This time anyway…if I had known they cared, I would have done it years ago!
I jest. Still, it was a shock to see the article “Not Good for Learning: New research is showing the high costs of long school closures in some communities” in yesterday’s New York Times, and even a greater shock to see the author: David Leonhardt, who was one of the most indefensibly partisan of the Times op-ed stable when he was an editorial columnist. (Check his EA dossier, here.)
Yet Leonhardt reveals,
Or, in the alternative, he has finally revealed himself as another aspiring totalitarian progressive. Either way, the doctor is a dangerous, arrogant, power-abusing fool, and it’s way past time to get rid of him.
Last week Dr. Fauci—may he go down in U.S. history as one of the nation’s true villains—said:
“We are concerned about … the courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally a public health decision… This is a CDC issue, should not have been a court issue… It was perfectly logical.”
Yes, he really said this. No, I wouldn’t kid you, he really did. He is Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States. He has been director of the NIAID since 1984. From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And yet he either doesn’t understand the Constitution of the United States, or wants to overturn it in favor of a dictatorship of experts. Ironically, he epitomizes exactly what is wrong with “experts” in so many fields. They tend to be single-minded and locked into tunnel vision. They drift toward favoring processes that favor an “ends justify the means” philosophy. They are ultimately untrustworthy and unethical. Continue reading
I would hope the whole Wuhan virus fiasco would have hammered that principle home by now like a high-grade nail gun, but no. The progressives who want to use “follow the science” as their ploy to inflict the Green New Deal on America aren’t yet willing to try something else, like, say, honesty and responsible policy. So here is another case study…
A peer reviewed University of Washington study called“Mental Health Outcomes in Transgender and Nonbinary Youths Receiving Gender-Affirming Care” was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and immediately became the favorite weapon of the crowd. (The same group holds that questioning the wisdom of this marks one as “transphobic.”) The study instantly made the euphemisms “gender affirming medicine” and “gender affirming care” catch-phrases for pro-trans activists, and it was widely cited or referred to in the media and in political battles over schools’ handling of students with gender issues, real, imagined, or imposed.
The conclusion of the study, we were told, was that the students who received “gender affirming medicine” had significantly better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at the beginning. The news release accompanying the study’s publication stated that “UW Medicine researchers recently found that gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary adolescents caused rates of depression to plummet.”
The study’s release was accompanied by a flashy video that claimed researchers found “gender-affirming care made a big difference in reducing depression levels for transgender youth.”
Well then! Follow the science!
Except that the study didn’t show that. Researchers with an agenda misrepresented the findings to satisfy trans advocates and activists, knowing, I assume, that 99% of those who would exploit the study wouldn’t read it. Unfortunately for them, a few did. One was journalist Jesse Singal, who looked carefully into the researchers’ numbers and couldn’t find convincing data to suggest the mental health of the transgender and nonbinary teens improved over with treatment the course of the research. Thus caught rainbow-handed, The University of Washington this week edited online materials “to more directly reflect the findings as reported in the study.”
April 14 will always be the date that I associate above all else with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which occurred 157 years ago. Lincoln and the audience at Ford’s Theater laughed uproariously, as John Wilkes Booth knew they would, at the line “Why you sockdologizing old man-trap!” in the play the Lincolns and their guests were watching, “Our American Cousin.” Booth fired a single-shot derringer into the back of Lincoln’s skull, dreew a dagger and stabbed Major Rathbone, also in Lincoln’s box along with Mrs. Lincoln and Rathbone’s fiancee, in the arm, and dramatically leaped down onto the stage, shouting Virginia’s motto,“Sic semper tyrannis! (Thus ever to tyrants!) The South is avenged!” Booth caught his spur on a draped flag on the way down and broke his leg, but limped across the stage and out to waiting horse through a back stage exit. Lincoln never regained consciousness.
