What is there left to say about this? According to the Tampa Bay Times, the sibling who placed the obituary (guess which one) claimed that all he was doing was memorializing his mother’s own opinion regarding her children. Whether this is true or not, his conduct in composing such a petty and inappropriate obituary can’t be defended. Continue reading
You cannot fight for the truth with lies. Why is this so hard to learn?
This is a big ethics story, with general ethics lessons and serious public policy repercussions in an area already muddled with ethical misconduct on all sides. I’m going to restrict Ethics Alarms to the purely ethical analysis. and, at the end, point out some of the excellent articles that the incident has inspired regarding the policy implications of it all.
Last week, leaked documents prepared for a board meeting of the libertarian think tank, the Heartland Institute, were published on various blogs and websites. The Institute is a major player in the effort to disprove, debunk or discredit scientific studies showing man-made climate change, and block the adoption of anti-climate change policies while undermining public support for them. One of the most provocative documents was a “Climate Strategy” memorandum laying out Heartland’s secret efforts in sinister terms. The source of the documents, and the one who made them available to global-warming promoting bloggers, was a mysterious individual calling himself “Heartland Insider.”
Now the source has revealed himself, and it is a prominent climatologist on the front lines of the climate change battle, scientist Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute. Gleick explained what occurred in a column at the Huffington Post: Continue reading
Just what I want to see on my daughter's Girl Scout troop leader's husband's website! And you?
The Girl Scouts have been going through a strange period lately. There was the controversy over a transgender troop member, a boy who identified as a girl. Then it was revealed that the organization’s literature was promoting Media Matters as a means of civic education. This, however, takes the cake.
Stacy Hintz, a 28-year-old mother from West Bend, Wisconsin,was removed from her volunteer position as a Girl Scout troop leader because of her husband’s website. The site is called Wisconsin Sickness, is slick, professional, unique, and 100% batty. Here is its introduction:
“Whatever the reason, there is a deep and passionate psychosis that runs through the unstable synapses of those of us from Wisconsin, land of serial killers and cannibals. And we’re proud of it. Wisconsin Sickness, a Mental Shed project, is all about bringing the independent, underground Wisconsin scene together and spreading the sickness like a virus.”
And really, that’s nothing: wait until you see the site, which, among other things, celebrates Ed Gein, the serial killer/cannibal/necrophiliac whose horrific crimes and, uh, interior decorating style inspired “Psycho,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and dozens of lesser horror films. Continue reading
Robert Stack as Eliot Ness with the rest of TV's "The Untouchables." Now THOSE guys were professional. You'd never see THEM text messaging jokes to Al Capone...
The Washington Post ran a story Tuesday describing how the defendants in an elaborate FBI sting operation escaped conviction as a consequence of the revelation of racy text messages between the agents and their undercover informant. Agents and their key informant bantered “about sex, booty calls, prostitutes, cigars, the Village People, the informant’s wives and an agent’s girlfriend.” When the arrests were first announced by the Justice Department, the operation was regarded as a model law enforcement success. But federal prosecutors failed to win a single conviction, in large part because defense lawyers used the text messages to raise juror doubts about the credibility and professionalism of FBI agents. Now the Justice Department says that in light of the first two trials, the government is evaluating “whether to continue to go forward” with the remaining prosecutions of 16 defendants, seven of whom had their cases end in hung juries.
During the most recent trial of six men and women on charges of paying bribes to win business with a foreign government, the defense attorney used the FBI’s texts both to attack the character of the informant and to suggest that the lead agent was an untrustworthy, bigoted, anti-gay misogynist. The FBI believes this was unfair, and an example of a lawyer’s trick defeating justice. Informants, almost without exception, are sleazy characters, and managing them takes skill and guile. The agents felt it was essential to build trust, which meant working to develop a collegial relationship, at least in the informant’s mind. The text banter, they say, was designed to ensure the loyalty of a low-life, which required the agents to sometimes act like low-lifes themselves. Thus they texted messages back and forth that included bawdy jokes, innuendos about sex, anti-gay stereotypes and more, all in a buddy-buddy tone that the jury found troubling. “The texts were one of many things that point to an absolutely amateurish operation,” the jury foreman told the Post. Continue reading
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
Forget those psychics in the pool, Tom! All you need to identify pre-criminals is to check Newt Gingrich's donor list!
All right, maybe that’s a little extreme. Still, in America today we have a putative Presidential candidate who is virtually carrying a billboard stating, “I am dishonest! I am a narcissist! I am angry, mean and vindictive! I am incapable of shame, and I have the self-control and judgment of a mad scientist from an old Vincent Price movie!“, and yet people still call up talk shows and say, “Why isn’t everyone backing Newt?”
