Health and Medicine

More Amazing Stories Of The Great Stupid! FEMA Tells Us How To Avoid Getting The Wuhan Virus During A Nuclear Attack…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Do you wonder why fewer and fewer Americans trust their government? The reason is simple: the government is stuffed with idiotic bureaucrats who presume to tell us how to live our lives when they repeatedly demonstrate that they are fools pretending to have expertise and wisdom when all they really have is power to abuse.

Here is one throbbing example: FEMA’s directions on how to survive a nuclear attack. Of primary importance to the Biden Administration: while avoiding death by radiation, don’t forget to take pandemic precautions (last section)…

No, I’m not kidding, and this is not a hoax. Check yourself if you don’t believe me. Continue reading →

“How Do You Respond When An Anti-Vaxxer Dies Of Covid?” I’ll Answer That…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I thought this op-ed, by a Jesuit priest, would have something profound to say about the ethics of schadenfreude. I was disappointed. His grand conclusion:

At this point I could run through a list of philosophers, theologians and wise voices from religions and traditions around the world to prove my point. Instead I will reclaim a word that has been largely lost from our discourse: mean. Crowing over someone’s suffering or demise is as far from a moral act as one can imagine. It’s cruel. Indulged in regularly, schadenfreude ends up warping the soul. It robs us of empathy for those with whom we disagree. It lessens our compassion. To use some language from both the Old and New Testaments, it “hardens” our hearts. No matter how much I disagree with anti-vaxxers, I know that schadenfreude over their deaths is a dead end.

Wow, stop the presses. A Jesuit recognizes the value of the Golden Rule. This is news that’s “fit to print?” Well, the obvious (I hope) conclusion turned out to be device to attack Wuhan vaccine skeptics and opponents on the way to reaching it. “After months of trying to convince anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti-social distancers that lifesaving measures are both for their own good and for that of others, frustration might get the better of people,” Father James Martin writes, finding an excuse for one side of the aisle while condemning without sympathy, for example, Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham, “a commentator who often expresses her belief in “Christian values,” gloating over the news that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tested positive despite being vaccinated and boosted.

I expect more fairness and less deceit from the clergy, Lord knows why:

  • Opposing government mandated vaccinations does not make one an “anti-vaxxer.” That’s a slur on par with calling those who doubt the certitude of over-simplified climate change taking points “deniers.” Many oppose the mandated vaccines as an unconstitutional and unethical violation of personal liberty, and are not taking the shots to stand up for basic rights, not because they necessarily don’t believe in “the science.”
  • Calling masks, particularly the masks most people wear, “live-saving” is propaganda and misinformation. The CDC’s “experts” have, in sequence, said “mask aren’t necessary,” wear masks; no need to wear masks if you’re vaccinated; better wear masks, and if you don’t like what the advice is now, as they say about weather in New England, wait a bit. I know men of the cloth are suckers for faith, but if Jesus had been wrong as often as the health experts, we might be making offerings to Jupiter and Neptune today.
  • Don’t get me started on “social distancing.” I’m surprised the good Father didn’t also say we were killing people by touching our faces. Remember that edict?

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Free Crack Pipes For Black Addicts? Help! I Have No Idea What To Make Of This Story

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The current state of our journalism makes it difficult for me to deal with this story. There are other factors as well.

The headline I read two days ago was from the Washington Free Beacon, a fairly reliable conservative news source. I still didn’t believe it:

“Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity’“

Yet the same day, this headline, which I verified, also appeared: “Heroin withdrawal made woman hallucinate SpongeBob telling her to stab her 3-year-old daughter to death, police say.” We are in the eras of Poe’s Law and The Great Stupid. There was a time not so long ago when the idea of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States was as plausible as us putting Dennis Rodman. in the White House A politician who suggested de-funding the police would be laughed out of public service. Encouraging illegal aliens to cross our borders would be seen as a symptom of a psychotic episode. Advocating teraing down statues of Thomas Jefferson would guarantee pariah status. Allowing non-citizens to vote, as New York City will do now, was incomprehensible. Imagine the reaction just ten years ago if a male college swimmer tried to compete as a woman because he decided that he “identified” as one.

