I attended my first Zoom memorial service today. Ethics tip, if you are considering doing this for a loved one: set an end time and stick to it, for God’s sake. This event today was to honor a great presence in my childhood and a friend of both my parents, and I was grateful for the chance to pay my respects. I don’t even begrudge the fact that her one child who has a serious stutter carried the duty of the eulogy, But as we got to the dreaded open mic for the assembled to share memories of the departed, one ancient attendee after another droned on with no discipline or relevance, often just trading niceties with others present and generally repeating what had already been said.
One more tip: if you had never even met the person being memorialized, shut up. One guy went on and on about how he always hoped to meet her, “but we were never invited to her house.”
I bailed when we hit the one hour, 15 minute mark and I saw no sign of a conclusion.
1. I don’t understand this at all. The Biden administration is restricting press access to the mess at the boarder. How can the news media allow it to get away with that? Is there anything the Democrats dishonestly accused the Trump administration of doing that they aren’t happily attempting to do themselves? I just know I’m going to get sick of the mantra, “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden…”—in fact, I’m sick of it all ready,
Until I get a better suggestion, I’m just going to abbreviate it as IIPTDXTTNMIAFB. It has a ring to it…
2. Oh, fine…just what we need...shadow social media for ex-Presidents. Since his outrageous and purely partisan ejection from the existing social media, the former Tweeter-in-Chief has been planning to launch his own platform. If he does, I will be duty bound to support the effort because he shouldn’t have to do this, and if he can wound Twitter, good. It deserves it. But this is not healthy. What should happen is for social media to stop trying to manipulate public discourse while favoring progressive disinformation over conservative misinformation.
3. Best stupid cancel culture story EVER! The Great Stupid continues to entertain, if you can get past the urge to throw yourself into the nearest wolf pit. Alexi McCammond, the rising reporter at Axios who had been tapped to become the editor at Teen Vogue, found her past tweets that were termed “racist” being circulated among Teen Vogue staff, which demanded her “cancellation.” (Were the tweets racist? Does it matter? I’m not going ti check: there is only so much time I’m willing to devote to that ridiculous, Marxist, intersectionality-besotted rag.) “Following the Atlanta shooting that left eight dead, six of them Asian American,” I’m reading, “McCammond and Teen Vogue parted ways.” What did a sex-crazed lunatic shooting up a massage parlor have to do with the old tweets of a Teen Vogue editor?
Oh, nothing.
But that’s not the great part of the story. This is: Christine Davitt. the senior Teen Vogue staffer who posted a letter attacking McCammond for her past tweets, used versions of “nigger” in her own tweets 10 years ago!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! What a moron! See?
And this IS exactly what “judge not lest ye be judged means”….
4. Res Ipsa Loquitur? Kylie Jenner, one of the useless Kardashians who has made mega-millions for being famous—no, really because her half-sisters are famous— and is a “social media influencer” for the gullible, ignorant and immature, was so confident in her unjustified fan worship that the 23-year-old took to Instagram to urge her financially-strapped fans to donate to Samuel Rauda’s GoFundMe page, as his family looks for assistance in paying for his medical expenses. Rauda is Kylie’s beloved make-up artist. Gee, I wish I could afford my own make-up artist!
Kylie wrote, in a classic of self-awareness deficit: “May God watch over you and protect you @makeupbysamuel everyone take a moment to say a prayer for Sam who got into an accident this past weekend. And swipe up to visit his families go fund me.”
His family is asking for $120,000; generous Kylie, who has no financial worries other than when her favorite eye shadow has a price hike, contributed all of $5000 while asking her teen fans to help foot the bill, which she could pay all by herself from pocket change.
5. Now THIS is an Ethics Hero! Reggie Jones was a Jones Beach (on Long Island) lifeguard for an incredible 64 summers. He died on January 30 at age 93. Reggie began his lifeguard career at Jones Beach as a teenager in 1944, then continued the job every summer there and at other beaches until 2009, when he finally failed the qualifying swim time at the age of 80.
It is estimated that he rescued more than 1,000 swimmers.
Here’s Reggie in 2000, when he was 73:
Ethics Alarms 
All I can say is that I want to be like Reggie when I grow up.