Why? WHY? Well, how about this, from CNN:
“As recently as last week, Newt Gingrich’s communications director has been criticized by editors on Wikipedia for dozens of edits he has made and requested in defense of his candidate. While some of the changes were minor, Joe DeSantis has removed or asked to remove factual references to Gingrich’s three marriages as well as mentions of ethics charges brought against him while he served as speaker of the House. These efforts continued as recently as Monday.”
That’s right: Newt Gingrich has his staff trying to re-write the more distasteful episodes in his history—all the better to fool you with. This is the candidate remember, who now says he is the one running on “principles.” What principle would Stalin-style censorship come under, Newt?
Oh, never mind—we know the answer. Win at any cost. The ends justify the means.
Back to the title: perhaps they aren’t slam-dunk future criminals, but at this point, I really do believe that individuals continuing to support Newt Gingrich after he began the campaign with a certifiable character deficit and has managed to show with every passing week that it was even worse than his worst critics could have imagined really do create a prima facie case that they are unethical by nature. There just is no other plausible explanation.
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
Twenty-eight-year-old Xuedan “Diana” Wang agreed to be an unpaid intern at Harper’s Bazaar magazine, in order to build her resume and gain experience in a tough job market. She worked up to 55 hours per week, and presumably got what she bargained for in exchange for her labor. Now, however, she is seeking full compensation for her time, arguing that the Hearst Corp, which owns Harper’s Bazaar, violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act by letting her work for nothing. Her lawyers are also seeking class action status for her suit, which could eventually include hundreds of interns.
A high-profile class action suit on this issue is welcome, because for-profit companies using unpaid interns is an almost always unethical practice that is so easily and frequently abused that it needs to be banned. I wrote about this in 2010, when the Huffington Post’s management had the gall to auction off unpaid intern positions for up to $9,000–making interns pay them to be allowed to work for nothing. About the considerably less offensive practice of just having unpaid interns rather than making them pay for the privilege, I wrote… Continue reading
The new memoir by Mimi Alford, the former White House intern whom President Kennedy made his sex toy (though not his only one), hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who didn’t accept the fabricated, idealized version of JFK sold to the public by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Chris Matthews. Still, her account of Kennedy’s revolting conduct is infuriating, because it continues his corruption of American ethics and leadership standards, the real legacy of his presidency.
Kennedy was a thoroughly fraudulent human being, a cynical and arrogant leader who used soaring prose about freedom, aspiration and the human spirit while masquerading as a devoted father and husband, betraying his wife, abusing his power for selfish personal gratification, and in the process, putting his country at risk during the height of the Cold War. Only moral luck, combined with the failure of a complicit media to tell the public what they really had a right to know—that their President was a sexist, reckless, ruthless, SOB—allowed Kennedy to escape with his myth intact long enough to be regarded as a heroic figure. Now, as the truth relentlessly emerges, the product of his devoted image-makers collides with the ugliness of JFK’s behavior, creating cognitive dissonance of the most destructive sort. After all, if the great John F. Kennedy abused drugs in the White House, used his office and power to lure employees into illicit sexual relationships, degraded and pimped-out women devoted to him, and did all of this with the full knowledge that it would bring down his administration and his party if anyone ever revealed his secrets, then this must mean that character doesn’t matter in our leaders, that we should tolerate a wide range of misconduct, and that the abuse of the power of the President is just a traditional perk. Continue reading
This is Scylla. Charybdis is in the teachers lounge.
Responding to one of the recent posts here about the deteriorating relationships between students, teachers and administrator, teacher Brook Styler alerted us to his own crisis, a situation right out of “The Children’s Hour” in which vengeful female students, aided and abetted by parents, circulated rumors that lost him his job.
Styler has launched a website, Teacher Hunt, to collect the experiences of teachers, who, like him, have been victimized by false accusations from students. I plan on visiting it often. But the site appears at a time in which teachers using their students for sexual gratification is either on the rise, or is being uncovered with remarkable efficiency. Every day, one or more cases of teachers preying on students is in the news. Yesterday, it was Rachel L. Farrell, 25, a Bangor, Maine high school teacher charged with having sex with a 17-year-old student on “numerous occasions” while she was supposed to be tutoring him in English. Authorities believe she had sexual relations with as many as three other students. Today, it was the still unfolding horror of Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in the Los Angeles community of Florence-Firestone, who was charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts on children after over 400 photos were discovered by a CVS clerk, showing pornographic conduct involving his students (age 7-10) over a five year period. Berndt, now being held on $23 million bail, regularly told his students that they were going to play a “tasting game,” in which children were blindfolded and, in some cases, gagged with tape, authorities say. They were then fed the teacher’s semen, administered to them on a blue plastic spoon and, according to one alleged victim’s father, on cookies.
I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings, can you? Continue reading
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