The above is as close as I can get to the approximate predominant color of the bruise that runs from just above my left hip to below the back if my left knee. The thing is about ten inches across at its widest point. Then there’s the swelling, which reminds me of a joke in “City Slickers.” Thanks to everyone who has sent good wishes, both here and off site. I’m just embarrassed and frustrated, while metaphorically kicking myself for not buying that standing desk I was considering a few years ago. Right now, I’m just going to try to catch up a bit…

1. Apparently the Axis is really  going with the “threat to democracy” narrative. I was watching the News Mix channel on DirectTV. Fox News is nestled between CNN and MSNBC, so you can watch all three channels at once. In the time that Fox was covering rising crime rates (and WaWa pulling stores from Philadelphia after a mob ransacked one outlet), police officers getting shot, the latest inflation numbers, the border mess, and the Justice Dept. being sued to force an explanation for why it allowed illegal protests in front of SCOTUS justices’ homes, the other two networks never budged from reports on the Jan. 6 Star Chamber, backed by films of the riot that occurred 21 months ago. News! Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias… Continue reading →

Actually, when we first heard of David Leavitt, a gaming writer with delusions of grandeur, the Ethics Alarms verdict was not that he was an ethics villain, because the particular misconduct that sparked that 2020 post wasn’t quite dastardly enough (or maybe I was in a charitable mood). That was after he had found a mislabeled electric toothbrush (priced at $0.01 rather than $100) at Target, and when the checkout employee refused to sell the item at what was obviously an erroneous price and the store manager backed up the clerk, David went on a full-bore campaign of vengeance on Target.

“This [Target] manager Tori is not honoring the price of their items per Massachusetts law,” tweeted Leavitt, including the young manager’s photo. He called the police on the manager, and said he was prepared to take her and the store to court. Recognizing an ethically-dead progressive determined to harass evil corporations, disgusted observers started a GoFundMe page that raised $28,000 to cover the victimized manager’s inconvenience. The law Leavitt cited but never bothered to check in fact says that an obvious pricing error, one that qualifies as “gross,” isn’t enforceable. I wrote in part:

Leavitt is being an asshole, in technical terms. He knows the price posted was a mistake. A decent, fair, rational citizen would accept that, alert the store that it needs to fix the label, and stop at that. Maybe such a citizen will get some kind a reward from the store (this once happened to me). Instead, this epic jerk goes, in the immortal words of Marsellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction,” “Medieval on Target’s ass,” and its poor manager too. His rationalization for his appalling behavior, and this is rich, is that he can’t afford to go to the dentist, so, presumably, he believes this entitles him to steal an electric toothbrush from Target…

I also wrote that I almost felt sorry for David because he had made a national fool of himself. I don’t feel sorry for him after his latest example of ethics rot. He obviously learned nothing, and indeed has decided to step a notch, several, in fact, from asshole to Ethics Villain.

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I really hate to do this, because there is a lot to write about, but I’m going to have to open up the blog to reader commentary early this week. I took a nasty fall in a (poorly lit, dangerous) hospital parking lot two days ago, and now have a bruise the approximate size of South Dakota in my sitting area, bowling ball-level swelling, and skinned fingers on both hands. In order of painfulness, I’d rank them sitting, bending over (I had to get my son to tie my shoes), getting into the car, lying down, walking and typing. Standing still isn’t too bad. Plus I’m commuting back and forth to that hospital.

I hope I can figure out a way to get out some posts—you would not believe how long this pathetic entry took and how many times I had to re-arrange the pillows.

Thoughts...

• That Columbus sketch was recorded in 1961. Was Stan Freberg ahead of his time , or what?
• Boy, Paul Fries did a great Orson Welles impression!
• Ethics Alarms has blown hot and cold on Columbus Day; you can read (or reread) the negative take from nine years ago here. Still, he was a brave man and a visionary, and attention must be paid.
• And yet in the daily feature “This Day in History” for today, Columbus isn’t mentioned, perhaps because the “New World” was sighted on October 11. The stupid Monday holiday rule makes no sense when it is linked to an actual event with an established date. Columbus’s big moment at least deserves the right date.

1. Elon Musk can’t take over soon enough for me. Twitter, right on cue, proved its totalitarian inclinations by banning this tweet on the pretense that it was “misinformation”:

It wasn’t misinformation, just information that upsets a progressive, vaccine Nazi narrative. Eventually Twitter was shamed into reinstating the announcement, but it doesn’t matter: again, this is signature significance. A trustworthy platform doesn’t do this, not even once. Prof. Turley on his blog was astute enough to remind us that years ago, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.” Got it. [Pointer: Steve Witherspoon]

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