Now where there is an outright civil war it's different. It's clear the people want somebody else in the ruling position and that they will fight to get there. And that they have some sort of plan for when they do that. Of course it's not a guarantee, but the chances of something good coming out of that is much higher.
Who are these rebels and what reason do you have to think that they'll be any better than Ghadaffi?
FTFA: "The UN Security Council has passed a resolution authorising "all necessary measures" to protect civilians in Libya from pro-Gaddafi forces."
I heard a lecture by a military ethicist who said that according to U.S. military studies, about half the fatalities in any large military action are innocent civilians, and that's a reasonable standard for collateral damage.
What we will be doing (ostensibly purely as a side effect, although almost certainly by intent) is clearing the path for the rebels to do what they will. Which will almost certainly be the creation of a democracy (however flawed of one).
I've been reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal carefully to try to figure out who the rebels are, and I can't find it.
Who are these rebels, and why does anybody think they'll create a democracy, or anything other than a dictatorship just as brutal as Ghaddafi's, if not more brutal?
the last time I checked, the Cold War actually went pretty well for the Western democracies.
I don't know about that. A lot of people got blacklisted. Linus Pauling lost his passport and couldn't travel outside the U.S. The editors of the Daily Worker got sent to jail for expressing their First Amendment rights. A lot of teachers got fired. A lot more people got intimidated into not expressing their ideas. They moved the political center of gravity farther to the right, where it still is today.
I read his engineering notebooks and built circuits out of them. I will be forever grateful to him for that. It was the most fun I ever had in science, and I learned a lot of useful stuff.
It blew me away when I found out that a guy that smart and cool was a creationist. But there are a lot of engineers who believe in Bible-belt creationism.
If Mims were proposed to teach an engineering course, there's no doubt that he's qualified. If he were to teach a biology course, maybe not. If he were to teach a general science course, I don't know.
But that's a decision for the department to make, not the Texas legislature.
This doesn't prevent us from laughing at creationists.
Sounding Board Biomedical Research and Health AdvancesNEJM | February 9, 2011 | Topics: Other Health Issues Hamilton Moses, III, M.D., and Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D.
In 1945, the President’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, wrote in Science, the Endless Frontier 1 that basic scientific research was “the pacemaker of technological progress” and that “new products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.” He recommended the creation of what would become the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was created in 1948, and the National Science Foundation, created in 1950.
The biomedical-research enterprise in the United States soon became the envy of other nations, as well as the primary source of the world’s new drugs and medical devices. Since 1945, biomedical research has been viewed as the essential contributor to improving the health of individuals and populations, in both the developed and developing world.
Financing of research was ensured by the successes in the early 1950s of polio vaccination, antibiotics, and antipsychotic agents. Equally dramatic advances in surgery and medical devices, such as cardiopulmonary bypass, dialysis, and organ transplantation, followed in the 1960s. In the 1990s, the conversion of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and some cancers from uniformly fatal diseases to chronic conditions created an expectation that similar advances would occur for other devastating diseases.
But, once upon a time, people trusted the companies they worked for - companies very often took great care of their employees - now, we have to look out for ourselves.
What time was that exactly? Was that at the time when companies used child labor? Was that at the time when no one worried about worker safety and many jobs had appalling mortality rates? You have a fantasy view of the past.
That was the policy of Eastman Kodak, IBM, and most other major U.S. corporations. It was also the policy of a lot of smaller companies, like the old German printing companies. That was the policies of the best companies in this country, for most of the last century.
It was a social contract between employers and workers -- an ethical obligation that Randy Cohen never heard of -- that went back thousands of years. In most wealthy developed countries, it's the law.
Unfortunately, most of those American companies have abandoned those policies, with nothing to replace it.
One of my pet peeves since Randy Cohen started the column is that he's calling himself an ethicist when he really isn't. It's like calling yourself a doctor or lawyer when you're not, and giving people medical or legal advice that gets them into trouble.
It's part of the old newspaper mindset, "A good reporter can cover X even if he doesn't know anything about it, he'll just pick it up when he goes along," when X is a country where he doesn't speak the language, technology, politics, the drug war, health care, etc.
There actually is such a thing as an ethicist. I'm most familiar with medical ethicists, who are often employed by hospitals and academic medical centers. I've taken courses and gone to lectures on medical ethics, and I learned a few important non-obvious things.