Not only was it the first and still most spectacular of the four Presidential assassinations [Notice of Correction: I originally wrote “five,” not because I can’t count, which is what usually happens, but because I was counting Reagan, because he was actually shot. Moron. Thanks to Steve-O-in NJ for alerting me, or I’d have to ban myself from the blog for passing on “misinformation”], Booth’s act and subsequent events, oddities and coincidences launched perhaps the first widespread political conspiracy theory. I wrote in 2010,
[A]s a teenager, I became fascinated by the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. A best-seller at the time was “Web of Conspiracy,” an over-heated brief for the theory that Lincoln’s War Secretary, Edwin Stanton, and others in the military were in league with John Wilkes Booth. The author, a mystery writer named Theodore Roscoe, was constantly suggesting sinister motives by asking questions like “The sealed records of the official assassination investigation were destroyed in a mysterious fire. Was the War Department afraid of what the documents would prove? Would they have implicated Stanton? We will never know.” This tactic is on view regularly today, used generously by the purveyors of modern conspiracies…
Then again, sometimes conspiracy theories, even unlikely ones, turn out to be true. There was sure a lot of smoke around Lincoln’s assassination (after all, there really was a conspiracy, as Booth had at least five co-conspirators working on his plot for months), and it didn’t help when Robert Lincoln, Abe’s son, was caught burning his papers and told the man who interrupted him (allegedly) that he was doing so because the contained proof that a member of his father’s own cabinet was involved in his assassination. Yet none of the components of the Lincoln conspiracy narrative have held up to scrutiny, except as tantalizing suspicions.
1. First, the rest of a story...Two weeks ago Ethics Alarms covered the story of Kychelle Del Rosario, a fourth-year medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine, who appeared to admit in a tweet that she deliberately caused pain and discomfort to a patient because he had mocked her “preferred pronoun” pin. After her tweet was seen, circulated and attacked on social media, she deleted it in an attempted cover-up. Wake Forest suspended her pending an investigation, which is now complete. It’s conclusion: Del Rosario was grandstanding, implying that she stuck the patient a second time when she had turned the job over to a supervisor. “Our documentation verifies that after the student physician was unsuccessful in obtaining the blood draw, the student appropriately deferred a second attempt to one of our certified professionals. The student did not attempt to draw blood again,” the university stated.
But had she deliberately missed the vein the first time to punish the “transphobic” patient? Wake Forest believed her statements that she had not, saying, “Our review revealed that the description of the patient encounter on social media does not reflect what actually occurred. We also determined that all of our procedures were followed while caring for this patient.” For her part, Del Rosarion, who expects to be reinstated, said,
“For the event mentioned in the tweet, I was performing a blood draw on a patient and during our conversation they had shown dismay at my pronoun pin,” she said. “I calmly shared my thoughts about pronouns and did not escalate the situation further. When I was doing the blood draw, I missed the first time due to my inexperience as a student, and per our policy, my supervisor performed the successful blood draw the second time….[I] never intended to harm the patient.”
She also wrote an apology to the school for her inflammatory tweet, admitting to “poorly representing” the school and the healthcare system. [Source: Campus Reform] Continue reading
Did you know yesterday was “Transgender Day of Visibility”? That’s funny, it seemed to me that this tiny minority in the U.S. has been disproportionately visible for years. Here’s the Presidents’ obsequious pander:
“To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know your president sees you, Jill, Kamala, Doug, our entire administration sees you for who you are. On this day and every day, we recognize the resilience, strength, and joy of transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. We celebrate the activism and determination that have fueled the fight for transgender equality. We acknowledge the adversity and discrimination that the transgender community continues to face across our nation and around the world. Like never before, they are sharing their stories in books and magazines; breaking glass ceilings of representation on television and movie screens; enlisting — once again — to serve proudly and openly in our military; getting elected and making policy at every level of government; and running businesses, curing diseases, and serving our communities in countless other ways. Despite this progress, transgender Americans continue to face discrimination, harassment, and barriers to opportunity…I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating discrimination against all transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people — and all people.”
I wasn’t exaggerating when I noted in the morning ethics horrors round-up today that March, 2022 was an ethics catastrophe speeding up, if anything, in the month’s waning hours.
The above revolting tweet was authored by Kychelle Del Rosario, a fourth-year medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine. In answer to a tweet by someone complaining about “transphobia,” the future doctor—you know, “First, Do No Harm”?—appeared to admit—with pride!—that she deliberately caused pain and discomfort to a patient because he had mocked her (obnoxious) “preferred pronoun” pin. Then, when her despicable tweet was seen, circulated and justly condemned on social media, she courageously deleted the evidence in an attempted cover-up.
