The previous open forum, in the midst of Thanksgiving weekend, was a bit of a dud (though EA applauds those intrepid, dieting readers who posted), so I’m hoping for a rebound. This is especially true because I’m swamped all of a sudden with more ethics stories than I can cover with the thoroughness they deserve. And this morning’s paper added to the crisis with six new issues or revealed angles on old ones that need coverage.
See what you can do. I’ll be grateful.
Ethics Alarms 
(the illustration reminded me of this cartoon from when I was a kid)
Thoughts on the lockout:
https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mlb-lockout-a-brief-history-of-mlb-strikes-and-lockouts-as-baseball-enters-first-work-stoppage-in-26-years/amp/
Looking at this article, it kind of confirmed an initial impression of mine: how can you have a lockout in December when everyone is probably home anyway.
The other stoppages mentioned in the article affected or threatened to affect actual play.
Is this just symbolic?
-Jut
I view any lockout or strike related to professional sports as another well earned nail in their coffin. I don’t watch any professional sports and I don’t support professional sports in any way other than whatever tax money is trickled down to them that I can’t do a damn thing about.
I am not sure whether MLB intended the lockout to be something more than putting extra pressure on the players, but it does have some consequences.
Almost all of the content on the MLB website has been removed — you cannot see anything regarding your team, or their roster, or records, or anything like that. I believe they have some historical stories or some such as the only content left.
The other thing is that once MLB declared a lockout, clubs are not permitted to talk with any of the players in any way. So all the free agent negotiations and signing came to a screeching halt. I’m sure there are no practices allowed, no players are allowed in the club houses for training, and who knows how much more.
That’s one reason there was such a frenzy of deals the last part of November — I believe there were something on the order of $2 billion worth of deals, because players and teams were trying to get these things finalized before a potential lockout shut them down.
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I, and I am sure millions of fans, vividly remember when baseball cancelled the World Series in 1994. I think back then there was a decent amount of sympathy towards the players — salaries had not yet exploded for the top tier of players. As well, the owners were historically bad actors towards the players.
It took baseball a decade to get back the attendance they had before 1994. If they have a work stoppage now, I don’t know that they’ll ever recover.
If I understand the dividing line, it sounds like the player’s association feel they got a raw deal in 2016 and they feel they aren’t getting a big enough piece of the pie.
Forgive me, but are they serious? I just read about someone signing a contract for over $40 a year. The Texas Rangers just signed two players for a total of $500 million!
Sheesh!
Baseball is such a great game, it makes me sick to think of it being cancelled again.
I oppose vaccine mandates (especially with medical experiments), I oppose forced use of vaccine passports to exercise our own Liberty and participate in society, I oppose pandemic related economic shutdowns, I completely support anyone choosing not to get the vaccines for whatever reason they see fit, plus I support anyone choosing to get the vaccines. Each person has an innate human right to make medical choices for themself and their dependent children based on whatever information they see fit and it doesn’t matter one bit if I agree or disagree with any particular piece of information.
That said; please watch the following video regarding COVID-19 vaccines.
https://www.brighteon.com/7d55613e-a983-4b52-b884-23d423771900
Looking at the ethical side of this; is it ethical for medical doctors to make, or go along with, assertions like these (and more) in the video…
Again, is it ethical for medical doctors to make, or go along with, assertions like these when these assertions don’t appear to actually be fact based but instead appear to be correlation = causation assertions, aka conspiracy theories, that are presented to specifically target bias and shock the listener on a pure emotional level which is similar to the assertions made by apocalyptic global warming alarmists predicting a climate catastrophe.
Science should be a guide for all critically thinking adults but let’s face it folks, there are so many differing vaccine opinions based on some level of “science” that it can make your head spin, then if you don’t believe the opinion of one “scientist” in favor of another “scientist’s” opinion your tarred as a science denier by those that agree with the “scientist” you disagree with. They all claim to be right based on their own tunnel vision “science”; therefore, they’re all right using science that supports their conclusions and they’re all wrong using science that contradicts their conclusions. So they’re all right and they’re all wrong and we the non scientist dumbasses in the public are supposed to choose between one side or the other. It doesn’t matter which side you agree with, it’s a no win “science” conundrum, you are a science denier no matter what you choose.
I’ve fucking had it with all the medical “science” that’s being presented to the public. It’s clear to me that all these “scientists” don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, they’re making up this shit as they go, they’re hiding relevant information from the public if it doesn’t support their conclusion, and sometimes these trusted “scientists” actually LIE to the public – but of course their lie is a justifiable good lie because they were lying for the betterment of all. I’m more inclined now than I have ever been to put all medical “scientists” and nearly all doctors in the category of charlatans and quacks. To be completely transparent; a long time ago I literally walked out of a doctors consultation room with my son and quacked all the way out the front door and never allowed my son to be treated by that quack again.