An ethicist isn't like a doctor or rabbi who tells you what's right (according to God). The job of an ethicist (at least a medical ethicist) is to get the facts, figure out the logic of the situation, clarify the problem for you, and let you make your own decision. They also have to point out to you that different people would have different values and opinions, and you have to decide for yourself.
For example, back in the 1950s, when a pregnant unmarried woman went to a doctor, depending on who she went to, the doctor would tell her (1) you have to deliver the child and give it up for adoption or (2) You have to get an abortion so you can continue with your education/career. Later on, some doctors came up with the innovative idea that you should lay out the facts and options, and let the woman make her own decision what she wanted to do.
Today, medical ethicists help people decide a lot of Terry Schiavo-type questions about when a patient is hopeless enough to let the patient die, or whether to take a dangerous, unpleasant treatment like cancer chemotherapy when there's a very low chance it will do any good.
But Randy Cohen was answering ethical questions usually on the basis of nothing more than his own personal opinion or gut feeling. Up to the point where I stopped reading his column, I never saw a thoughtful consideration of the different viewpoints and options. Cohen just delivered his own opinion, as if he had a direct line to God.
What really annoyed me about Cohen was that he was taking a field with a lot of good, thoughtful logical and even scientific analysis behind it (for example, doctors did studies of how patients felt a year after deciding to let relatives die; for example, doctors recorded conversations between doctors and patients about fatal diseases and found out that the patients didn't usually appreciate the seriousness of their condition) and treating it as if it were just a matter of opinion, and entertainment, and his opinion was better than yours. It's like applying creationism to ethics. He's just a liberal version of those conservative Christians (or extremists of every religion) who think that they have all the answers and everybody should do what they say because they have a direct line to God. It's scientific ignorance applied to ethics.
Dr. Mironov has taken myoblasts -- embryonic cells that develop into muscle tissue -- from turkey and bathed them in a nutrient bath of bovine serum on a scaffold made of chitosan (a common polymer found in nature) to grow animal skeletal muscle tissue.
Bovine serum is a byproduct of the commercial meat industry. So he first has to farm the animals, and slaughter them, to get the serum, to grow a much smaller quantity of meat.
I was trying to draw a distinction between what cops have a right to do, and what they illegally do.
While most people don't have the resources to sue the police department, a few do, and of course the ACLU takes on the test cases that they think have the best chance of winning and changing policy.
I acknowledge that the U.S. in general has more freedom in most ways than any other country I can think of.
However, There are a lot of exceptions, for members of certain groups, and it doesn't serve the purpose of freedom to deny our flaws.
The U.S. is a whole different world if you're black, especially in a part of the U.S. where cops regularly harass blacks. You can look up the Innocence Project for the names of innocent black people who have been wrongly convicted (I met one guy who was released after 15 years). Funny thing -- only 10% of the population is black, but 50% of the prison population is black.
During the civil rights movement in the 1960s I knew someone who was organizing for the right to vote in the South, was picked up by the cops, released to the local KKK, and killed. Quite a few people were stopped by the cops and killed.
For black people in the South back then, "papers, please" really did have the dangers that were associated with certain unfree countries. Blacks tell me they're uncomfortable today when a cop stops them.
You could say, "Yeah, but that only happened to black people." That argument doesn't offer much consolation to black people.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to name other minority groups who were treated that way in the U.S.
The lawyers told me that the Supreme Court decisions on the Fourth Amendment are clear: A cop needs an "articulable reason" to search you, and without that, you have no obligation to cooperate with the cop. They told me to say, "I don't consent to anything" and "Officer, am I free to walk away?"
Driving is a separate issue, since the courts ruled you've made an implied agreement to identify yourself. But parent was referring to sitting in a coffee shop.
Of course cops often break the law, but it's still not a misdemeanor or violation of any law to refuse to show them your ID simply because they demand it without a reason.
Newspapers and magazines are also supposed to have separated the editorial decision-making from financial considerations. Some do. But most of them ignore that rule. There are few magazine editors, and fewer publishers, who will publish a story that will cause a major advertiser to pull out.
Over the last 50 years, cigarette companies were the biggest advertisers in women's magazines. Half their ad pages might be cigarette ads.
Women's magazines warned about every cancer but one -- lung cancer. For 50 years, health coverage was a major topic for women's magazines, but they pointedly avoided any mention of the health effects of cigarettes. The editors of these magazines admitted it, and it's been proven in published academic studies. Or you can just go to the library and look at them.