UPDATE: 11:45, 3/30/45: Rock briefly addressed the Smith attack during his concert in Boston tonight, but said nothing substantive about it. “Soooo, how was your weekend?”, he began. After the crowd responded with a standing ovation, Rock continued: “Let me be all misty and shit.I don’t have a bunch of shit to say about that, so if you came here for that…I had written a whole show before this weekend. I’m still processing what happened, so at some point I’ll talk about that shit. It’ll be serious. It’ll be funny, but right now I’m going to tell some jokes.”
And he did.
***
Incredibly, Chris Rock has managed to stay off the Ethics Train Wreck that he unfairly was the catalyst for. Bravo, Chris. This alone makes him a worthy Ethics Hero. Consider:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
Last night in Northern Virginia, I waited to be served at a SubWay behind a young, apparently well-to-do mother and her two children, no more than 5 or 6 years old. All three were tightly masked, though in the cloth variety that are—yes they are— virtually useless. The two women behind the counter were masked, of course, for business and PR reasons. I wasn’t. Also in front of me was a young African-American woman (who ordered a BMT with cucumber, mayo, mustard, oil and vinegar) who also wore a cloth mask, while two young men behind me were unmasked.
For about the tenth time in recent weeks, I had to wrestle my tongue to the floor to avoid asking the masked women in line, “Pardon me, but why are you wearing those things?” and the mother “Why are you forcing those tiny children to walk around with half their faces covered? (I also wanted to ask the woman in front of me, “Mayo, mustard, oil and vinegar all on an Italian sub? What are you, nuts?” But that’s another issue.) Once again, I resisted the urge, but I can feel myself nearing the point where I’m going to do it. In fact, I’m nearing the point where I think it is the duty of Americans who care about the culture, societal values and future as a democracy to challenge the maskers, especially those who are abusing and warping their children.
These people should be made to defend their conduct. It’s not a private matter, not when masks carry a message and send messages to others. There appear to be two varieties of masked Americans, one pathetic and the other sinister: those who wear masks as a symbolic show of solidarity with the statist, totalitarian Left that wants the government to train the “little people” to do and believe what they are told, and those who have been turned into lifetime germaphobes and agoraphobes by media scaremongering, inflated death statistics and incompetent health officials. Every day, in tiny, incremental ways, these two, sometimes overlapping groups are tearing down American individuality, liberty, and the quality of life.
The fact that the radical feminist and pro abortion lobbies did it is no excuse. The party has allowed abortion to corrupt it. There need to be consequences.
The Women’s Health Protection Act would codify Roe v. Wade and make all abortion restrictions illegal. Every Democratic Senator except one—Joe Manchin, of course—voted for the bill yesterday in lockstep with party leaders, despite its brutal, unethical and radical objective. [In the House as well, only one Democrat thought that the lives of full term unborn human babies were worth protecting.] The bill would allow doctors to abort unborn babies at any point in a pregnancy if they determine that allowing the pregnancy to continue to birth “would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”
Note the woke weasel words in that proposed law. Although the title of the bill and the long introductory argument for the law mention women prominently, the proposed wording of the law itself doesn’t mention women anywhere, as an obvious sop to the trans community, which seeks to erase all gender distinctions.
I’m sorry about the rambling headline, but I couldn’t find a short way to summarize just how bad this is.
It is fair to say that we can confidently add the AMA to the ABA and the ACLU as organizations that have decided to abandon their organizational missions to join the ideological assault on the United States, its values, and what our society once agreed upon as democratic and pluralistic priorities. “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” recently approved and released and reading like a high school Junior Marxist Club manifesto, officially injects far Left cant into medical practice, where it does not belong and never has. Doctors are professionals, and as such have a duty to serve the public good using their special skills and knowledge. Being a doctor of medicine, we have learned, imbues one with no special policy expertise, historical perspective of political acumen whatsoever. Consider, just as a sampling, former Senator Bill Frist, Howard Dean, Ben Carson, Rand Paul (most of the time , fortunately retired Virginia Governor Ralph Northam , and, of course, Dr. Fauci.
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