Why should I trust any of these “scientists”?
Am I unethically biased?
Scientists should limit themselves entirely to telling us what they observe. The end.
As soon as they start prescribing behavior or reaction to their observations they stop being scientists and start being philosophers and statesmen. Nope, behavior and reactions are entirely up to how the body politic believes our value sets (which cannot be derived from science) best apply to data at hand.
https://www.themainewire.com/2021/02/charlie-bakers-climate-undersecretary-resigns-for-controversial-statements/
This is the blast from the past regarding a climate expert. This is ground zero in the mentality on why we have energy issues that are certainly driving inflation. The zealots took over since day one of this administration and those who can least afford it are getting conned by a group of grifters.
As a disclosure, I own a Tesla, have had solar since 1983, have $15,000 worth of energy windows, energy star appliances, and even a Kobalt electric mower.
A different topic for thought. And since I refuse to use Facebook because of its censoring policy, this is an outlet for me here.
I spent 90 excruciating minutes a couple of weeks ago watching “American Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference”– a PBS documentary which unlike other PBS productions actually tries to relate an unvarnished truth. It is a devastating piece, and oddly, seems to disappear and then reappear on Amazon.
I knew a fair amount about all this from my history reading, but this was much more. It has real photographic documentation (e.g., a photo of a document about Jewish immigration to the US, with a handwritten note: “Ignore… [signed] FDR”); and a detailed photograph of the State Department’s Breckenridge Long’s advisory to US consulates worldwide about ways in which they could delay Jews’ emigration to the US between 1940 and 1944 – not coincidentally when 6 million died at the hands of the Nazis.
Slavery, our original sin, is not the topic here. And yes, we denigrated and mistreated the Irish, Italian and Chinese immigrants, but at least they were allowed to come here and had a chance to live. Not so for the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe when the Final Solution arrived. The horrible truth is that it was not a primary cultural or bias problem among the general population that condemned so many innocent Jews, including children, to death, but a persistent and sinister State Department policy.
Roosevelt was accountable, even if he may not have been guilty of hostility to Jewish immigrants himself. Breckenridge Long is the true villain that emerges from the documentary, but it was FDR who allowed him to have the power he did.
Long had supported FDR’s 1933 presidential run; they knew each other from the Wilson administration. When World War II began, Roosevelt asked Long to return to the State Department as an Assistant Secretary of State. serving in that position until his resignation in November 1944. Among Long’s duties was overseeing the Visa Division, which handled the issuing of American immigration and transit visas at consulates overseas.
In 1940, ten days after France’s surrender to the Nazis, Long wrote a memo to other State Department officials suggesting ways to stop all immigration in the interests of national security. He suggested that consular officers “put every obstacle in the way and require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative advices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.”
Long worried that some of the refugees were communists or Nazis, were not legitimately in danger or would be security threats, and convinced President Roosevelt to limit the number of names FDR’s advisory committee on refugees could submit for visas. He continued to encouraged consular officials to use their power to deny visas, even for those recommended by the Advisory Committee on Political Refugees.
In July 1941, spurred by Long, the State Department announced that all visa applications needed to be reviewed in Washington, DC by an interdepartmental visa review committee made up of the State and Justice Departments, military intelligence, and FBI personnel. The idea was to add more red tape to the already long and difficult immigration process. Again, FDR stood by and allowed this to happen even as reports of Nazi persecution of the Jews became impossible to deny. Long, meanwhile, tried to stop intelligence about the mass murder from reaching the United States, fearing that it might cause public pressure on the State Department.
In November 1943, the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs held hearings on a bipartisan resolution that called on FDR to create and implement plans to rescue European Jews. Breckenridge Long testified that the State Department had accepted 580,000 refugees since 1933, and was still working diligently to assist refugees. It was a lie. The actual number was far less than half of Long’s claim. In January 1944, the US Treasury Department discovered Long’s efforts to suppress information about the Holocaust, and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau finally confronted President Roosevelt, demanding that Long be removed and that State Department policies regarding Jewish refugees be changed. Some were saved by Morganthau’s intervention, but the State Department’s hostility had persisted to the point of complicity with murder.
See https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-timeline/
Find the film and watch it if you are so inclined. It will change your view of the US and the world. And it will prove forever that that dear poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty is simply delusionary cant. We picked and chose our “huddled masses” and did so with prejudice. Not necessarily an unusual thing, because many nations do it, but it does put to bed our totally false mythology about the glory of our ‘nation of immigrants.’
I read an interesting book called “The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior” about British incarceration camps in Canada at the beginning of the war. It was an interesting look at British attitudes about refugees from Germany.
