stupidity

KABOOM! Bloomberg: “Well, I Hear These Guys Do A Good Job, So Let’s Give The Contract To Them!”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

head_explodes

From an exclusive in the New York Daily News:

“In one of its final acts, the Bloomberg administration pushed through a costly contract to modernize the city’s 311 call system — hiring the same company fired by the feds for the botched rollout of the Obamacare website. The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, known as DoITT, awarded the contract to the Montreal-based company CGI on Dec. 31, hours before Bill de Blasio was sworn in as mayor.”

This isn’t even an incompetent U.S. company. It’s based in Montreal. Continue reading →

And The Winner Of The Curmie Is….

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

blue ribbon

….Just whom I thought it should be…and a previous winner on Ethics Alarms.

Writes Rick Jones, announcing that his annual poll to pick the worst example of misconduct by education professionals that highlights the deep, deep problems in the field wisely selected Principal Greer Phillips of PS 79 (the Horan School) in East Harlem, who, you may recall, decided to terrify special needs students and her staff by running a surprise “a school massacre is happening right here at our school! ARGHHH!” drill shortly after the Newtown shooting…

“…it’s difficult to argue with the collective wisdom of Curmiphiles. Principal Phillips managed to do something not merely colossally stupid, but arrogant, cruel, smug, unethical, insensitive, reckless, boorish, and—oh, yeah—illegal, as well. Plus, in the kneejerk world of post-Newtown, it also succeeded in being an emblem of everything that makes me crazy about the world of public education and self-righteous liberal do-gooding.I may not have had preference among the finalists at the beginning of the voting, but you have convinced me that the right person won. I’ll send the Curmie along to her, but perhaps first I should call her up and tell her that there’s a serial killer waiting for her in her apartment and that he’s amusing himself by setting her cat on fire. She won’t really appreciate the Curmie until she gets out of therapy, anyway, right?”

Read his whole post here, and I urge you, again, to follow Rick’s blog.

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Virginia Delegate Tom Garrett (R-Lynchburg)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

It just doesn’t get much dumber than this, friends.

Why are Republicans still picking on Bill Clinton?

Why are Republicans still picking on Bill Clinton?

Delegate Garrett has proposed a bill that would make oral or anal sex with a minor a felony in Virginia. The state’s laws currently make regular, run of the mill sex between an adult and a 15-to-17-year-old a misdemeanor only, and designate sex between 15-to-17-year-olds as no crime at all. So, Professor Eugene Volokh points out,  “if two 17-year-olds are choosing whether to have oral sex or genital sex, the law would push them towards the form of sex that is more likely to transmit disease, and more likely to cause unwanted pregnancy.” The law also covers prostitution, making oral sex with a prostitute a felony for both sides, while genital sex is  only a misdemeanor.

Just as children shouldn’t be allowed to play with sharp objects, weapons and matches, individuals as devoid of common sense and basic reasoning skills as Tom Garrett should never, ever be allowed to participate in law-making. OR play with sharp objects, weapons and matches.

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Pointer and Source: Volokh Conspiracy.

 

Curmie’s Back With Arrows Flying! But What Do His Targets Teach Us?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

archery_target

Rick Jones, known to his web fans as Curmie (short for Curmudgeon), has had a busy year in his day job as a tender of young college-age minds, and his excellent blog was not as active as years past. Just in time for his annual awards for the worst transgressions in the field of education, however, he has returned with a vengeance, exploring at length and with his usual superb ethical instincts several incidents I have not had time to tackle here. Among them…

…and more, including his take, nicely complimenting mine, on Robert Reich’s complaints about how rich people and others choose their charities.

Rick, in one of his posts, makes the oft-heard point that the many awful incidents of miserable judgement and outright misconduct, if not criminal conduct, on the part of teachers and administrators should not be projected on the education profession as a whole, since these are relatively rare. I hear him, but I am not convinced. Continue reading →

Maryland’s Ethics Dunce State Senator, Len Bias, And Statue Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
The late Len Bias. No hero he.

The late Len Bias. No hero he.

Maryland State Sen. Victor R. Ramirez (D-Prince George’s County) has introduced a bill to designate state funds to erect a statue of Len Bias, a former University of Maryland basketball star, at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Md. Bias, a graduate of the school, died in 1986 of cocaine intoxication less than two days after he was drafted s by the NBA’s Boston Celtics, shocking the area and the nation. Ramirez’s efforts, as well as a recent decision to name another local high school after President Obama, is causing the Prince George’s County Education Board to revise and formalize its policy for such honors as statues and building names. Will an African-American kid who cut off his promising life as it was just beginning with a self-administered drug overdose be deemed worthy of immortalization, to serve as inspiration for future generations of black youth? Stay tuned.

