irresponsible, and stupid.

In the alternative, a victim could just sue the pants off the producers and the production company; that would work too. If there is any justice, that is what will happen to the Heritage Park Care Center in Carbondale, Colorado for  getting local police to pretend to play armed thugs taking over the facility and threatening the employees…in a drill that none of them knew was a drill.

Former employee Michelle Meeker has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Denver alleging that  an armed man confronted her last October at the  Center as  Meeker, a registered nurse, was tending to one of her long-term patients.  Another employee told her to investigate  a suspicious man sitting in the Center’s day room. When she did, the man then showed her a handgun he had in his waistband and ordered her into an another room. He told her in hushed tones that he was really a police officer, but Meeker, quite reasonably, was unsure that he was telling her the truth. Hysterical, she pleaded for her life.

At least she didn’t pull out a concealed but licensed Glock and blow him away.

Robert Baker, the executive director of the Center and one of the named defendants, explained that the facility routinely conducts safety, fire, and natural disaster drills for its residents. “Unfortunately, the training exercise alarmed some at our facility,” Baker said.

Yeah, imagine that. Continue reading →

Flunking Responsibility, Honesty, Common Sense and Ethics: Gov. Deval Patrick, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Daily Kos, and Anyone Else Who Repeats This Idiotic Analogy

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Deval Patrick

I thought I might run an ethics quiz asking whether this current and mind-bogglingly stupid argument that keeps popping up from my sentiment-addled Facebook friends is more unethical than the pro-Hamas hashtags being appended to twitter comments by the “Think of the children!” saps led by celebrities like Jon Stewart, Selena Gomez, and John Cusack. Pondering on it, however, I realized that as ethically misguided as Stewart at al. are, the above quote and its ilk are worse….especially since state governors and U.S. Senators have more credibility than comedians and Disney pop tarts. Not that they should, mind you.

If I really have to make a detailed argument explaining why Deval’s quote and  Leahy’s ( “Think of all those Jews that went to the ovens because we forgot our principles. Let’s not turn our backs now.”) are unforgivably irresponsible, we are just as dim-witted as those demagogues (or, more likely, as dim-witted as they hope and think we are.) The statements are no more nor less than an invitation to every parent of every child in every poor, war-torn, politically foul, culturally poisoned, dangerous, corrupt nation in the world to somehow get them to the U.S. border, paying shady and often treacherous agents to do so, because the United States will not “turn its back,” and turn them back. The question isn’t whether this is a legitimate, responsible or sane position worthy of debate and serious consideration: of course it isn’t. The question is how anyone can think it is. Continue reading →

Comment of The Day (Public Service Message Division): “Wanetta Gibson Is Even Worse Than We Thought”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Wait a second...I'm getting my rifle...

Wait a second…I’m getting my rifle…

We haven’t had one of these in a while, and I’m feeling like having a good fish-shoot in the ol’ barrel, so here we go….

Apparently there has been another development in the Wanetta Gibson saga—I know this because the last post about this horrible woman is suddenly getting traffic again—and this has moved one Terrance Skerrette—I sure hope there’s just one— to enter one of those periodic comments I receive here that serves as a public service announcement for the ethically-challenged. You know the kind—Saturday Night Live parodies of such spots used to be a staple:

“Hello. I’m Jack Marshall, and this is Terrance. Terrance was raised in an environment that left him with an inability to understand ethics. That’s right–he will go through life justifying horrendous conduct by using rationalizations, hideous logic, and warped values. Will you help Terrance? No, he can’t be helped by treatment, but perhaps, if you give generously, we can provide him with a comfortable shack in the forest and plenty of food, so he can live comfortably without infecting anyone else with his hopeless ethical ignorance and dangerous excuses for terrible conduct. Please send your generous contributions to “Help Terrance,” care of Ethics Alarms. Thank you. Terrance would thank you too, but he probably thinks you are evil.”

Continue reading →

The Obama Outhouse Float: Not Racist, Just Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments
Racist float? Why not? Well, a) Bill Clinton's not black b) it's not a 4th of July parade, c) this is in Germany and d) it's not Obama.

