I’m dreading tomorrow. I have a lively, interesting and strange life, but in almost two years since Grace died, I have concluded that 1) I really hate being single, 2) I didn’t tell her how much I loved her enough, 3) I see no possible path to ever having serious female companionship again, and 4) it is amazing that I had the four serious romantic relationships I did have, since all of them were started by the women involved, because in that realm, I am and have always been the ultimate weenie.
The compensating factor is that I have known, admired and loved an amazing group of brilliant, talented, powerful, funny, strong, tough and challenging women over the years—my mother and younger sister qualify—and all of them either married someone else, or scared off men so much that they never married at all.
But enough whining: Last night I was musing about how to find more reliable, non-ideological news aggregators. There may not be any. Ann Althouse likes memeorandum, which I have come to realize is as partisan as the old Drudge Report. Mirabile dictu, I woke up this morning and without even searching for it, stumbled over an article from last spring titled, “10 Great News Aggregator Websites You Should Check Out in 2025.” I use some of them, including #10, which despite its ostentatious leftward bias is great source of marginal news, but I was not aware of many of the others, including The Morning News, #8.
Longtime reader Fred spent a couple years being my ethics story scout, and while many of you regularly send me links and suggested stories (and I am duly grateful), I’ve never felt like I have been close to covering my dauntingly vast (and important) topic since Fred went on other pursuits.
Now please, make some noise. I’ll be listening…
Ethics Alarms 
Well, there’s this for the day before Valentine’s Day: Winter Olympics athletes’ village runs out of condoms in just THREE DAYS as one competitor moans: ‘They promised us more will arrive’ | Daily Mail Online
Kind of brings an entirely new perspective to “the Olympic spirit,” not to mention, “The Wild World of Sports.”
Interesting how the organizers’ objective is to facilitate absolutely as much sex as possible but to, at all costs, prevent pregnancies. They talk about a concern for the health of the athletes, but seem to have no concern whatsoever for their mental and emotional health. That’s hook up culture, I suppose.
Hey man. The world of women and love is a crazy one. All men feel a bit confused at times. I’m sure the loss still hurts you a lot.
I don’t have any good advice here, as my relationship of ten years recently ended (I think).
For the open forum, I recently visited a new Chick Fil A, and they have two lanes for the drive thru, one for regular users and another for mobile users. The mobile users only have a QR code to scan. The workers are standing on the other side, forcing anyone who doesn’t want to use a QR code but use the “quicker” mobile side to flag down a worker or just go inside. I find that incredibly annoying.
I vaguely remember you saying something about how smart phones should not be required for basic tasks (I think). If that was you, I agree.
I concur on that. “Smart Phones Should Not Be Requited For Basic Tasks.”
Unless my memory is garbled, I once needed a smart phone app to pay for street parking on the University of Rochester campus. It wasn’t more than a couple of dollars, but (IIRC) I had to pay with an app and a credit card.
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Another example…
There is a parking garage right next to the downtown branch of the Rochester Public Library (actually it’s the branch annex across the street that the garage is next to. Since the library is built on a foundation that sticks out over the Mighty Genesee River). Anyway…to get out of the garage I think they want you to use a credit card. Perhaps that is almost as bad, IDK. Doubtless it makes sense to the agency that runs the parking garages. .
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More generally…
Some of it is the drive to go “cashless.”
There must be two types of businesses–those comfortable with cash and those that are just trying to go cashless entirely. My buddy Joel has an anecdote about going to some sort of event and wanting to pay with cash and they gave him a “You Idiot” look. Because it was a big transaction (maybe it was a certain type of antique auction) and it made more work for the people collecting money.
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I blame in part the youngsters who Venmo everything. Maybe it’s progress, IDK.
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Come to think of it, rumor has it that the Sicilian heroin traffickers who brought us the “Pizza Connection” (Claire Sterling’s _Octopus_ is the book to read…or there are many other enjoyable books) liked the pizza business in part because it was a cash business.
Cash is complicated. Life is complicated.
Academics discuss the desire of the state to make society “legible.” I think that lingo comes from James C. Scott’s _Seeing like a state_.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
We had to put our 11 year old Golden Retriever to sleep yesterday. I so much hate having to make that kind of decision, and we always second guess ourselves. I’m sure many pet lovers reading this will understand the feeling.
I know that we did the right thing, although he seemed to be otherwise healthy, the cancerous tumor had grown to the point where it was affecting his quality of life. This is the 3rd Golden Retriever we’ve lost to cancer; one would think we’d have learned our lesson by now. I don’t think I could go through this again.
May your doggie rest in peace chasing squirrels, cats, and cars in Doggie Heaven.
jvb
“I’m sure many pet lovers reading this will understand the feeling.”
My sincere condolences! I posted THIS 77 months ago; the last sentence rings true to this day.
PWS
Oh no. I’m so sorry. I’ve gone through that trauma six times, and I can make myself cry by thinking about any of them. And so many people don’t understand…
Thanks to all for your kind words. It means a lot. Our vet sent us the following quote after our previous Golden, the inimitable neighborhood favorite son, Tacoma passed away.
Sadly, our vet was out sick yesterday, but she did call us during the procedure, which made it a bit easier for us as we were in a ‘foreign’ facility with a group of compassionate strangers.
“We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.
We cherish memory as the only certain immortality,
never fully understanding the necessary plan.”
Irving Townsend
I know I’ll get over this and return to my normal curmudgeonly state, but its going to take a while. Perhaps watching a leftist network news program this evening will snap me out of it.
Dang. I’ve lost beloved dogs in the past, too. It’s never easy. Yes, you did the right thing. Yes, you are still going to be feeling bad for a bit. Experiencing pain is the risk we take when we choose to love. It’s how we know the love was real.