Heck, maybe the Biden administration is distributing crack pipes.

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Ottawa Trucker Protest Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Is this an Ethics Train Wreck, defined as a situation where everyone involved in in the wrong? If it isn’t, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones’s burned-out sheriff in “No Country for Old Men,” it will do until a real one shows up.

We begin with the impetus for the protest. Truckers, alone in their cabs, pose no danger to anyone whether they are vaccinated or not, masked or not. Social distancing is enough when you’re alone inside a moving truck. The pandemic restrictions are increasingly obnoxious and irrational—unethical in short, “following the science” of experts who have been wrong (or lying) so often it would be funny if it hasn’t been so disastrous. Ethics Alarms is on record as holding that most protests are pointless and unethical, but not all. There is ample justification for truckers to protest what is, for them, oppressive government edicts.

BUT…this protest is violating the law, as well as inconveniencing and harming citizens who are not at fault for the policies the truckers are protesting. The truckers have paralyzed traffic, disrupted business and unsettled residential neighborhoods, as truckers parked their vehicles in intersections and across busy thoroughfares. “Someone is going to get killed or seriously injured because of the irresponsible behavior of some of these people,” Jim Watson, Ottawa’s mayor, said as he declared the situation a state of emergency. I don’t see how anyone can dispute that conclusion, and sympathy with the truckers’ position shouldn’t translate into acceptance of their mode of protest, Continue reading →

“Ethics Dunce” Doesn’t Quite Do New York Mayor Eric Adams Justice

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Help. I need a new designation. Long ago, I began using Ethics Dunce to describe individuals whose ethics alarms failed to work when they were most needed, resulting in clearly unethical and indefensible conduct. Later, EA began using the label “Fick,” after the recently departed Leroy Fick, to describe someone who was unethical and defiant about it. Since the American Left began going, as Bill Maher said recently with unusual perspicacity, “mental,” “Ethics Dunce” has seemed increasingly inadequate.

Many of the assertions and actions we have seen aren’t the result of malfunctioning ethics alarms, they arise from a deliberate attempt to redefine what is right while abusing power, position and influence to do so. “Dunce” is too mild; dunces can’t help themselves. The new breed are nascent totalitarians: should I add “Totalitarian of the Month”?

It’s a good thing I didn’t bother to reassemble my head yesterday, or this would have undone all my hard work:

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The Duty To Warn: As Will Surprise No One Who Is Familiar With This Blog, I See A Serious Ethics Issue Related To My Recent Visit To The Emergency Room

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I’m going to have to cover this topic with one metaphorical hand tied behind my metaphorical back, because some of the important details land in the realm of confidentiality.

Last week, one of my loved ones had a frightening experience, slowly becoming disoriented and confused regarding time, place and language, hallucinating, falling down an unlit staircase and only missing serious injury by pure luck, speaking nonsense, then gibberish, and finally being unable to speak at all. By the time the EMTs were summoned, I was worried that I was witnessing a stroke in progress, which is what the paramedics thought when they arrived.

But it wasn’t a stroke. In fact, the ER doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on. By then the patient was trembling, thrashing around (so much that an MRI was impossible), frightened, angry, aggressive, and talking incessantly but incomprehensibly. They thought it might be a tumor, or an infection, or bleeding, or an interaction of many factors. It was like a “House” episode.

The real reason for the symptoms was that the patient hadn’t filled a long-standing prescription for Levothyroxine, a very common drug ( also known as synthroid) used to treat an underactive thyroid. The weather had been bad and ice was everywhere, so the trip to the CVS was put off one day, then another, then another. An unremarkable few days off the drug, which had been taken regularly for decades with occasional short interruptions, stretched into a week. That, the doctors concluded, had caused it all. Once the drug was injected, complete recovery occurred overnight.

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Unethical—And Ignorant!—Quote Of The Month: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“The air in humid, hotter environments contains more water, which can condense onto the virus particles, make them bigger and theoretically fall to the ground faster. Wu compares the particles to a rock in this case — the more mass, the faster it falls.”

—-Washington Post Reporter Kasha Patel, forgetting about Galileo and gravity in an alleged science article headlined,  “Covid-19 may have seasons for different temperature zones, study suggests.”

