This Sunday, Hollywood awards its highest honor, the Oscar, to top films and filmmakers of 2012. Zero Dark Thirty – a film depicting the hunt for Osama bin Laden – up for Best Picture, has become a political football due to what many have called gross inaccuracies. Taking a break from dealing with the budget, sequester, the debt and debt ceiling, Senators Dianne...

Well… that was quick. No sooner had I written about the importance of giving college linebacker Manti Te’o a break regarding what he said or knew about his “Internet girlfriend” hoax, then boom, in less than a week, the Notre Dame star admits to lying to talk show host Katie Couric. I had already received several e-mails from John, good friend...

The intersection of two stories this week caused me to examine the media’s appetite to pander under the guise of “coming clean.” After weeks of rumor and speculation, former seven-time Tour de France winning cyclist Lance Armstrong admitted to Oprah Winfrey that he used performance-enhancing drugs to achieve his victories. In listening to Armstrong’s confessional, I wasn’t so much interested in...

Earl J. Hickey is a shiftless, ne’er-do-well, who, after a near-fatal accident, sees the burning bush of Karma and wants to lead a better life, or as one NHTI student so eloquently summarizes: “If you give crap, you will get crap in return.” In the part comedy-part philosophy series, My Name is Earl, Hickey sets out to reform his ways by...

This story’s been on my desk since last month (Washington Post, Oct. 26). My attention comes, not so much from Armstrong’s clear violation of U.S. doping rules regarding competitive cycling, but from an astonishingly implausible defense of Armstrong’s actions by author Brad Allenby. Allenby, a Lincoln professor of ethics (remember this part) and engineering at Arizona State University, writes, “Whether...

Some students today are getting so good at rationalizing it’s scary. “You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90.” “When it came to French class, where the teacher had literally taught me nothing all year, and during the final the students around me were openly discussing the answers,...

To begin with, I searched the internet with the question. The first link that showed up… no joke: “Honesty Is Still The Best Policy Free Essays 1-20 www.OpPapers.com/…/honesty-is-still-the-best-policy-page1.html 20+ items – Free Essays on Honesty Is Still The Best Policy for students.” Notice the lack of any pretense: “for students” While there are plenty of polls (and rationalizations) that examine the question,...

A Man for All Seasons was an Academy Award winning film about a principled man standing up against the king of England.A Man for All Semesters – a review of a book which has won no awards, but received plenty of attention – is about an unprincipled hack who writes papers for students too lazy, ignorant or both for money then brags...

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts, and evidence.” – John Adams I wonder how Adams would have responded to a local politician I recently spoke with who told me bluntly, “people don’t care about facts.” This same political leader went on...

After having spoken with newly installed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, radical Islamists have announced, in the Egyptian magazine Rose el-Youssef, that the government will soon begin the process of demolishing the Great Pyramids. “The magazine quoted a prominent Bahraini sheik, Abdellatif al-Mahmoud,” The New York Times writes, “as demanding in a Twitter posting on June 24 that Mr. Morsi ‘accomplish what...