Testosterone Fueled Stupidity Gets Bad Rap!

In the past, men could be men, cruel, powerful, obnoxious, bad behaving bullies, and now it’s all gone. Damn those feminists. We men have had enough! Okay, okay, that’s about as much satire as I can manage this morning.

Here’s the deal, Brit Hume longs for the good old days. I don’t. Christie is a bully. That makes him a bad person. It doesn’t matter whether the world is “feminized” or not, he’s still behaving badly.

As for bad male behavior, read the news. It’s all over the place.

If we could export testosterone, the trade deficit would be gone in a minute.

James Pilant

Hume shocks Lauren Ashburn, blames ‘feminized atmosphere’ for making Christie a ‘bully’ | Crooks and Liars

Fox News analyst Brit Hume on Sunday said that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) had only gotten a reputation for being a bully because men could not be \”masculine and muscular\” in the \”feminized atmosphere\” created by the media.

During a panel discussion on the Fox News show Media Buzz, host Howard Kurtz asked if Christie\’s \”bully image\” was hurting him after his administration was accused for closing part of the busiest bridge in the world to hurt his political opponents.

\”I have to say that in this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct and are kind of old-fashioned tough guys run some risks,\” Hume opined.

\”Feminized!\” Fox News contributor Lauren Ashburn gasped.

\”Atmosphere,\” Hume nodded. \”By which I mean that men today have learned the lesson the hard way that if you act like kind of an old-fashioned guy\’s guy, you\’re in constant danger of slipping out and saying something that\’s going to get you in trouble and make you look like a sexist or make you look like you seem thuggish or whatever. That\’s the atmosphere in which we operate.\”

\”This guy is very much an old-fashioned masculine, muscular guy,\” he added. \”And there are political risks associated with that. Maybe it shouldn\’t be, but t

via Hume shocks Lauren Ashburn, blames ‘feminized atmosphere’ for making Christie a ‘bully’ | Crooks and Liars.

Cheap Clothes Cost Lives

I recently bought a large amount of antique clothing all from the early 1980’s. I don’t know who the original owner was. It was an estate sale. But the clothing was made in American and some of the finer pieces came from Italy.

We don’t live in that world anymore. Through international trade agreements originally marketed as making us all much richer, American clothing manufacturers disappeared and our clothing comes from the farthest corners of the earth. In constant dollars, what we wear cost less than it used to.

But there is a cost. Many of these foreign workers are treated little better than slave labor and the risks of their work are unacceptable by our standards.

We can by our buying habits and our willingness to convey our sentiments to manufacturers and stores make this situation better.

James Pilant

Blood on our backs | Al Jazeera America

Labor conditions in Cambodia won’t improve unless consumers in the West demand industrywide, systemic change — and companies commit to meeting those demands.

We could start by accepting that we must pay more for our clothes — a difficult shift for many Americans who make minimum wages themselves. That’s why corporations need to step in, too. As consumers, we should insist that the stores and brands we patronize invest more in labor, both at home and abroad, and that factories increase workers’ wages. Multiple studies show that a happier, healthier, higher-paid workforce translates into less turnover and potentially greater company profits. Finally, we should ensure that our elected leaders hold other governments accountable.

We should also shift the way in which we view the workers who make our clothes. It’s easy to dismiss a person’s humanity when she is so far away. But she has a name, like Phearum or Phak. And she has a life beyond her job. She has a mother who needs medicine, a child who needs food and schooling. She is not just a cog in a sewing machine; she is a human being.

In the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster, many foreign retailers and brands promised to improve conditions in Bangladeshi factories. Several deals — some legally binding, others not — committed to better building safety, more factory inspections and greater worker and manager training. These are all necessary improvements, but they don’t do enough. These plans address the workplace, not the human being.

The human being needs help beyond the factory floor. She needs better and more nutritious food. She needs a safe, clean home and books for her kids. She needs a life free from imminent penury. She needs a living wage, not a minimum wage. Her basic well-being rests on everyone — consumers, retailers, brands and factories. And at the very least, it’s in the company’s interest to have healthier, more productive employees.

via Blood on our backs | Al Jazeera America.