Her editors also seem to have missed 6th grade science. In truth, I believe I learned about Galileo’s experiment with the Leaning Tower of Pisa before the sixth grade, after Santa left a children’s book about “great moments in science” in my sister’s stocking. We shared it, and it ended up with me: it’s around the house somewhere. I think about the book every time I end up on Walter Reed Drive in Arlington, which is often. His story is also in it; I wish I could think of the title.

The full quote is… Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Fugue: Looking Like America

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

1. Right on cue...I am seeing an explosion of articles explaining why it is crucial that the Supreme Court “look like America.” This is one of many logically indefensible statements that is pounded into the brains of weak-minded members of the public because it sounds rational if you don’t, or can’t, think about it very hard. What is important about the membership of the Supreme Court is that it contain the best and least biased judicial scholars and legal analysts available, because then we will have the best Supreme court available. I don’t care what the Justices look like, and neither should anyone else. If the nine best legal minds happen to be black, great. If they are all female, or trans, or gay, or in wheelchairs, I don’t care, and neither should anyone else. What drives this particular brand of lookism is the presumption of bias, and judges are supposed to be, indeed are required to be, as free as bias as possible. Bias leads to lousy judges and lousy decisions. The “Make SCOTUS look like America!” crowd, which is almost exclusively on the left, want to substitute a balance of biases standard for the “as little bias as possible” standard. And, of course, the new eruption of this dumb theory is in order to make President Biden’s indefensible decision to place race and gender first among the priorities for picking Breyer’s replacement seem fair, just and rational, when it isn’t. It’s just political pandering.

2. This is a novel way to try to justify the anti-white bias...Jamelle Bouie, the full-time, race-baiting, race-obsessed black pundit formerly of Slate and now with the Times, was given an astounding two full pages in today’s Sunday Review to argue that history hasn’t sufficiently described just how awful slavery was. See, it wasn’t just evil, it was really, really, really evil. “Evil beyond measure!” Thus, we are supposed to extrapolate, it was so unimaginably evil that no current day policies devised to compensate for and make amends for that evil by the descendants of those not enslaved can ever be enough. (So stop bitching about giving blacks an edge in employment forever, because even that won’t be enough.)

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Fake News Watch 2: The Missing Mask

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Compared to the above mass fake news about mass graves that have not, in fact, been verified, NPR’s bit of false reporting on Supreme Court intrigue seems trivial, and is. NPR’s longtime liberal-leaning Supreme Court reporter impugned Democratic Party boogie man Neil Gorsuch—He stole Merrick Garland’s seat!—by writing that Mean Neil was trying to kill Justice Sotomayor ( who “has diabetes, a condition that puts her at high risk for serious illness, or even death” from the Wuhan virus) or something, because he refused to wear a mask despite Justice Roberts “asking” him to.  Sotomayor, therefore, has to participate in the Court’s work via Zoom. Gorsuch is, apparently, fully vaccinated, and doesn’t have the virus. Continue reading →

The YouTube Ethics Dilemma: I Need The Platform, But It’s A Censorious, Partisan Propaganda Machine

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I don’t miss Twitter much. I quit the social media platform last year, disgusted with its blatant partisan censorship, its censoring of Donald Trump, and the odd way it flagrantly maintained a double standard in which misleading or questionable progressive tweets were opinions, but misleading or questionable conservative tweets were lies, mandating the tweet-monger’s banishment.

I also had been warning lawyers in my ethics seminars to eschew Twitter at all costs, since, I said with my tongue only slightly piercing my cheek, using it lowered the average lawyer’s IQ by between 15 to 25 points. (I estimated this on the evidence of poor former Harvard Law icon Larry Tribe, whose conspiracy theory tweets and ethics rules beaches on the platform raise the rebuttable presumption that he has entered the Biden Zone…not that this obvious decline has stopped the Washington Post and New York Times from publishing his increasingly over-heated and badly-reasoned op-eds.)

I decided that I should take my own advice and leave Twitter. Besides, my involvement with Twitter in the end consisted solely of issuing links to Ethics Alarms posts, which elicited virtually no traffic or retweets at all. (Except for you, Opal!)

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