The Stupid is strong in this one...

“Len Bias was a student athlete in Prince George’s,” Sen. Ramirez argues. “He moved the University of Maryland basketball program to new heights. He and Michael Jordan were the two best college players at that time, until he tragically died. . . . We can learn something from everything. The nation learned a lot from this unfortunate incident.” Well, if learning “a lot” from someone’s demise is the criteria for honoring them with a heroic statue, that opens up all kinds of possibilities. Good thinking, Senator! A statue of Richard Nixon reminds us that power corrupts, certainly a valuable lesson for all. A statue of Benedict Arnold teaches us the dangers of pride, and how a sense of entitlement can lead to tragic choices. And what could be more illuminating than a statue of Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter? Maybe even one showing him mowing down those kids—such a powerful statement about gun abuse, and the failures of the mental health system! In fact, what would really be appropriate is naming a public school after him.

By the end of his life, Len Bias was no hero or role model, and he deserves no honor for knowingly breaking drug laws and getting himself killed while disappointing legions of fans and supporters. Erecting a statue to Bias would be just one more step in society’s capitulation to the seductive, and destructive, appeal of the drug culture, and the elimination of the vitally important societal stigma attached to recreational drug use. What Bias did was willful, ignorant, irresponsible and illegal, and even if that last is removed for his young admirers, the first three remain.

The County Board of Education is now going to debate the appropriateness of making a hero out of a  drug abuser and a 21 year old cocaine casualty. If they have to discuss it to answer that question, they all need to be replaced, not that the pathetic performance of their schools isn’t reason enough for that. Len Bias’s death wasn’t “a tragic incident.” A car crash is a tragic incident. Bias died because, like so many young people in Prince George’s County and elsewhere, he deliberately engaged in dangerous conduct that he knew was forbidden, and learned, the hard way, why.

Placing a triumphal statue in front of a high school is no way to discourage deadly attitudes like the one that got Bias killed…unless the design of the proposed statue shows the young man at the exact moment his heart seized and his eyes rolled back in his head.

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Facts and Graphic: Washington Post

Source: The Nation

Ethics Alarms Presents …The Kaboom! The First Recipient: Fun Mom Judy Viger

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

kaboom

With this post, I am introducing the Kaboom!, a special category reserved for cases that should require no ethics commentary from me, since the ethical breach is beyond obvious, but where the individual’s ethics alarms have proven so spectacularly useless that attention must be paid.

The name of the award derives from the sound my head made as I read the story, because I don’t know how to spell the sound my brains made when they hit hit the ceiling and then slowly fell to the floor.

The first Kaboom! goes to the most deserving Judy Viger, 33, of Gansevoort, New York. Viger is taking a plea deal after being charged with five counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Just for fun, let me tell this story in stages, and let me know when you hear the Kaboom!

1.Police arrested Viger for after she arranged to have two strippers perform at her son’s 16th birthday party in November.

2. Some of the party-goers were 14.

3. The two women performed lap dances for the male teenaged guests, and the birthday boy, of course.

4. Viger did nothing to stop it.

5. One teenaged boy sustained a bitten nipple.

6. Viger then posted pictures of the proceedings on Facebook.

How did you do?

My head went off at #1.

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Pointer: ABA Journal

Facts: Post Star

Colorado’s Astounding Pro-Obamacare Ads: What Kind Of Values Are We Nourishing In This Country?

/ Jack Marshall / 77 Comments

brosurance

When I saw the ad above, my first assumptions were 1) This is a spoof, or 2) Some insane Republican group who didn’t pay attention to what happened in the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke tiff made it as an attack on Obamacare.

No such luck. It’s real. I would have made the website (DoYouGotInsurance.com) that features this and many other such ads the Unethical Website of the Month (it’s also the ungrammatical website of the month), but it has been down for the last 12 hours or so, and hopefully will never get up again, except in Hell. And there is a lot more alarming about these ads than the website they come from.

For example, the organizations who paid to have the ads developed—ProgressNow Colorado and Colorado Consumer Health—plus the Colorado progressives, Democrats and brain-injured who run them, and the millions of entitled, ethically clueless Americans who perceive nothing wrong with the messages they convey all perfectly illustrate the unethical reasoning and motives driving many of the architects and defenders of the Affordable Care Act. Here…let me show you some more, assuming you have head-explosion insurance: Continue reading →

Hallmark’s Christmas Carol Ethics Misadventure

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

holiday-sweater-keepsake-ornamentTo consider this ridiculous controversy, let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start):

Here are the lyrics of the 19th Century Christmas carol “Deck the Halls,” one of the best known and most sung of the traditional carols these days because it doesn’t mention God, angels, Jesus or anything overtly religious:

Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Tis the season to be jolly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Don we now our gay apparel,
Fa la la, la la la, la la la.
Troll the ancient Yule tide carol,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

(There are four more verses, but these are the ones most of us know.)

