Bitter Harry: Famous Grandchildren Ethics #2

Part I is here.

A London pub has announced that it will be selling a ‘Harry’s Bitter’ beer in response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s tell-all Netflix documentary, “Harry and Meghan” as well as Prince Harry’s family dirty laundry opus, “Spare.” Well-played. For Diana and Charles’ youngest offspring is indeed Bitter Harry, and a weak and rotten Royal to boot.

Because the U.S. is in the throes of The Great Stupid, in part a hangover from the George Floyd Freakout, Harry and his gold-digger spouse Meghan are more popular here than in the UK. Some Americans just enjot seeing the Royal Family shat-upon; some are suckers for those who play the racism victim card, Meghan’s specialty (with Harry’s dog-like assistance), and some were so absurdly smitten with the late Princess Diana, herself often an unseemly publicity addict, that her sons can do no wrong in their eyes. Nonetheless, Harry’s exploitation of his family’s misplaced trust for cash and cheap celebrity is the mark of a royal asshole as well as one whose bitterness has rendered his ethics alarms useless.

What kind of person deliberately reveals—often with dark shading borne of dark agendas—private conversations and family secrets in a manner guaranteed to embarrass, insult and infuriate named relatives and stain the reputation of those who have expired? The answer is… a petty, untrustworthy person. Harry doesn’t need the money, but apparently he needs something else: revenge, probably. He evidently has adopted his late mother’s attitude toward the Royal Family, blames them for her demise, and is doing everything he and his wife can think of to cause them pain.

This is ironic, because the only reason anyone cares a twig for either Harry or his C-list actress wife is his membership in that family. Harry is the epitome of a celebrity who is famous without having done anything constructive, admirable, or praiseworthy. He doesn’t have to work; he was born with the metaphorical silver spoon, and nothing short of treason or murder could remove it—indeed, if British history is any guide, not even those things.

However, he has been relatively cut off, and his wife, at least, wants to make sure they have a bright future ahead of interviews with Jimmy Kimmel, guest spots on sitcoms and starring roles as infomercial pitch-nobles. Thus the plan is to tar King Charles, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Prince William and the rest as racists and creeps, even if it makes Harry and Meghan look creepy too. Creepy celebrities do quite well here.

Maureen Dowd, amusingly snarky with a drop of illumination as usual, writes,

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Equal Time: A Dog’s Life Ethics Update

Having just posted about the mistreatment of cats, it is only fair to note some recent stories involving canine-human interactions.

1. At Gravelly Hill in Caterham, Surrey (that’s in England), a dog-walker was apparently attacked by the dogs she was caring for and mauled to death. There is some question how many dogs she was walking, but it may have been as many as nine. “Eight dogs have been detained” is how some news reports put it. Other reports say that none of the dogs involved were believed to be “dangerous breeds,” meaning none were pit bull breeds or looked like them (which is all a dog needs to be considered a pit bull: looking kind-of, sort-of like what someone thinks a pit bull looks like, meaning that my first Jack Russell which a silly twit started screaming about because she thought he was a pit bull was a pit bull).

Among the culprits were, police believe, a collie, a Leonberger, a cokapoo and two dachshunds. (I’m betting on the dachshunds as the ringleaders.) A Leonberger is a giant breed, typically weighing at least 150 pounds—I’d say a dog that big is potentially “dangerous.” In fact, any dog is dangerous if its in a pack.

Walking that many dogs, whether it was seven or nine, is irresponsible. It’s not fair to the dogs, and obviously perilous to the walker: I’m surprised there haven’t been more tragedies like this. The owners of the dogs are also implicated for entrusting their dogs to over-burdened caretakers.

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Nah, There No Progressive Social Media Platform Bias!

The British political commentary magazine “The Spectator” has published a nearly1400 word explanation for why the cover above was rejected for a Facebook advertisement (an “advert” in Brit-talk) as not complying with the platform’s policies, while these covers…

…were deemed acceptable.

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From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Why Do You Insist On Calling Covid “The Wuhan Virus”?

Because that’s what it is?