State Rep. David Campbell, Convicted for Duck hit and run

This is my second posting on this subject and it might well be asked, why the writer of a business ethics blog takes such an interest in a duck slaughter? First, I just naturally side with the underdog. After all, a BMW has a enormous advantage in a confrontation with ducks. Second, justice is important to me. I want to see that it is done. I suspect that a lot of people have cruelly and with malice and forethought run over animals and have never suffered any consequences. And third, I want this cautionary tale to be spread as wide as possible. After all there are a lot of ducks and a lot of cars. Maybe we could all be a little kinder in our actions regarding our animal brethren.

James Pilant

State rep. pleads no contest to killing five ducks with his car at Nashua hotel, – NashuaTelegraph.com

State Rep. David Campbell told police he consumed two alcoholic drinks before striking a group of ducks with his car outside the Crowne Plaza Hotel last month, but said he wasn’t intoxicated.Police records released Friday show that Campbell, a Nashua Democrat, killed five birds outside the hotel’s main entrance on Dec. 23 before leaving the scene and calling Nashua Police Commissioner Thomas J. Pappas, a longtime friend, to escort him away from the area.After an investigation that lasted 16 days, police cited Campbell on Thursday for killing waterfowl out of season, but cleared him of any motor vehicle charges.Nashua Police Capt. George McCarthy said police investigated all aspects of the case, including the fact that Campbell had been drinking before the incident, but determined the offseason hunting charge was most appropriate.“Attempts were made to try to determine all elements of the investigation,” McCarthy said. “Sometimes circumstances prevent us from, you know, following through with determining certain things, and it’s my understanding, in reading the investigation, that he wasn’t available at the time to speak with us.”Campbell was cited by Nashua police for killing five migratory game birds, namely the friendly mallard ducks that swim in the pond in front of the hotel. Campbell appeared in court Friday morning to answer the offense, and paid a $695 fine.Campbell offered a public apology for killing the ducks, and said he donated an equal amount of money to New Hampshire Audubon.

via State rep. pleads no contest to killing five ducks with his car at Nashua hotel, – NashuaTelegraph.com.

BMW Duck Massacre!

I have been told that BMW drivers are notorious for their misbehavior. This anecdotal evidence supports that theory.

Frankly, I don’t understand why you would want to run your car through a flock of any bird. It just seems mean and callous.

James Pilant

New Hampshire Politician Apologizes After Mowing Down Ducks With BMW | Crooks and Liars

The incident was brought to light by retired Marine officer James Murphy, a Florida resident who was preparing to check into the hotel Monday evening when Campbell’s car collided with what he described as a pack of about 20 ducks in the road.

Murphy said he had just tossed the ducks some crackers when he spotted Campbell’s dark sedan approaching from a side parking lot near the hotel entrance.

“All of a sudden, this 5 Series BMW comes up, it’s going about 15 miles an hour, and then when he gets to the ducks, it’s not like it even slowed down,” Murphy said. “It just crushed all of the ducks.”

Murphy said he believes as many as six ducks were killed and a handful of others returned to the pond at the Crowne Plaza with apparent injuries. Murphy said he followed the BMW a few dozen feet down the road, took a picture of the license plate and called police.

via New Hampshire Politician Apologizes After Mowing Down Ducks With BMW | Crooks and Liars.

No Qualified Women for Thirty Years?

I applaud Apple for deciding to look for women to sit on their board of directors. However, apparently for a long time, one has been enough. It’s time to change.

James Pilant

No Excuse for Apple’s Binders Full of Women Problem | Kathleen Reardon

Thanks to Apple shareholders, the company\’s board nominating committee will now be \”actively seeking out highly qualified women.\” Which raises the question: What has the committee been doing for more than three decades? Apparently the same thing they\’ve been doing about minorities, since the woman currently on the board is also its only member of a minority group.

Worse still, Apple finds it necessary to specify that such women must be \”highly qualified.\” The implication is that they\’re hard to find or that the good ones are all taken. I could have a list, with bios, in 20 minutes. Who couldn\’t?

This is more than a little reminiscent of Mitt Romney\’s \”binders full of women\” comment that revealed how out-of-touch he was with the issue of women\’s equality at work.