Conversely, the few women's magazines and consumer magazines that didn't take cigarette advertising did run articles on smoking and health.
Cigarettes are the most obvious example, but you can find that same bias in the coverage of all the major advertisers in most news media -- alcohol, automobiles.
Public radio is now taking advertising. I've heard a lot of local news stories about their advertisers, particularly in the music and entertainment business.
Wikipedia is already getting all the money it needs. (TFA doesn't explain *why* they need more money -- more server farms?) There's a real risk advertising would compromise their objectivity. It has everywhere else.
He's used to dealing with companies whose goal is to make money.
The goal of Wikipedia is not to make money.
The goal is to have reliable, objective information, and it's an ongoing effort to do that already.
Advertising will make it worse. If Pepsi-Cola is a major advertiser, will that affect the presence of unflattering material on Pepsi-Cola's page? The experience of advertiser influence on print and broadcasting media is that it will.
Financial analysts made similar recommendations for Craigslist. Craigslist could make more money if they took advertising. But the purpose of Craigslist wasn't to make money. Craig already had money. He wanted to do something cool.
It's like saying, "Your household is operating according to the wrong model. If your wife were to work as an escort, and if you were to sell your children for body parts, you could make a lot more money." But the purpose of your household isn't to maximize your income.
If someone can show a higher complication rate for surgeon, who are sleepy, then I'd consider the above proposal, otherwise it's just over reactionary crap.
Let's see some data, as opposed to truck driver, or pilot studies - 'cause surgery isn't anything like those jobs.
Researchers have documented the adverse effects of sleep deprivation and sleep disorders on individual performance.1 In surgery, there is an 83% increase in the risk of complications (e.g., massive hemorrhage, organ injury, or wound failure) in patients who undergo elective daytime surgical procedures performed by attending surgeons who had less than a 6-hour opportunity for sleep between procedures during a previous on-call night.3
3 Rothschild JM, Keohane CA, Rogers S, et al. Risks of complications by attending physicians after performing nighttime procedures. JAMA 2009;302:1565-1572
I'm not giving anecdotal evidence, I'm giving evidence that can be documented. But put that aside.
Your mother's problem was with the driver who ran her over, not with the legal profession.
If you sue somebody for damages, the purpose is to get money as a result.
If the person whom you sue doesn't have any money, you're not going to get any money, and there's no point in suing. You can't get blood out of a stone.
An illegal immigrant without insurance is one of the worst defendants imaginable. Even if you won the case, he probably has no money so you can't recover anything. The accident may have brought him to the attention of the immigration service, who would deport him. That would make it even more difficult to get any money, or even find him again.
Lawyers take cases on contingency, when they think it's likely that there will be money to pay their fees and expenses at the end. In this case, there will never be money at the end. So they can't take it on contingency.
In principle, a lawyer could take the case if your mother paid for his expenses and time in advance, but that would be very expensive and she'd still have no realistic chance of recovering. So an ethical lawyer wouldn't take her money.
It would be like a doctor performing surgery when he knows the surgery would be unsuccessful.
It's a bad case. It would require big expenses up front that the plaintiff would never recoup. The ethics of lawyers have nothing to do with it. Even the most altruistic lawyer imaginable couldn't help her recover any money.
Slashdot Mirror
Now where there is an outright civil war it's different. It's clear the people want somebody else in the ruling position and that they will fight to get there. And that they have some sort of plan for when they do that. Of course it's not a guarantee, but the chances of something good coming out of that is much higher.
Who are these rebels and what reason do you have to think that they'll be any better than Ghadaffi?
That's dead simple - supporting people against another genocide bound despot willing to kill his own people to retain his money and power.
Who are these rebels, what do they stand for, and how do we know they won't be even worse than Ghadaffi?
FTFA: "The UN Security Council has passed a resolution authorising "all necessary measures" to protect civilians in Libya from pro-Gaddafi forces."
I heard a lecture by a military ethicist who said that according to U.S. military studies, about half the fatalities in any large military action are innocent civilians, and that's a reasonable standard for collateral damage.
True?
What we will be doing (ostensibly purely as a side effect, although almost certainly by intent) is clearing the path for the rebels to do what they will. Which will almost certainly be the creation of a democracy (however flawed of one).
