San Francisco spends $5 million a year on a so-called “managed alcohol program,” giving homeless alcoholics beer,wine and shots of vodka to “manage” their addiction. This deranged program has been running for four years without getting much media attention. I suppose so many other things are being mishandled in this rotting city that this one slipped under the radar. The theory underlying program is designed to minimize the amount of alcohol homeless people drink to control their addiction. It would be starnge indeed if this were a legitimate approach, since medical professionals make it very clear that drinking any alcoholic beverage (or mouthwash) makes recovery from alcoholism impossible, and “maintenance drinking” is ultimately a failed and often fatal strategy. Alcoholism is a progressive disease as well, so the longer a drunk is drinking, the more damage alcohol does to his or her body.
In the most woke-ravaged city in North America, nurses typically serve the homeless drunks the the equivalent of of one or two drinks three to four times a day, either a shot of vodka or other liquor, a glass of wine, or 12 nearly a pint of beer. The taxpayers of San Francisco must truly be brainwashed to tolerate seeing their hard-earned dollars going to pay for drinks for winos, killing them slowly at the city’s expense.
The only responsible way to get alcohol addicted street people out of the metaphorical gutter and on the way to recovery and a productive, happy life is to put them in a rehabilitation program, monitor their recovery, and take satisfaction from the relative few who will go on to live addiction-free lives. Giving them just enough alcohol to keep them dependent as their liver fail isn’t merely futile and misguided, it’s cruel.
Happy Mother’s Day. It’s not going to be a happy one at the lonely Marshall house, though my sister and I will be having dinner to celebrate her motherhood as well as the two dead mothers in the family. She talked me out of bringing Grace’s urn to the dinner, as I expected she would. I’m still tempted.
In more dark news, it seems a cruel twist of fate that the major event in U.S. history that occurred on this date was the discovery of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby, dead. Happy Mother’s Day!
On to the ethics inventory…
1. About that Trump trial…I haven’t written much about Alvin Bragg’s blatantly political and partisan prosecution of Donald Trump in New York. I’m not there and it’s not being broadcast; meanwhile, the news media is setting new records for completely slanted and biased coverage: going back and forth among Fox News, MSNBC and CNN is like visiting parallel universes. But even a legal analyst on CNN confessed that the prosecution had yet to prove any crime had been committed, and it seems clear that the judge’s decision to allow Stormy Daniels to testify extensively about the alleged sexual activities engaged in with the former President guarantees a guilty verdict being thrown out. From what I can determine, the judge should throw out any guilty verdict as a matter of law, because guilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be legitimately found when the two primary witnesses for the prosecution are as inherently unbelievable as Daniels and Michael Cohen, who is a disbarred lawyer, a disgruntled former employee of Trumps, and an admitted perjurer. Jonathan Turley, who has registered his utter contempt for this case (recent posts here, here, and here), had a funny line about waiting to see if the courthouse is struck by lightning when Cohen takes the oath before testifying.
It is so clear, in listening to the MSNBC and CNN commentary on the trial as well as print and online accounts like Maureen Dowd’s column“Donnie After Dark” that the real objective of this trial is to humiliate Trump and expose his “bad character.” This is not an ethical or legitimate use of the justice system, but Democrats are committed to it. How desperate they are. I was thinking about this even as I laughed at Jerry Seinfeld’s movie sharply tweaking Democratic icon Jack Kennedy’s serial adultery and sex addiction: after JFK, after Bill Clinton, and with a their own current President credibly accused of rape and caught on film sniffing and touching young girls as his own daughter’s diary documents them showering together, this is the best they can muster to impugn Trump? And how many Trump supporters are under the delusion that he has embraced high moral and ethical values in his private life? if anything, Trump’s handling of the lawfare assault on him has raised my opinion of his character. His determination and resilience are amazing. He epitomizes the lesson of “Laugh-In” comic Henry Gibson’s favorite poem (by Frank Lebby Stanton), “Keep A-Goin’.”
In her speech, Pelosi argues that voters are “blocked” from making good, rational decisions and voting Democrat because of their culture and views on God
“[T]hese poor souls who are looking for some answers….we’ve given them to them, but they are blocked by some of their views on the three G’s: guns, gays, and God—that would be a woman’s right to choose—and these cultural issues cloud their reception to an argument that is really in their interests.”
—-Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (D-Cal.) appearing at an Oxford Union debate to take the position that populism is a threat to democracy in the United States.
Let me get a compliment out of he way and on the record up front: Pelosi showed guts by appearing in this forum, and that is worthy of a measure of respect. Of course, her daring may be less attributable to guts than hubris, arrogance, or stupidity, because her position is indefensible from a Jeffersonian and Madisonian point of view and stating it in a public forum demonstrates that the totalitarian disease now rampaging through the Democratic Party has so corrupted its values that leaders like Pelosi no longer are capable of realizing how repulsive its ideology has become. Continue reading →
Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-odlCalifornia teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well.
A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.
I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.
Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”
Or, “Why It’s Unethical to Behave in Defiance of Reality.”
Or, “Why the old saw ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is constantly being affirmed.”
Or, “Why progressive wishcraft keeps blowing up in society’s metaphorical face”
Sanai Graden (left), a University of California at Berkeley senior (presumably you know what that means) was hit up by a homeless man as she visited Washington, D.C. He said his name was Alonzo, and told her he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The sympathetic young woman paid for his medication at CVS. She also got him a hotel room for the night. Sanai was a TikToker , and told her followers that she needed to raise money for Alonzo, whom she called “Unc.” Soon she bought Alonzo, aka. “Unc,” a cell phone, and put him up in a hotel for a week.
Awwww. How Christian! How kind! How progressive!