You would think that nobody could get in trouble using this particular holiday song, but Kansas City-based Hallmark was equal to the challenge. It decided to change the words for one of its new holiday ornaments, designed by “Keepsake Artist,” Matt Johnson. He  designed an ornament shaped like a typically gaudy Christmas sweater  sporting the altered lyric “Don we now our Fun apparel.” The word “gay” was removed.

Hallmark, much to its surprise, was flooded with complaints, and not just on the basis of one perceived offense, but several, and contradictory ones at that:

1. How dare they mess with the lyrics of a traditional and well-loved carol?

2. This was an anti-gay decision, literally and figuratively.

3. This was political correctness, to avoid criticism from gays.

Confronted with unseasonal hate mail and threats of a boycott, Hallmark did what many corporations do in such crises. It lied. Here was its initial statement, before Hallmark surrendered and apologized with one of those ‘we didn’t mean to offend anyone’ things : Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Storey County,Nevada Assemblyman Jim Wheeler (R)

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
Note to Assemblyman Wheeler: you were not elected "genie." Or "mindless idiot." Or...never mind, you wouldn't understand anyway.

Note to Assemblyman Wheeler: you were not elected “genie.” Or “mindless idiot.” Or…never mind, you wouldn’t understand anyway.

The word “idiot” is widely and correctly regarded as uncivil on the web, but sometimes its is simply descriptive, as in the sentence  “Assemblyman Jim Wheeler is an idiot.”

Before a local Republican gathering, Wheeler told of an email inquiry he had received asking if he would vote to reestablish  slavery if his constituents supported it. He said he replied in the affirmative.

“Thank you, Assemblyman! We’ll have your resignation now, thanks!  Please commence your new career as a bait shop proprietor.”

Naturally, after Republicans, Democrats, the governor and the media unanimously condemned his statement, Wheeler protested that his comment had been “taken out of context,” and he was only making the point that he was elected to represent his constituents. …thus again making the point that he still doesn’t comprehend representative government. Continue reading →

When Worlds Collide: Maryland’s Attorney General Doug Gansler Flunks His Ethics Test

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler (D) is running to be his party’s nominee for Governor, which, since Maryland is one of the Bluest of states, means that success equals the statehouse, or should. But the intense spotlight that such a quest creates can be hot and unflattering, and Gansler’s character and integrity is now being called into question…especially after this photo from last summer surfaced on Instagram, showing Maryland’s top law enforcement official in the middle of a wild teen beach party at a beach house by the Delaware shore. He’s the guy in the white shirt and the cell phone:

Gensler Party

There you have it: the exact moment when Attorney General Doug Gansler, Candidate for Governor Gansler and Father of a Teenage Son Who Graduated From High School And Wants To Party With His Friends Like In “Animal House” Gansler officially collided. Many, especially many Democrats, especially many Bill Clinton fans, and definitely aspiring toyboy lawyer Brian Zulberti, would argue that only one of them is really there: Father Doug. The others, being absent, are immune from criticism. This position is popular, convenient, lazy, ethically corrosive and wrong. There is only one Doug Gansler, yes, but he is bound by three standards of conduct. When you are bound by three standards of conduct, you have to abide by the highest one.

Again, this situation focuses our attention on integrity, a core aspect of character, and crucial to ethics. Does an individual have genuine principles that he oe she lives by, or a constantly shifting set of values that are assumed and then discarded according to situation, convenient, strategy and whim? When an ethical problem arises, do others know how the individual will respond? Are his words consistent with his actions? Trust means that others can rely on an individual’s conduct, and you can’t rely on the conduct of someone whose values and priorities with the wind, locale, attention and personal desires.

Then there is the issue of judgment. Judgement is like intelligence and common sense: an individual either has it, or he doesn’t. And such traits as responsibility, accountability, honesty, prudence, dignity, loyalty  and courage come into play. I know those who embrace the private individual/professional dichotomy are stuck with the argument that the absence of  one or more of these in a private setting has no predictive value regarding public or professional conduct, but it is a hopelessly untenable position, pure denial, and ethics poison. Continue reading →