I have mixed feelings about your first comment there about setting end times for online funerals. If this is someone’s last chance to say goodbye to whoever, I think they should be allowed to do so. That said, I understand that they can’t hold everyone up to do it. I agree, though, that if the person was unknown to you, now is not the time to speak. I went to a funeral the end of 2018 when a very good friend of mine lost her sister to cancer at the early age of 43. I kept out of sight, or I should say remained within the congregation. My friend had never introduced me to her sister, and my only purpose in being there was to be supportive of her.
1. Color me unsurprised. I have said it many times, but, the fact is that if it were not for double standards, the Democratic party would have no standards at all. Because they have the media almost completely in their pocket, they can be shameless about it. I used to think that this kind of shamelessness was limited to staged sporting events like roller derby and sports entertainment like pro wrestling, where part of the action was how each side refused to even acknowledge the other side might have anything of value to say or do, and another part of the action was for one side’s hangers on and enablers to say outrageous things just to gin up anger from the audience. That’s exactly what biden’s Secretary of Homeland security sounded like saying that the border was closed when it pretty obviously is not. Whether you choose to trust a government that thinks so little of you as to lie to your face is on you.
2. We will see if this gets off the ground. That said, if it does, I will certainly be in support of the former president’s attempt to reach out to the world again. I hope it is a domino that starts the process toward the breakup of some of these huge tech monopolies that put too much power in the hands of too few people who have shown that they will not hesitate to abuse it to impose their vision of how things should be on everyone and have shown themselves all too eager to be agents of governmental tyranny. Just as government should not be the vessel for a private citizen’s hatred, as is the case when these civil rights commissions allow themselves to be agents for atheists who want to destroy religious people, private companies that are de facto public utilities should not be the vessel for government to silence indirectly those that they cannot silence directly.
3. This is nothing more than a classic story illustrating how people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
4. This is basically a PT Barnum situation. If I understand correctly, Barnum said that there was a sucker born every minute, and he also said that you never give a sucker an even break. In this case, it’s just a celebrity taking advantage of sucker fans. why pay yourself for something you can persuade gullible fans to pay for out of their own pockets? Meantime, you keep your money in the stock market working for you making more money, and the sooner one day you can drop out of sight and retire, and sit on your pile of cash and flip the world off like George RR martin.
5. Nuff said.
Prologue: This is where leadership is required. Someone has to be able to moderate the discussion. Whether it’s a book club which one member has decided to turn into a support group or an employee that regularly takes up all the allotted time in a team meeting to gripe, a designated person must be in charge to keep everyone on track. At a funeral, that should be a minister or a funeral director, ideally.
1. We all know the press permits a double standard when it comes to the Democrats. If they’re not complaining, as one would expect they should from having access cut off, I wonder if they are complicit in some scheme to stop reporting on the border in order to help the administration hide some action that will, in the end, fit with the end goals of Team Biden.
2, We desperately need it, yes, but anything Trump launches will be instantly derided as racist, xenophobic, homophobic and all the phobics. Advertisers will be scared away from it by SJW and anyone who signs up for it will be labeled a fellow traveler with the Great White Supremacist. You can expect endless media coverage of any problems with the launch, as well as articles highlighting the worst of the participants’ submissions.
3. Has she been fired yet? Remember the double standard. Time will tell if the company decides to stand behind her and decree the motives of her exposers were suspect enough to keep her on.
(3) It is funny how fast the anti-racism slippery slope has happened. You can’t have a good struggle session without someone to force into a confession while the rest of the people blame the kid for oppressing them. So, what happens when there isn’t a white student in the class to label as an ‘oppressor’ and abuse? You pick the lightest-skinned kid in the class, label them as ‘white’ and force them to be the oppressor. I have little sympathy for the mother, because she isn’t upset about the curriculum, just that HER child was listed as the oppressor. I guess she thinks they should have found a white kid somewhere to bring in and abuse.
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2021/01/21/las-vegas-charter-school-sued-for-curriculum-covering-race-identity/
Any update on the Pandemic Creates a Classic and Difficult Ethics Conflict?
I have been thinking we need a twitter like social network, probably on blockchain that is both ephemeral and immutable. Rarely do we need missives from more than 90 or 120 days, so it seems that we could just time them out at that point. I think it would be awesome if we called it trumpet. If we made it a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation then no one would control it, so no one could censor it. People who wanted could just run nodes (like bitcoin) to host it, so if you did not like it, you could just not run a node. I think eventually twitter like services will need to be in a distributed format that no one can censor, and have functionality to block the content that you find offensive.