Her video became a Tik Tok sensation, with millions of views. Graden started a GoFundMe account, and it quickly raised more than $400,000. Her legion of followers multiplied: one admirer set up a GoFundMe for her that eventually raised over $26,000.
Isn’t that a nice story?
Then a report from local D.C. TV station Fox 5 revealed that “Unc” was Alonzo Hebron, 64, a long-time criminal who numbered among his convictions one for a violent assault on a homeless woman. In another, he stabbed a man in the neck with a screwdriver. Donors started asking for their money back.
The ethical principle at issue here shouldn’t be hard: “Do your job.” Unfortunately, it is apparently too hard for the scientists and researchers at Scientific American. Just as American journalism, sports teams, the entertainment industry–ethicists!— and others have been unable to resist the siren song of political activism, the once reliable and trustworthy general consumption science magazine so essential to my early education in the subject has capitulated to wokeness and now feels that its mission of exploring and explaining science to non-scientists includes political and partisan advocacy.
Will going woke mean, as the saying goes, that “S.A.” (as its friends call it) will “go broke”? Time will tell. This kind of beach of trust, integrity and mission, however, deserves to be fatal.
This week, the magazine unveiled its criticism of news media reporting on the campus pro-Hamas demonstrations. Science! In fact, the article is little more than a standard progressive rationalization of the protests. It is transparently presented with rhetoric that suggests legitimate scientific inquiry, (“For over a decade, my research has extensively explored…”) but the author isn’t a scientist. She’s a professor of journalism; more to the point, she’s a black community activist journalist clearly in the intersectionality and advocacy journalism camps:
“I mispoke and I regret it,” was the serial head-exploding Democratic governor of New York’s attempt at backtracking after she claimed, during a speech at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, “Right now we have, you know, young black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word “computer” is. They don’t know. They don’t know these things.”
“Of course black children in the Bronx know what computers are — the problem is that they too often lack access to the technology needed to get on track to high-paying jobs in emerging industries like AI,” Hochul said in her desperate mea culpa. “That’s why I’ve been focused on increasing economic opportunity since Day One of my Administration.”
If it’s really “Of course,” Governor, then why did you say what you said? And emphasize it three times?
Hochul’s scripted smear of the black children in her state triggered instant, if in some cases restrained, condemnation from her own party. “I’m deeply troubled by the recent statements made by Governor Kathy Hochul,” wrote New York State Assembly Member John Zaccaro Jr.in a statement. “The underlying perception conveyed about Black and brown children from the Bronx is not only disheartening but also deeply concerning.” Assembly Member Karines Reyes tweeted that she was “deeply disturbed” by Hochul’s remarks and “the underlying perception that she has of Black & brown children from the BX” because “Our children are bright, brilliant, extremely capable, and more than deserving of any opportunities that are extended to other kids,” Reyes wrote. “Do better.” Assembly Member Amanda Septimo called Hochul’s comments “harmful, deeply misinformed, and genuinely appalling,” adding that the Governor was “repeating harmful stereotypes.” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie described Hochul’s remarks as “inartful and hurtful.”
(But claims by Donald Trump that the election was “rigged” are “baseless” and supported by no evidence at all….).
Ben Smith, the former media columnist for the New York Times, is hardly an unbiased interviewer when it comes to his old employer. He’s a product of the Times culture, and the Times culture is, has been and continues to be corrupted and unethical. The message of his recent interview with newish executive editor Joe Kahn is that the Times is all better now and is objective again after a teeny dip, though it hasn’t been objective in my lifetime.
What is revealing about the interview, however, is that if one can wade through the doubletalk, careful caveats, avoidance of direct statements and verbosity, Kahn admits that the Times was in the tank for Biden and the Democrats in 2020 as the pandemic and Black Lives Matter hit, and that it was wrong for the Times to do that, and they are really, really sorry and promise not to do it again.
Strangely, the Times has not apologized to Donald Trump, Republicans, the American voters and the Founders for this. His statement also puts in perspective the rote talking point, every time the news media sneeringly refers to Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him, that the claim is “baseless.” That the leader of the U.S. news media still regarded as the role model for the rest deliberately abandoned its already partisan-biased version of journalism for pure advocacy and propaganda in the year of a national election is very much a “base.” Ethics Alarms, among others, has said so, and was saying so in 2020. Remember those scary (and fake) Hunan virus death charts with red spikes reaching through and above the mast head? Yeah, I think we got a little carried away, says Kahn.
Oh, well that’s okay then. Everybody makes mistakes….
The man is, in order, as expert at avoiding speaking plainly as any politician, infuriatingly equivocal, blatantly partisan, and a master of spin. Nonetheless, if you can pick your way through all the fog, the confession is there. Here are some key sections with some commentary by me):
Ben Smith: “Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?”
Joe Kahn: “Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election. To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear. It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening. It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one.”
And I have absolutely no faith or trust in this arrogant and rotting (a bad combination) institution. But I still didn’t think its leadership could be this stupid. Hence my brains and skull fragments being all over the ceiling…
Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker will be Maria Ressa, the CEO of the Philippines-based news site Rappler and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Sounds Harvard-y eneough, doesn’t she? Except that in January, Ressa signed a letter accusing Israel of “unabated killing of journalists in Israeli airstrikes since the start of the Israel-Gaza war”while calling for “immediate end to the bombardment of journalists and apparent targeting in some cases of our colleagues in Gaza and the region.” (This a dubious accusation at best.)
I gave a legal ethics seminar 90 minutes after finding my wife dead, and these infants are too traumatized to take their exams because of a “horrific time on campus” and their “level of distress”:
Ethics Alarms 