Not only suspicious Germans living in Britain or captured P.O.Ws, but also apolitical merchant seamen and cabin boys were picked up and shipped off to Canada. Incarcerated with them were sometimes Jews who had fled Germany for England.
There was generally a hearing at first to determine what level of threat a German national posed. But there was usually only one judge and the discretion was left to him to decide what threat level the person was tagged with. Jews were sometimes only asked if they loved their country. Many of them still did. But some English judges couldn’t see the difference between loving one’s country and not loving the regime in charge. Others assumed that, regardless of what suffering a person was subjected to, his or her loyalties will always lie with the home country, right or wrong. There was also some concern that spies and saboteurs were among the refugees.
Thus is was that Jewish refugees ended up in camps side by side with unrepentant Nazis and were sometimes brutalized there, too.
I can’t say whether or not those considerations affected U.S. Policy. I still maintain that the United States could not possibly have recognized that Germahy planned to systematically murder the Jews of Europe. There were certainly bigots in the government, but that doesn’t mean that Roosevelt, facing isolationism at home and accusations that he was trying to start a fight with Germany, knew he was condemning the refugees to their deaths. The last U.S. Ambassador was recalled a week after Kristallnacht and was never replaced, though there were a couple of chargé d’affaires there til the end of 1941.
Our host has also recommended the excellent book called, “The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust” by Rafael Medoff.
We’re one (1) month away from the 11th anniversary of something that would have made ENRON seem like a neighborhood bake sale.
On 01/03/2011, a “Who’s Who” of rent-seeking Lefties (Gore, Soros, Franklin Raines [deep-sixer of Fannie Mae], Maurice Strong, Barack Obama, the Lefty Foundations, et al, HIT THE WALL when the the Chicago Climate Exchange [CCX] was quietly shuttered after failing to fulfill its one task: Enriching Gucci-Slippered Carbon Traders and generating ten$ of Trillion$ out of thin air.
“When founded in November 2000, CCX’s carbon trading market was predicted to grow anywhere between $500 billion and $10 trillion.”
‘Course, $10 Trillion’s jes’ one more’n $9, am I right?
From the Gosh, Who Coulda Seen THIS Happening Files:
REPORT: Kamala Harris’ Staffers Leaving White House In Part Because They Fear Being Labeled A ‘Harris Person‘
“A growing list of Harris staffers are heading out the door amid internal chaos and disastrous poll numbers.”
Idiot student claims he was joking about carrying out a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland:
https://www.aol.com/news/parkland-florida-student-arrested-school-130719687-195131742.html
Of course, he’s arrested. His post reads just like a joke and that’s what I figured it was before the article mentioned the joke claim.
So here we are again. He should have known better. Is his post protected speech? Is this overreach?
Interesting article.
http://fpif.org/if-you-think-vaccine-mandate-pushback-is-bad/
The author of that article is a delusional, totalitarian psychopath.
A tweet from Ben Shapiro.
This is actually a very good point.
How can people who support cutting welfare benefits credibly object to some punk kid killing a homeless person as part of a gang initiation?
From the Gosh, Who Coulda Seen THIS Happening Files 2.0:
ZERO Bail Policy UNDER SCRUTINY As LAPD Announces 14 Smash-n-Grab Suspects Are All Out Of Custody
Both LAPD Chief Michel Moore and LA Mayor Eric Garcetti call for an end for the county’s $0 bail policy.
(bolds/italics mine throughout)
Moore: “Zero bail poses a challenge when their next court appearance is in March…(a)s we evolved through this (COVID-19 shut-down), there’s criminal elements that are recognizing that condition, and are capitalizing on it,”
Garcetti: “There are people who need to be behind bars,”
Gutless career Lefty LA DA George Gascón, (wants to end bail across the board for misdemeanor, non-violent and non-serious felony offenses) sends errand boy/lackey Alex Bastian to slobber unconvincingly: “These brazen acts hurt all of us: retailers, employees and customers alike,”
Incuriously missing from the DA office’s release? Any mention of the perps, their responsibility, or what WILL be done to address this.
An update on the University of Austin. I’m sure everyone remembers the post Jack put up on this new university experiment a few weeks ago.
I was watching a pod cast from the Hoover Institute (Goodfellows, a weekly pod cast that is quite worth watching). One of the people on the pod cast is a University of Austin founder. I’m sure we all wondered how well they would do with this project.
Niall Ferguson said that within a few weeks of the UofA announcement, they received 3000 emails from professors asking about when they would be hiring. They also received 5000 emails from prospective students interested in attending or taking classes there.
That does sound very encouraging, although we all know there will be a number of obstacles ahead — perhaps the biggest one, to my mind, will be getting accredited.
In any case, I wish them the best.