News flash for Apple: A woman as far back as 1993 to 1996 was NASA\’s Chief Scientist. You might want to check her math and management skills. See if she\’d be considered \”highly qualified.\” Then there\’s NASA\’s 2013 astronaut class, which is 50 percent women.

via No Excuse for Apple’s Binders Full of Women Problem | Kathleen Reardon.

An Old Idea for a New Age

 All over America, our citizens are having a difficult time finding work. But young people are particularly hard hit. In the past when we have had serious economic downturns, the government provided emergency employment so that people could get by until the economy recovered. We should have been doing that since this crisis started. But since unemployment is so high, we can still do things to help people deal with this crisis. Let’s employee young people to make a America better place. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

James Pilant

A Civilian Conservation Corps for the Modern Age | John Bridgeland

More than 80 years ago, FDR saw power in marrying two threatened resources — millions of unemployed young men during the Great Depression with the public lands beset by deforestation and soil erosion. His CCC put more than three million young men into productive service over a decade with impressive results: Three billion trees planted, 97,999 miles of fire roads built, 800 parks constructed and proper drainage for more than 84 million acres of agricultural land (almost the equivalent acreage of our entire National Park System). But FDR knew that the transformation ran deeper — not only in helping support young men and their families, but \”the moral and spiritual value of such work.\”

…

Given the needs today, with high youth unemployment, 6.7 million young people disconnected from school and work, two million veterans returning from war, and public lands and waterways in desperate need of our attention, our country has the opportunity to marry vulnerable resources once again. The 21st Century Conservation Service Corps points the way.

via A Civilian Conservation Corps for the Modern Age | John Bridgeland.

For the Majority of Americans Poverty is One Pink Slip Away.

Everyday the danger lurks. Could something happen to my job? What will I do? How will I pay my bills? Homeless?

Last year a third of Americans fell into poverty at least some of the time.

If that doesn’t scare you or disgust you, I don’t understand. That kind of insecurity is terrible to live with, and when it actually happens, when someone falls out of the middle class and lands on a street grate, that life is changed forever.

James Pilant

Why the Republicans’ Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy — Setting Working Class Against the Poor — Is Backfiring | Robert Reich

Poverty is now a condition that almost anyone can fall into. In the first two years of this recovery, according to new report from Census Bureau, about one in three Americans dropped into poverty for at least two to six months.

Three decades of flattening wages and declining economic security have taken a broader toll. Nearly 55 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 have experienced at least a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line). Half of all American children have at some point during their childhoods relied on food stamps.

Fifty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson declared a \”war on poverty,\” most of the nation\’s chronically poor had little or no connection to the labor force, while most working-class Americans had full-time jobs.

This distinction has broken down as well. Now a significant percentage of the poor are working but not earning enough to get themselves and their families out of poverty. And a growing portion of the middle class finds themselves in the same place — often in part-time or temporary positions, or in contract work.

Economic insecurity is endemic. Working-class whites who used to be cushioned against the vagaries of the market are now fully exposed to them. …

via Why the Republicans’ Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy — Setting Working Class Against the Poor — Is Backfiring | Robert Reich.

Aitizaz Hasan, Hero

“My son made his mother cry, but saved hundreds of mothers from crying for their children,”

Just Read.

James Pilant

Pakistani boy who died trying to stop suicide bomber is hailed as hero | World news | theguardian.com

A 15-year-old who died while tried to defend his school in Pakistan\’s troubled north-west from a suicide bomber has been hailed as a hero for saving the lives of many of his classmates. Aitizaz Hasan tackled the bomber as he stood outside as a punishment for being late to school in Hangu, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on Monday.His two companions fled the scene after spotting the bomb being carried by the man, who was trying to gain access to the school, but Aitizaz grabbed the bomber.Unable to stop him from detonating his bomb, Aitizaz later died of his wounds in hospital.Hangu has a large community of Shias, an Islamic sect which many militant groups regard as heretics who should convert to the majority Sunni faith or be killed.Aitizaz\’s actions are thought to have saved the lives of many of the 2,000 students who were believed to be in the building at the time.\”My son made his mother cry, but saved hundreds of mothers from crying for their children,\” his father, Mujahid Ali, told the Express Tribune newspaper.\”There are a handful of people in the world who are martyrs; I am now one of those proud fathers whose son is among them.\”

via Pakistani boy who died trying to stop suicide bomber is hailed as hero | World news | theguardian.com.