I've been reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal carefully to try to figure out who the rebels are, and I can't find it.
Who are these rebels, and why does anybody think they'll create a democracy, or anything other than a dictatorship just as brutal as Ghaddafi's, if not more brutal?
Pigeons carrying 8GB thumb drives. Perfect!
the last time I checked, the Cold War actually went pretty well for the Western democracies.
I don't know about that. A lot of people got blacklisted. Linus Pauling lost his passport and couldn't travel outside the U.S. The editors of the Daily Worker got sent to jail for expressing their First Amendment rights. A lot of teachers got fired. A lot more people got intimidated into not expressing their ideas. They moved the political center of gravity farther to the right, where it still is today.
Forrest Mims is a creationist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims
I read his engineering notebooks and built circuits out of them. I will be forever grateful to him for that. It was the most fun I ever had in science, and I learned a lot of useful stuff.
It blew me away when I found out that a guy that smart and cool was a creationist. But there are a lot of engineers who believe in Bible-belt creationism.
If Mims were proposed to teach an engineering course, there's no doubt that he's qualified. If he were to teach a biology course, maybe not. If he were to teach a general science course, I don't know.
But that's a decision for the department to make, not the Texas legislature.
This doesn't prevent us from laughing at creationists.
Did you ever hear of the National Institutes of Health?
http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=13733&query=home
P.S. Vannevar is not related to George. He invented the Internet in 1945. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/
Someone is offering you money to perform illegal work for them. How is this unethical?
He's going to National Public Radio.
Instead of just flipping the page, we'll have to get up to turn off the radio.
But, once upon a time, people trusted the companies they worked for - companies very often took great care of their employees - now, we have to look out for ourselves.
What time was that exactly? Was that at the time when companies used child labor? Was that at the time when no one worried about worker safety and many jobs had appalling mortality rates? You have a fantasy view of the past.
That was the policy of Eastman Kodak, IBM, and most other major U.S. corporations. It was also the policy of a lot of smaller companies, like the old German printing companies. That was the policies of the best companies in this country, for most of the last century.
It was a social contract between employers and workers -- an ethical obligation that Randy Cohen never heard of -- that went back thousands of years. In most wealthy developed countries, it's the law.
Unfortunately, most of those American companies have abandoned those policies, with nothing to replace it.
One of my pet peeves since Randy Cohen started the column is that he's calling himself an ethicist when he really isn't. It's like calling yourself a doctor or lawyer when you're not, and giving people medical or legal advice that gets them into trouble.
It's part of the old newspaper mindset, "A good reporter can cover X even if he doesn't know anything about it, he'll just pick it up when he goes along," when X is a country where he doesn't speak the language, technology, politics, the drug war, health care, etc.
There actually is such a thing as an ethicist. I'm most familiar with medical ethicists, who are often employed by hospitals and academic medical centers. I've taken courses and gone to lectures on medical ethics, and I learned a few important non-obvious things.
An ethicist isn't like a doctor or rabbi who tells you what's right (according to God). The job of an ethicist (at least a medical ethicist) is to get the facts, figure out the logic of the situation, clarify the problem for you, and let you make your own decision. They also have to point out to you that different people would have different values and opinions, and you have to decide for yourself.
For example, back in the 1950s, when a pregnant unmarried woman went to a doctor, depending on who she went to, the doctor would tell her (1) you have to deliver the child and give it up for adoption or (2) You have to get an abortion so you can continue with your education/career. Later on, some doctors came up with the innovative idea that you should lay out the facts and options, and let the woman make her own decision what she wanted to do.
Today, medical ethicists help people decide a lot of Terry Schiavo-type questions about when a patient is hopeless enough to let the patient die, or whether to take a dangerous, unpleasant treatment like cancer chemotherapy when there's a very low chance it will do any good.
(There are corrupt ethicists, too http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/pharma-buys-a-conscience.html.)
The job of an ethicist is to clarify ideas
But Randy Cohen was answering ethical questions usually on the basis of nothing more than his own personal opinion or gut feeling. Up to the point where I stopped reading his column, I never saw a thoughtful consideration of the different viewpoints and options. Cohen just delivered his own opinion, as if he had a direct line to God.