Take care, friend.
Condolences. It’s always sad to see a beloved pet journey across the rainbow bridge.
A couple of years ago in the lead-up to a mid-February Hallmark holiday, I published an essay about the best romance films produced by Classic Hollywood.
Nearly every entry on my list also qualifies as an ethics film. (I guess those are the most interesting.)
Here is an answer from Quora.
https://www.quora.com/Will-the-white-liberals-in-Minnesota-fight-against-ice-go-down-like-Vietnam-as-one-of-the-only-time-the-United-States-was-defeated/answer/Sara-Kopper
nd, for the latest news bulleting from the Olympics:
https://babylonbee.com/news/fraud-suspicions-arise-as-somali-team-wins-734th-gold-medal-at-winter-olympics?utm_source=The%20Babylon%20Bee%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email
As a heads up, there’s a Braver Angels national conversation about ICE on Thursday, February 19th. If you’d like to respectfully express your concerns about illegal immigration and what policies you think are necessary to deal with it, you can sign up at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/national-debate-ice-registration-1981202637421?discount=BRAVER.
Here are key parts of the description:
“You probably haven’t experienced anything like a Braver Angels Debate. This is a highly structured conversation in which a group of people think together, listen carefully to one another, and allow themselves to be touched and perhaps changed by each other’s ideas. When done well, everyone walks out a little closer to the truth, more aware of the validity in opposing views, and with tighter community relationships.”
“On January 7, 2026, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent named Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good in the course of ICE’s deployment to Minneapolis to conduct immigration enforcement operations. Three weeks later, on January 24, ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, another Minneapolis resident.
“In the hours and days following each event, video footage capturing the shootings from different angles proliferated, sparking protests in Minneapolis and other American cities. Events in Minneapolis have sparked a national conversation about ICE, President Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics, and the limits of federal authority. Were officers’ uses of force legal? Are ICE immigration raids in major metropolitan areas justified? Are protesters unlawfully obstructing federal agents in the execution of their duties? Should ICE be abolished, or is it necessary?
“What do you think? We want to hear all perspectives on this matter of pressing public concern.”
Thanks, EC. I hope some of the participants here will be involved.
No V-Day talk? Might I recommend some reading material? I finished “Anna Karenina” this week. I also read “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway, “Emma” by Jane Austen, “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley and “My Antonia” by Willa Cather.
I am heading into “David Copperfield”. Remember me as a peacemaker!
Who here is tired of having the same arguments over and over? When someone says something you believe is wrong, do you feel frustrated at having to choose between biting your tongue or getting drawn into yet another circular debate?
What would your ideal outcome for a political discussion look like? Do you want people to recognize that you are a decent, thoughtful, caring person even though you disagree with them? Do you want them to understand why your perspective is important? Do you want them to rethink their own beliefs? Do you want to have meaningful conversations about how to address society’s problems?
I’m not certain what you mean by “the same arguments over and over.”
I would enjoy seeing a list of “arguments we have over and over again”, in a way similar to the manner in which Our Leader Jack Marshall has catalogued the various “Unethical Rationalizations and Misconceptions,” duly numbered.
For example..
“The King’s Pass”
“It Isn’t What It Is”
and
“There Are Worse Things”
charles w abbott
rochester NY
https://ethicsalarms.com/rule-book/unethical-rationalizations-and-misconceptions/
Sorry, there were some assumptions baked into my original question. I will rephrase.
“For those here who find themselves having the same arguments over and over, whether with the same person or different people, are you tired of it?” Et cetera.
That’s an interesting question. Offhand, I’d say examples of repetitive arguments include:
What do you think?
That’s a great answer. It’s a good start to cataloguing what I think we are talking about.
I’m a big fan of the blogger / economist Arnold Kling. He talks about
“The three languages of politics.”
Mostly I picked up Professor Kling’s ideas by osmosis, because I have never read his book. I won’t take the trouble to expand them here–there is a lot online.
Economists talk about “substitution effects and income effects” as a response to changes in prices. They also talk about “moral hazard.”
I don’t know where to start exactly, but we could sketch out some vocabulary entries as well as useful aphorisms.
For example, Thomas Sowell has the aphorism “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” That aphorism has a certain usefulness when looking at drug prohibition, for example.
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For example, I could give you the old George Will article citation–Alcohol is legal and cheap and readily available–so it takes its toll throughout the population.
With illegal markets it concentrates the markets in certain areas, among certain sub-cultures, and produces violence to enforce contracts and property rights.
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I can only write here in dribs and drabs.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
P.S.: Much of what I think you are talking about has to do with the measurement of effects. Those are *empirical questions* regarding quanties, number of persons, amount of goods purchased, number of lives lost, etc.
Yeah, supplying words to make important concepts easier to think about is part of the goal of Visionary Vocabularies. One of the more recent concepts I’ve codified is “thermostat politics”: the unnecessary conflict created by fixation on controlling a single variable, when zooming out would reveal opportunities for win-win solutions.
Empirical questions are of limited use if we haven’t yet expanded our awareness of our options and our goals. Once we can see the possibilities and priorities, we can empirically judge which options get us the most of what we want. That’s just basic engineering, at least as I understand it.
Another repetitive argument:
If I may, here is a recommendation.
There is a book you may find useful that engages in sustained empirical analysis of a few controversial topics.
The book is _One nation undecided: Clear thinking about five hard issues that divide us_. By Peter Schuck. Published by Princeton University Press in 2017 or thereabouts.
If nothing else, the book has a long, thorough discussion of what makes a topic “hard.” I don’t remember the details. The book is long.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691191584/one-nation-undecided
thanks for reading my post.
charles w abbott
rochester NY