Let’s see what revoltin’ developments we have accumulated, shall we? But first, some positive news…
1. Bernie Madoff has died in prison. Good. If there was ever a case for using capitol punishment for crimes other than murder and treason, Bernie is it. He was convicted of orchestrating the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history and was serving a 150-year sentence that he managed to escape by dying in prison of natural causes at age 82. He was a stone-cold sociopath who destroyed his family, foundations, charities and lives, all out of greed. On the plus side, his exploits did spawn two excellent dramatic portrayals, one by Robert De Niro and the other by Richard Dreyfuss. I liked Richard’s better, but after his disgusting conduct during the Trump years, Robert is permanently unwelcome to my eyeballs.
So much for the good news…
2. Don’t tell me again how poor Pete Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Pete was the second Ethics Dunce of them all, way back in 2004, here. Knowing well that baseball had an iron-clad, one strike and you’re out forever rule forbidding players, coaches and managers from betting on games, he did it anyway (as a manager) because, see, he is Pete Rose, and the rules don’t apply to him, but mostly because he’s an idiot. So he got banned from the game and the Hall of Fame despite being the all-time hit leader, ahead of Ty Cobb. He’s a walking, talking ethics corrupter, prompting fans and writers to resort to rationalizations to explain why he should be forgiven.
Now we have this:
“LAS VEGAS – UpickTrade.com, the long term strategy and money management sports recommendation service, announced today that all-time great Major League Baseball legend Pete Rose will become an ambassador for the service and provide his exclusive daily baseball picks for subscribers throughout the 2021 season…“We are thrilled to partner with Pete Rose, perhaps the greatest baseball player who ever lived, to provide our UPickTrade.com subscribers with exclusive and valuable content,” said Carlos Lazo, the CEO of UPickTrade.com and XOY Capital of Guadalajara, México. “There are very few if any people in the world who know more about baseball than Pete Rose so his deep knowledge of the game and his experiences in gambling will blend well with our unique UPickTrade.com sports betting strategies and algorithms.”
“His experiences in gambling.” Got it. This is actually funny, because even though Rose knows baseball as well as anyone alive, he was a terrible gambler, and lost money while he was breaking the game’s most unbreakable rule.
3. John Cleese’s “Gazinga”! Somehow I didn’t post an intended Great Stupid comment after actor Hank Azaria recently virtue-signalled a desire “to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize” for his funny and deft vocal work as Apu, the Indian character in “The Simpsons.” The foolishness of “The Simpsons” and its cast groveling to this “antiracist” insanity was discussed here before this particular sacrifice to wokeness became an epidemic.
A bit earlier, the show announced that Dr. Hibbard, the family’s black doctor, would no longer be voiced by Harry Shearer, because Harry is white. A white actor doing a black animated character’s voice is racist, but a black actor doing a white character’s voice is inclusion and praise-worthy non-traditional casting. Shearer, at times a vocal progressive, lost a job he had performed well for decades because he was white. That’s anti-racism!
In response to Azaria’s grovel, John Cleese, the Monty Python icon, tweeted [Pointer: Monkey Boy] ,
4. On the CNN “confession.” The latest Project Veritas sting video caught CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester claiming that his network used “propaganda” in an effort to ensure that President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and stating that the network created at least one story that was “all speculation” in order to defeat the President. Chester said on camera, “Look what we did, we got Trump out! I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out. I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that.”
What does this mean, other than proving that Charlie is an asshole?
- It’s still unethical to do what Project Veritas does. Since the group is unethical, even its scoops can’t be trusted. They can’t be ignored either, and yet that’s how the mainstream media, except Fox, is treating this story.
- Strictly speaking, this isn’t even news. Of course CNN broadcasts propaganda. Of course it deliberately tried to undermine President Trump. The only ones who didn’t know this years ago are your most Trump-Deranged and dim-witted Facebook friends. As for the smart ones who deny it, they are liars. It’s that simple.
- I do not believe that CNN was trusted sufficiently by any American inclined to vote for President Trump for its screamingly obvious bias to change the results of the election. Chester is a chest-thumping fool. He is also, however a fick, the Ethics Alarms term for someone who admits to being unethical and is proud of it.
- The episode is relevant to the news media claim, which I read or hear literally every day still, that Trump’s assertion that the election was stolen was and is “false.” Chester’s description sounds, at the very least, like attempted theft, and it is the position of Ethics Alarms that whether you use “stolen,” “fixed” or “rigged,” the mainstream media’s manipulation of its reporting to help Biden and hurt Trump is sufficiently clear that the media’s constant “false” chorus cannot be accepted as anything but a tactic of diversion.
5. And when appointing people for their skin color and gender is your only priority, this is what you get…President Biden’s U.N. Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told Al Sharpton’s National Action Network that “the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles…I remain hopeful in part because of the influence and the insistence of organizations like yours. Just look at the way [the] Black Lives Matter movement spread this past summer.”
Yeah, just look! Will any reporter ask Jen Psaki to explain and defend this anti-American, racist propaganda from the representative of our nation at the U.N.?
Is that five items already? Ugh. There’s so much more…
Ethics Alarms 
3–Cleese is Da Bomb!
To a certain extent. In many respects, he’s really a standard issue ’60s lefty.
5 — World Apology Tour 2.0
This Biden administration program of back to the future is crushingly depressing. Reparations. Court packing. Aid to the Palestinians. “Negotiations” with Iran. Defering to Putin. Open borders. The green new deal. Pete Butegig. Ugh.
Oh, and I forgot reparations and eliminating the filibuster. Jesus H. Christ.