I’m actually grateful for the question, because I have become more adamant about resisting the deliberately deceptive misnomer for the virus as time goes on and more information becomes available. In 2020, when the pandemic was just starting to wreck the United States’ on many levels, it was pretty obvious that the virus had its start in the Wuhan province of China. Whether it was from a lab or the (disgusting, third-world level wet markets) was and still is uncertain, but Wuhan is where the first recorded case emerged, and where the pathogen took first hold in December of 2019.

Early on in 2020, then-President Trump and some media sources referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus,” and these useful and descriptive terms were quickly declared unfair, inaccurate, and “racist.” by the Left. Part of the motivation was, I believe, to suck up to China, a corrupt and dangerous nation that too many businesses and industries (like Hollywood and the NBA) view as a profitable target for unprincipled pandering, Another aspect of the linguistic cover-up was to, as usual in the age of The Great Stupid, choose censorship and public confusion in the quixotic and bizarre effort to make certain groups feel “safe” (as in “safe from reality”). Because there are morons who will bully and mistreat Chinese-Americans as “punishment” for a disaster they could not be rationally blamed for, the widiculous woke decreed that the origins and true responsibility for the pandemic must be obscured by technical jargon. Continue reading

Now THIS Is Incompetent Policing! (International Division)

Police in Santa Marta, Colombia, recently published a wanted poster for 12 dangerous criminals in the town, asking the public for help in apprehending them. All are members of the “Los Pachenca” drug cartel and are suspects in a series of crimes committed in Santa Marta in recent months. The published poster (above), however, only mentioned the suspects’ nicknames without revealing their real names, and only generic silhouettes were offered rather than actual photos.

Nevertheless, the police department acted as if their procedure was serious and reasonable. “It is very important that citizens help us identify the people who are affecting life throughout the city,” the police high command said to supplement the poster. “We are going to provide payments for data that allow us to identify them.”

The mockery of the absurdly inept dragnet was instant and relentless. One wag noted that it should be easy to identify cartel members since “they all look identical.”

The department quickly pulled the poster. See? It’s not completely incompetent after all!

Ethics Quiz: The Fake Status Devices

The AcryPhone, created by eKod Works, is literally a piece of acrylic shaped to look like a smartphone. It has no screen, speakers, nor even an LED. What’s it for? Supposedly the fake is for cellphone addicts to wean themselves off addiction to their smartphones. Do you believe that? I don’t. I think that explanation is like the ad copy for those suspiciously shaped battery-powered “massagers” for women that have photos showing a model using it on her neck.

The Acryphone is a prop for insecure people who can’t afford a smartphone or the costs of its service, but who want to look like they can. One reason I am quite certain of this is another product from the same country (Japan) that you see on the right: Stone Watch, a fake smart watch that doesn’t even tell time. The Stone Watches are just glossy, black pieced of plastic with a silicone band so the wearer will look like he or she is using the current fad gadget.

You have a double Ethics Quiz of the Day, and the two questions are,

Is it ethical to pretend to use one of these props in public?

and

Is it ethical to manufacture and sell them?

My tentative answer: they are both visual lies, like a phony Tale diploma hanging on an office wall. Making and selling products that have no legitimate use other than to deceive is itself unethical.

But I am open to being convinced otherwise.

The Most Incompetent Christmas Greeting Ever!

The Askern Medical Practice in Doncaster, England intended to send out a jolly seasonal text to all of its patients wishing them a “very merry Christmas.” Instead, and don’t ask me how this could happen, the mass text told patients they had “aggressive lung cancer” that had metastasized and asked them to fill out form DS1500 for people those have a terminal illness to apply for benefits.

After freaking out many of its patients, the Center texted its “sincere apologies” saying, “This has been sent in error. Our message to you should have read We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” 

I don’t think “Oops! Sorry!” quite makes up for something like this.