What really annoyed me about Cohen was that he was taking a field with a lot of good, thoughtful logical and even scientific analysis behind it (for example, doctors did studies of how patients felt a year after deciding to let relatives die; for example, doctors recorded conversations between doctors and patients about fatal diseases and found out that the patients didn't usually appreciate the seriousness of their condition) and treating it as if it were just a matter of opinion, and entertainment, and his opinion was better than yours. It's like applying creationism to ethics. He's just a liberal version of those conservative Christians (or extremists of every religion) who think that they have all the answers and everybody should do what they say because they have a direct line to God. It's scientific ignorance applied to ethics.
This is like turning gold into lead.
He's turning bovine serum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum which costs about $800 per kilogram, http://products.invitrogen.com/ivgn/en/US/adirect/invitrogen?cmd=catDisplayStyle&catKey=100301&filterDispName=Mammalian+Cell+Culture&filterType=1&OP=filter&filter=ft_1701%2Ff_188301*&_bcs_=H4sIAAAAAAAAAMWQ22rDMAyGn8Y3CwlODFt6maWklMIY67Z746iJwYfgQ0LefvK6lrGV3Q6EfiRb%0A8vc7Lwmtn53towg%2BI9V9dgQ3SwH%2Bj%2F4YwkRYQ6oOY1mWQppZBmcHMIWwGpteBkCJHhMYTKPVqXHZ%0AmHPT59eNVddMk5KCB2mNL8agFb5CKpaC1sFFSDV9oCglLXFgs0G9w7IFpbI2qhAdJE6uEe0xe3Xc%0A%2BBOItDF7AY5o4Rf69EXzk581NcVjOQ%2Fmwv92xMR76XBlOroOENYJ3RO23b%2FvntDBVvpJ8bXlAQbr%0AViTC5gFWvPHJ%2FN3YiSt%2F2xlqSSk7W8R%2Fivqf2c80t%2BA%2FAApkysVCAgAA into meat, which sells for about $5-10 a kilogram.
Bovine serum is a byproduct of the commercial meat industry. So he first has to farm the animals, and slaughter them, to get the serum, to grow a much smaller quantity of meat.
I was trying to draw a distinction between what cops have a right to do, and what they illegally do.
While most people don't have the resources to sue the police department, a few do, and of course the ACLU takes on the test cases that they think have the best chance of winning and changing policy.
It's pretty bad, but not hopeless.
Those are good links.
I think the bottom line is, the laws vary from state to state, and cops can come up with a justification for stopping you, especially if they lie.
But you're not legally required to identify yourself if you're sitting in a coffee shop with no reason for a cop to be suspicious.
I acknowledge that the U.S. in general has more freedom in most ways than any other country I can think of.
However, There are a lot of exceptions, for members of certain groups, and it doesn't serve the purpose of freedom to deny our flaws.
The U.S. is a whole different world if you're black, especially in a part of the U.S. where cops regularly harass blacks. You can look up the Innocence Project for the names of innocent black people who have been wrongly convicted (I met one guy who was released after 15 years). Funny thing -- only 10% of the population is black, but 50% of the prison population is black.
During the civil rights movement in the 1960s I knew someone who was organizing for the right to vote in the South, was picked up by the cops, released to the local KKK, and killed. Quite a few people were stopped by the cops and killed.
For black people in the South back then, "papers, please" really did have the dangers that were associated with certain unfree countries. Blacks tell me they're uncomfortable today when a cop stops them.
You could say, "Yeah, but that only happened to black people." That argument doesn't offer much consolation to black people.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to name other minority groups who were treated that way in the U.S.
Refusing to show your ID to a cop who demands it for no discernible reason is a jailable misdemeanor?
Under what law?
I've refused to show my ID to cops, and I've been to lectures where ACLU and other attorneys explained to me what my rights were. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmyE6_b_xJY&feature=channel
The lawyers told me that the Supreme Court decisions on the Fourth Amendment are clear: A cop needs an "articulable reason" to search you, and without that, you have no obligation to cooperate with the cop. They told me to say, "I don't consent to anything" and "Officer, am I free to walk away?"
Driving is a separate issue, since the courts ruled you've made an implied agreement to identify yourself. But parent was referring to sitting in a coffee shop.
Of course cops often break the law, but it's still not a misdemeanor or violation of any law to refuse to show them your ID simply because they demand it without a reason.
People do get added to the sex offender list for the wrong reasons, IMHO.