4. As much as CNN is a dumpsterfire that misleads their viewership, I think that both CNN and you overstate their reach.
Media is dying a slow, painfully protracted death, held together by gobs and gobs of cash from advertisers that still for some godforsaken reason I can’t fathom, think they get more bang for their buck there than they would out of YouTube. The daily viewership of CNN News is 1.5 million people on a great night. Assuming that those watchers are all unique (and we know they aren’t) that means an audience of what? 10.5 million people a week? Max? I thought that was insanely low, so I Googled the number of people who have cable or satellite TV in their homes: 83 million. I doubt very much that CNN and Fox share many viewers, so between the two, I’d estimate that about a quarter of people with a cable/satellite package watch Cable News. Maybe 25 million.
That’s an upper limit. People watch the news they consume more than once a week, generally. So of the 10.5 max number of viewers (on a week of exceptionally good viewership), how many are unique viewers? 5 million? Give or take? How many of those viewers are watching to reinforce their already Democratic biases? All of them? Give or take? How many of them actually voted?
My point, which I’ve taken a really meandering path to, is that CNN is irrelevant outside of a relatively bubbled sphere. Their viewership is already partisan, and they aren’t changing minds. Despite CNN *obviously* being in the tank for Democrats, and despite their awfulness, and despite the lack of shame or self awareness necessary to make those stupid “this is an apple” adds (Don’t see those much anymore, do you?), I don’t think they actually had the clout to really effect this election.
What kind of attention do the get on line, HT? I hold my nose and check their website out once or twice a week to see what they’re whining about or what false “narrative” du jour they’re pushing. I watch zero network news on TV.
Some? I’m sure. But Facebook has 3 billion users, Facebook being in the Tank for Democrats and burying the Hunter Biden story as it was breaking did more for Joe in 2020 than anything CNN did.
Yes. Well, I think it’s safe to assume it was a team effort. By a very large team.
Facebook also paid millions of dollars to cities to rig the vote in Biden’s favor. Put drop boxes in only Democrat leaning areas. Get access to the ballots before Election Day and go door to door asking democrats to “cure” invalid ballots. Change election rules in Biden’s favor. Some of what they did is only now starting to come out in leaked emails and city/state investigations. We will probably never know what all really went on.
The idea that CNN doesn’t have a big audience and so it doesn’t have much of an effect is erroneous, though. If 25 million people watch it, then that is 25 million potential sources of propaganda. CNN articles pop up at the top of search engine search results. CNN clips and articles are what is being shared on social media. CNN propaganda starts on CNN, then moves into academia, proselytized by teachers and professors into the minds of children and college students. There are huge ripple effects. The scope of CNN’s reach is not limited to who watches their station.
Wait, didn’t I say this? I meant to. I thought I did. Let’s check: “I do not believe that CNN was trusted sufficiently by any American inclined to vote for President Trump for its screamingly obvious bias to change the results of the election.” Overstated?
I still think under, but it’s a whole lot closer to right than Chester. Somewhere along the way, and it wasn’t all that recently, CNN abandoned their thin veneer of respectability in order to chase entertainment ratings like MSNBC did. I don’t think that CNN could even convince their own viewers of something that they didn’t already believe, those viewers would just find a news station that agreed with them.
Question for lawyerly folk;
On the subject of court packing. I’m seeing much ado about this bill that Nadler is putting out to add four justices to the court. I could do the research, but I’m wondering if someone just knows the answers, because apparently the media is incapable of actually laying out the process;
Is the requirement a simple majority in the house and senate?
Because my impression is that it is…. And my further impression is that if that’s true, that makes it a dead document. There’s no way there isn’t a Democrat or two in the Senate that rejects this.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/915381446/is-it-possible-to-expand-the-supreme-court
This is kind of ironic. An NPR interview from September of last year assuring us Biden didn’t want to pack the court (and said as much during the campaign) but that Schumer and Markey were for it. As the article says, the number of justices can be changed by a federal law adopted like a farm appropriation bill. They might have to nuke the filibuster as well, I suppose, which I think can be done with a simple majority, which they have with Kamala breaking ties. And maybe they’ll do that. The Dems are running around like a Chinese fire drill. You’d think the 2022 congressional election was next week.
Auntie Nan is evidently in no hurry to march of that cliff:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9475425/Nancy-Pelosi-senior-Dems-say-WONT-support-partys-bill-pack-Supreme-Court.html
But why does she think a commission to study court packing make any sense? Markey (or Nadler) says the bill would “unpack the court.” Hah! More Orwell.
(How short is Jerry Nadler? Does he tower over Robert Reich?)
He’s 5’3″! As short as Kamala Harris! And HRC! Sheesh.
Whenever someone says they want to “commission a study” on something, that politicinese for “I don’t want to touch this with a ten foot pole, but some of my constituents want me to do it, so I’ll say I’m studying it and kick the can down the road.”
I was listening to a CBC report a while back that was talking about racism in America…. Not how you’d normally hear about racism in America: There weren’t any Republicans involved! This show was specifically on the racism inherent to the New York City school system. Bill DeBlasio has been brutally mismanaging education in the Big Apple, and you know what his response is every time he’s questioned on it? That’s right: They’re doing a study. The City of New York has commissioned almost a hundred studies on various issues pertaining to education since DeBlasio took office, at grievous cost to the taxpayer, and he’s basically ignored them all in favor of progressive policies… Which… obviously aren’t working. And that confuses him…. So he commissions another study.
Hah! Silly me.
Be sure to check out the Manhattan Contrarian for all things idiotic in NYC (among other topics).
It’s gonna be a tough two years. Count on it. Hopefully the voters will get sick of this crap during the next Congressional elections and throw the bums out.
“Just look at the way [the] Black Lives Matter movement spread this past summer.”
like wildfire
Regarding Project Veritas, what is the ethical way to do undercover journalism / investigative reporting?