Climate Change Media Hype, 2022

The more I think about it, the more the Wuhan virus fiasco strikes me as a microcosm (not too micro, unfortunately) of the climate change hysteria. Both are “Do Something!” debacles; both have demonstrated that those who argue for lock-step compliance with ideologically driven “science” don’t understand the science they demand we bow to. And, as we have seen, the policies applied to both problems have proved to be irresponsible, reckless, expensive, and destructive. Nevertheless, a substantial portion of the population remains brainwashed by climate change hysteria, even those individuals with brains one would think are too substantial to wash, much like the once sane and competent Americans who wear masks alone in their automobiles and while walking their dogs. I am seeing this in my college reunion report, as I slog through hundreds of life stories. A majority of them express terror at the looming climate apocalypse. Their solution is massive “structural change”…you know, “one world” government, though few are bold or honest enough to say so clearly.

Aiding and abetting the hysteria that is so useful to those who find democracy an inconvenience is the mainstream media. Just as it hyped the risks of the pandemic, never clearly explaining that the virus was overwhelmingly a mortal threat only to the already sick, elderly or obese—all the better to justify shutting down schools, businesses, social interaction and the economy, the news media continued to exaggerate and misrepresent the effects of climate change in 2022. Continue reading

From England, A Great Stupid Christmas

Looking on the bright side, it’s heartening to know that after all these years, the United States is still less censorious than our cousins across the pond.

Two British radio stations ( Heart FM and Magic Radio; the BBC is said to be considering following their lead) have censored a line of Johnny Mathis’s song “When a Child Is Born” because of listener complaints that it is “racist.” On the recording of Mathis’s Christmas song that he introduced in the Seventies, the African-American singer speaks about the significance of Jesus’s birth:

And all this happens because the world is waiting–waiting for one child…black, white, yellow, no one knows. But a child that would grow up and turn tears to laughter, hate to love, war to peace, and everyone to everyone’s neighbor. And misery and suffering will be words to be forgotten forever.

What’s the racist part, you well may ask? It’s “yellow!”

“Black”‘s OK for blacks, thought they aren’t really black, and “white”‘s fine for whites, but “yellow” is racist. What is the vernacular for Asian skin-tone, then? Wait, is calling Donald Trump “orange” also racist? Who can keep up with these rules. much less the floating, ever flexible definition of “racist.” What an amazing word: it’s there anything it can’t do? It’s like duct tape or Silly Putty! A black singer speaking about how skin-color is irrelevant can be racist!

Amazing.

A Christmas Music Ethics Spectacular, Final Chorus: Updates And Unfinished Business!

These songs each fall into a special category, so I saved them for last:

E. Creepiest totalitarian lyrics to a Christmas song that was already bad

That would be the 1977  duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing “The Little Drummer Boy.” In Bing’s last (and posthumously broadcast) TV Christmas special, he sang “The Little Drummer Boy” while  Bowie sang something that sounded like John Lennon on a bad day about world peace blahtattty blah in counterpoint.  I found the song retchworthy when I saw it in ’77, but some people actually like it, perhaps because of the spectacle of the greatest American popular music auteur singing with a much younger pop music icon.

Here are the lyrics of Bowie’s section:

Peace on Earth, can it be
Years from now, perhaps we’ll see
See the day of glory
See the day, when men of good will
Live in peace, live in peace again

Peace on Earth, can it be
Every child must be made aware
Every child must be made to care
Care enough for his fellow man
To give all the love that he can

I pray my wish will come true
For my child and your child too
He’ll see the day of glory
See the day when men of good will
Live in peace, live in peace again.

The couplet,

Every child must be made aware
Every child must be made to care

is, I wrote in 1n 2018, ” insidious, creepy, totalitarian, arrogant, and redolent of what we are currently seeing in the schools, with various state and media-approved thought-control efforts…in lesson plans.” Yes, let’s make children care about peace, banning guns, banning fossil fuels, permitting abortion, LGBTQ rights. Make them care about what their programmers care about. I didn’t expect much out of Bowie, but it was Bing’s show, and he didn’t 86 those lyrics as he should have, perhaps because Bing, at least when raising his first family, was big on “making children care” about what he wanted them to care about by physical force if necessary.

F. Most unfairly maligned non-Christmas song played almost exclusively at Christmas

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