Health and Medicine

Saturday Afternoon Ethics Excursion, 5/9/2020: Putting The Wrong Thing On A Ritz [13 Typos Fixed!]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Hi!

1. Now THIS is incompetence...The makers of Ritz crackers have issued a nationwide recall of mislabeled Ritz cracker boxes after discovering that some packages labeled cheese really contained pairs of crackers with peanut butter between them, according to a statement posted on the Food and Drug Administration’s website yesterday.

Oops!

Fortunately, almost all Ritz fans regularly check the Food and Drug administration site.

2.  In the category of “professionals embarrassing themselves,” I offer this: Len Niehoff is a “Professor from Practice at the University of Michigan Law School” according to the editors at the Detroit Free Press. This is a bad start: I don’t know what a “professor from Practice” is. I assume they meant he teaches legal practice, or trial practice. Obviously they have no more understanding of law than the average guppy, which also explains why they published the professor’s article titled, “Law professor: Virus reveals we all need a class in evidence.” He begins,

“Numerous public officials and individuals have made dreadful decisions about how to assess and respond to the threat posed by COVID-19. Those errors reveal a fundamental flaw in our K-12 and collegiate education systems. We have failed to teach a subject of critical importance, and as a result have imperiled our health, our economy, and our republic. We teach it in law school. We call it Evidence.”

Hilariously, in his essay about evidence, the professor doesn’t  offer a single piece of evidence indicating any of that assertion is correct, or might be correct. He does offer, without evidence, statements like, “National and local political leaders have made decisions that ignored the evidence. Members of the general public have proved slow to accept the evidence. Measures adopted to help flatten the curve have been met with virulent protests, despite the evidence that they are working.”  Really? What is your evidence for those propositions? Those are opinions, not evidence.

Moreover, the rules of evidence he is extolling are specifically designed for trials, which involve very specialized forms of decision-making. Hearsay evidence, for example, is generally inadmissible in a trial, but in many other activities, it is valuable. Similarly, trials settle generally narrow issues. We don’t use trials, or juries, to settle more complex issues like “how long should we shut down the economy to minimize the effects of a pandemic?” The professor seems to be laboring under the delusion that it is clear what is and what isn’t relevant to such decisions.

One of my benighted Facebook friends posted this thing on Facebook as if it was meaningful. It is useful for one purpose: it is strong evidence for the proposition that if the only tool one has is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

3. Ringer ethics. In a famous 1992 episode of “The Simpsons,” evil nuclear power tycoon Montgomery Burns’ stacks his Springfield Nuclear Power Plant baseball squad with major league baseball players for the league championship game. Using “ringers” in such situations is unethical (but often permitted due to rules loopholes), but here is a story about something akin to Mr. Burns’ cheat that nobody seemed to mind.

In the late 1980s, a softball team known as Spike & Fat Boy was entered in a local softball beer league. The team included three active major leaguers, Kevin Mitchell, John Kruk and Randy Ready. Not only did they displace the regular players when they showed up (“You talk about pressure on a manager,” the team’s skipper says now, “What could I do? I had to put those guys in the lineup!”) and the three hit exactly as you would expect them to.

Says Ready, “We didn’t lose a single game. It was domination.”

Gee. What an achievement.

4. Laws and social distancing are for the little people. Great Britain had a juicy scandal when Neil Ferguson, a prominent  epidemiologist who advised the UK government on its pandemic response and  warned that it was possible that 500,000 British citizens  would perish if the  lockdown was disobeyed,  defied the lockdown himself (and obviously social distancing <cough>) in a rendezvous with his married lover.  He was caught, shamed, and resigned his government post. Opines Spiked!  in a tough editorial, the episode is significant in that it reveals

“…a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism..Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too…Anyone who questioned the wisdom of the lockdown, or merely suggested it should be very brief, would find themselves being battered by Ferguson’s figures. Almost overnight it became tantamount to blasphemy to question these models…. It was the political class’s dodging of moral responsibility for tackling Covid without destroying the economy, and the media’s searing intolerance towards anyone who questioned the lockdown, which led to the ossification of his models into tablets of stone that you queried at your peril.”

Sound familiar?

The U.S. has had its Fergusons too. Senior White House adviser and First Daughter Ivanka Trump traveled from D.C. to the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey to celebrate Passover, though she had posted social media videos urging “those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please do so.”  Michelle Obama lectured Americans to stay home as her husband was putting on the golf course.  Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot had  her hair done by a salon stylist while demanding that citizens of her city eschew such frivolous services. The mayor of Beaumont Texas locked her town down, then went to a nail salon. NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio put gyms on his “non-essential” business list, then went to one to work out.  Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell and his wife attended his grandson’s birthday party (using county resources in the process, a nice touch ) after ordering residents to stay home amid the Wuhan virus outbreak.  I do not doubt that plenty of other examples exist showing our betters behaving similarly, just  more discretely.