You mean like this guy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/us/11bar.html
A Place on the Sex-Offender Registry for a Crime That May Be Off the Books
By ADAM LIPTAK
January 10, 2011
Newspapers and magazines are also supposed to have separated the editorial decision-making from financial considerations. Some do. But most of them ignore that rule. There are few magazine editors, and fewer publishers, who will publish a story that will cause a major advertiser to pull out.
Over the last 50 years, cigarette companies were the biggest advertisers in women's magazines. Half their ad pages might be cigarette ads.
Women's magazines warned about every cancer but one -- lung cancer. For 50 years, health coverage was a major topic for women's magazines, but they pointedly avoided any mention of the health effects of cigarettes. The editors of these magazines admitted it, and it's been proven in published academic studies. Or you can just go to the library and look at them.
Conversely, the few women's magazines and consumer magazines that didn't take cigarette advertising did run articles on smoking and health.
Cigarettes are the most obvious example, but you can find that same bias in the coverage of all the major advertisers in most news media -- alcohol, automobiles.
Public radio is now taking advertising. I've heard a lot of local news stories about their advertisers, particularly in the music and entertainment business.
Wikipedia is already getting all the money it needs. (TFA doesn't explain *why* they need more money -- more server farms?) There's a real risk advertising would compromise their objectivity. It has everywhere else.
TFA misses the point.
He's used to dealing with companies whose goal is to make money.
The goal of Wikipedia is not to make money.
The goal is to have reliable, objective information, and it's an ongoing effort to do that already.
Advertising will make it worse. If Pepsi-Cola is a major advertiser, will that affect the presence of unflattering material on Pepsi-Cola's page? The experience of advertiser influence on print and broadcasting media is that it will.
Financial analysts made similar recommendations for Craigslist. Craigslist could make more money if they took advertising. But the purpose of Craigslist wasn't to make money. Craig already had money. He wanted to do something cool.
It's like saying, "Your household is operating according to the wrong model. If your wife were to work as an escort, and if you were to sell your children for body parts, you could make a lot more money." But the purpose of your household isn't to maximize your income.
That's one of the points of TFA.
Negative findings are useful findings. Those are solid results. They're just not the results the CAM guys wanted.
I agree they don't need more money.
This has always been supporting evidence in malpractice cases.
I think the Libby Zion case was the big one that involved interns and residents working long shifts, and led to the current attempts to reduce hours.
If someone can show a higher complication rate for surgeon, who are sleepy, then I'd consider the above proposal, otherwise it's just over reactionary crap.
Let's see some data, as opposed to truck driver, or pilot studies - 'cause surgery isn't anything like those jobs.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1007901
Researchers have documented the adverse effects of sleep deprivation and sleep disorders on individual performance.1 In surgery, there is an 83% increase in the risk of complications (e.g., massive hemorrhage, organ injury, or wound failure) in patients who undergo elective daytime surgical procedures performed by attending surgeons who had less than a 6-hour opportunity for sleep between procedures during a previous on-call night.3
1 Ulmer C, Wolman DM, Johns MME, eds. Resident duty hours: enhancing sleep, supervision, and safety. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2008.
3 Rothschild JM, Keohane CA, Rogers S, et al. Risks of complications by attending physicians after performing nighttime procedures. JAMA 2009;302:1565-1572
I'm not giving anecdotal evidence, I'm giving evidence that can be documented. But put that aside.
Your mother's problem was with the driver who ran her over, not with the legal profession.
If you sue somebody for damages, the purpose is to get money as a result.
If the person whom you sue doesn't have any money, you're not going to get any money, and there's no point in suing. You can't get blood out of a stone.
An illegal immigrant without insurance is one of the worst defendants imaginable. Even if you won the case, he probably has no money so you can't recover anything. The accident may have brought him to the attention of the immigration service, who would deport him. That would make it even more difficult to get any money, or even find him again.
Lawyers take cases on contingency, when they think it's likely that there will be money to pay their fees and expenses at the end. In this case, there will never be money at the end. So they can't take it on contingency.
In principle, a lawyer could take the case if your mother paid for his expenses and time in advance, but that would be very expensive and she'd still have no realistic chance of recovering. So an ethical lawyer wouldn't take her money.
It would be like a doctor performing surgery when he knows the surgery would be unsuccessful.
It's a bad case. It would require big expenses up front that the plaintiff would never recoup. The ethics of lawyers have nothing to do with it. Even the most altruistic lawyer imaginable couldn't help her recover any money.