The Ethics Sage Discusses Sport Ethics

My friend, Steven Mintz, the Ethics Sage, has an opinion piece on sport ethics. I have here a brief excerpt. As always, please go to his site and read the whole thing. An excerpt does not do it justice, and you would be wise to bookmark his site and follow his posts.

James Pilant

Sport Ethics – Ethics Sage

The abiding values of sport include fairness, integrity, responsibility, and respect. Fairness requires that each player and each team should have an equal chance to play up to their abilities. The taking of steroids by well-known baseball players such as Ryan Braun violates the fairness doctrine because it gave him a competitive advantage over those who played by the rules, which ban certain substances.

Integrity is related to fairness and the other values because it addresses the whole of the person. Does each individual playing the sport truly believe in and practice the core values of sport? That is the essence of integrity or principled behavior in sport. In football, faking an injury at the end of a game to stop the clock lacks integrity and the offending team may lose time off the clock. In basketball some would say ‘flopping’ to draw a foul lacks integrity.

Respect deals with how athletes and coaches relate to athletes, teammates, opponents, coaches, and officials. Rutgers University Mike Rice was fired on April 3, 2013, after the coach was caught on video hitting, kicking and taunting players with anti-gay slurs at practice.

Responsibility entails accepting the consequences of one’s actions on the field including one’s emotions. On a Thanksgiving game last year, Pittsburgh Steelers coach

via Sport Ethics – Ethics Sage.

Should Professional Women Ever Get Married?

While this study has been criticized, I believe it. Women face hurdles in the academic world that men do not, or more correctly and broadly, women face hurdles that men don’t. You would think that in the supposedly more liberal world of colleges and universities there would be more income equality.

It is important that the issues is actively being discussed. At least, we are not pretending that things are better or by far, worse, not even seeing a problem. Most successful sexism relies on a practiced acceptance of the status quo. Acknowledging a problem, recognizing it, is the first step in action.

The first question of our analysis: Do we want professional women to get married? The current situation mitigates against this but some would see this as an action of the free market, and suggest that delaying or avoiding marriage is a natural phenomenon. Since, every last detail of the problem is a human creation, I find free market naturalism, treating humanity like a slightly more sophisticated herd of wildebeests, little more than ridiculous. What humans have created, humans can change. I think that the question is flawed. A better question: Do we want professional women to have children?

Perhaps marriage itself is a social institution that needs re-examination. I think that highly educated women are likely to make better than average parents. Certainly this is the case with the academic women I know. If we value the child rearing quality of women, then we as a society should not penalize women for having children.

We can do this through subsidized and regulated, professional day care. We can do this through paid leave. We can do this by giving up stigmatizing single mothers and divorced women. The practice of slut shaming has outlived its purpose, keeping women in their place and regulating their sexuality. We can do better.

Women in this generation will not escape the social pressures like diminished professional lives that go with our current customs but a new world is possible where we achieve parity. I won’t see it. Maybe the current generation won’t see it, and maybe the one after that. But we can lay the foundation here and now. We are not helpless. We have to recognize our power and use it.

Hope and action are not contradictory. The time for change is now.

James Pilant

Female economists penalized for getting married, married men rewarded.

According to a study that was presented earlier this month at the American Economic Association, women (who make up about a third of Ph.D students in economics) who got married in the first five years after they received their Ph.D.s had a 23 percent salary growth penalty—in other words, their salaries grew much more slowly— compared with their unmarried female counterparts. Men who got married in the half decade after they got their doctorates? They received a 25 percent salary growth bump—their salaries grew by a larger margin—compared to other men. Wendy Stock, a co-author of the study and a professor of economics at Montana State University, said in an email that among female economists, the penalty for having children was not statistically significant. “In addition, our estimates didn’t indicate that the impact of having a child was any different for males than for females,” Stock wrote. (If Ph.D. candidates have children while still in graduate school, they take longer to complete their studies, regardless of gender).

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via Female economists penalized for getting married, married men rewarded..