Racist float? Why not? Well, a) Bill Clinton’s not black b) it’s not a 4th of July parade, c) the parade is in Germany and d) most important of all, it’s not President Obama.

It was almost a year ago that a rodeo clown donned an Obama mask, and the NAACP demanded that the Secret Service investigate him, and the clown lost his job. It is considered acceptable that in the nation’s capital, five people in  big-headed costumes depicting the Mt. Rushmore Presidents (and William Howard Taft) race around a baseball stadium as the crowd laughs at their antics, but any mockery of the current President of the United States will be immediately attacked as “racist.”

Thus an appallingly stupid, tasteless and inappropriate float in a Norfolk, Nebraska Independence Day parade is further straining already damaged race relations in this country, because it depicted a distressed man coming out of an outhouse labelled the  “Obama Presidential Library.” The Norfolk Odd Fellows Lodge, which coordinates the annual parade, is defending the float, which was entered as political satire (it even won an award). Others, however, have condemned it as, you guessed it, racist.  Here it is:

Obama float

It isn’t racist. Although many media reports have described the zombie-like figure exiting the outhouse as a representation of the President, it clearly isn’t. Does President Obama use a walker for support? The float’s designer, Dale Remmich, who does use a walker and dresses like the figure on the float, explained that the figure was meant to be Remmich himself, tinged green out of disgust for, among other things, the Veterans Administration fiasco. As for portraying Obama’s future library as an outhouse, that’s not racial imagery, though it is obviously a statement communicating criticism and disrespect. The same imagery would not have puzzled anyone if it had been used to criticize any other recent President; nobody would have looked at the exact same float except with the label “George W. Bush Presidential Library” on the outhouse and said, “I don’t get it. Bush isn’t black.” That’s because it isn’t the design of the float that makes it racist, just as it wasn’t the use of a mask that made the rodeo clown’s act racist, in the eyes of those making the accusation. What makes it racist is the criticism and the mockery, its target. Criticism and mockery of other Presidents went with the territory. Criticism of the first black President is by definition racist. Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Incompetent Jury…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

clowns

Polled after turning in a not guilty form to the judge in the burglary case of Bobby Lee Pearson, all 12 members of a Fresno, California jury nodded their agreement to the judge’s traditional question, “So say you all?”  Later, however, it was found that the jury had deadlocked 8-4 on the charges. It was a hung jury, and there should have been another trial.

By the the time one of the jury members had come out of his stupor and told the judge that he had voted guilty, it was too late to correct the error because of double jeopardy. “I can’t believe it,” the judge said as he ordered Pearson released. “This has never happened to me in more than 100 jury trials that I have done.”  That’s because he never had a jury as dumb as this one before. It ostensibly understood the requirement that guilty and not-guilty verdicts had to be by a unanimous 12-0 vote, but apparently became confused by the verdict forms, which didn’t include a deadlock option.

The jury system is the simplest distillation of our democratic system, and even that proved too complicated for these bozos.

A depressing note:  Court authorities say the problem was that the jury was substantially made up of college students.

Yes, they really said that.

Meanwhile, to wrap up this travesty of  justice in a classic “Law and Order” surprise ending, Pearson was murdered within hours of his release.

______________________

Source: ABA Journal

Texas Republicans Forfeit All Claims To Respect

/ Jack Marshall / 151 Comments

 

Old-Rotten-PlanksIt would be an Unethical Quote of the Month, if it weren’t also so stupid. As it is, the newly minted endorsement of  conversion therapy for gays in the party platform serves to remove any reason to respect the Texas Republican Party, and like a projectile vomiting episode, contaminates anyone who identifies with the GOP, not just in Texas, but anywhere.

This despicable and ignorant platform states:

“We recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle. No laws or executive orders shall be imposed to limit or restrict access to this type of therapy.”

This was composed by bigots, enacted by fools, and adopted by intellectually lazy and mean-spirited dolts. Continue reading →