Sentiments like this, from Amy Johnson at Lifezette, are consistent with Spiked’s editor across the pond:

The global elites really do think they’re better than us. They’re riding high and mighty, collecting their paychecks and visiting their mistresses, as they lecture to us from their golden pedestals. Meanwhile, small business owners are watching what they’ve toiled and sacrificed for years to build crumble, as they and others deemed “non-essential” wonder how they’ll feed their families tonight.

Progressives, who increasingly sound like they want another Depression—all the better to “re-engineer society” (and, of course, defeat Donald Trump) , deride such assessments in the news media and social media as “right-wing conspiracy theories.”

Talk about evidence!

Maybe You CAN Fool All Of The People—80% Anyway: The Andrew Cuomo Anomaly

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo really does have “blood on his hands,” but thanks to the news media coverage, the public doesn’t seem to care.

In March, Cuomo, already overseeing the state that is the one U.S. local where the Wuhan virus could then be accurately described as out-of-control, adopted the policy of forcing nursing homes to take in elderly residents who were infected.

The edict horrified  many medical authorities.  Health experts warned  this was a formula for disaster because such facilities didn’t have the ability to properly quarantine the infected. “This approach will introduce the highly contagious virus into more nursing homes. There will be more hospitalizations for nursing home residents who need ventilator care and ultimately, a higher number of deaths. Issuing such an order is a mistake and there is a better solution,” American Health Care Association President and CEO Mark Parkinson protested in March after Cuomo’s order went into effect.

Richard Mollot, executive director of the New York’s Long Term Care Community Coalition, said that the policy “put many people in grave danger.” Professor David Grabowski at Harvard Medical School, whose field is public health, was aghast, telling NBC,  “Nursing homes are working so hard to keep the virus out, and now we’re going to be introducing new COVID-positive patients?”

Yes, that was the  plan, but it is difficult to fathom why anyone would think it was a good idea. A lot wasn’t and still isn’t understood about the virus, but one thing that has been known all year is that it is especially deadly for the elderly and people with compromised immune systems.

‘Hey, let’s put all those discharged old people who we know are infected into cramped, confined nursing homes where trying to quarantine anyone is hard and where we already know dubious management and care is rampant!’

‘BRILLIANT!’ Continue reading →

Prelude To “The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear, Part II”

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

No, I am not satisfied with the current draft of Part II, but I trust it’s obvious what the resolution referred to is. The lock-down has to end, and before vaccines, cures, or adequate medicine are available. One of the components of my research has been reading as many of the pro and con articles as I can stand. It is quite striking: the arguments for continuing the lockdown indefinitely are almost entirely authored by progressives, and are without exception characterized by bad logic, emotionalism, manipulated facts, biased analysis, fearmongering, and suspect motives. The majority of the arguments for opening up the economy soon are markedly more logical, unemotional, and based on sound statistics and analysis. Certainly one cannot choose between two options based on the quality of the advocates for each. Nonetheless, the divide is striking.

Ann Althouse chose such an essay today to critique, “Whose Freedom Counts?/Anti-lockdown protesters are twisting the idea of liberty” by Dahlia Lithwick, who has periodically been discussed here, the first time in 2010. It is e fair to say that her mind and mine run in different metaphorical riverbeds, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Lithwick’s article endorses yet another one of the  same ilk, Ibram X. Kendi’s  current piece in The Atlantic called “We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic/The pandemic has brought the latest battle in the long American war over communal well-being.”

Ann makes short work of both, writing,

Aha! We see what you’re doing! What a distraction! But I suppose that because slavery was invoked, I’m expected to listen without protest while Kendi’s solemn, censorious lecture is promoted by an over-excited Lithwick. I resist. Sorry. I do hear what you’re saying, and I see how well it works to justify depriving us of all freedom. There’s never enough freedom from all the things in the world that might hurt us if we’re not kept in eternal lockdown.

Excellent. Althouse is a liberal, much as she tries to hide it, but she is not an aspiring totalitarian, like such a large swath of the current mutated progressives and Democrats. Her last sentence echoes two of my favorite quotes, “In order to have enough liberty, it is necessary to have too much,”  (Clarence Darrow), and “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” (Benjamin Franklin).

I have another screed to deconstruct: a New York Times editorial  by Charlie Warzel titled “Open States, Lots of Guns. America Is Paying a Heavy Price for Freedom,” or in my print edition, “Will We Get Used To The Dying?” I’ll let you read it first without my comments, here. That’s only fair.

***

Done? Maybe you don’t even need this: eviscerating Warzel ‘s analysis shouldn’t be too hard. Rebutting most of these essays isn’t hard.

Away we go…

The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying. I first saw it on Twitter. “Someone poke holes in this scenario,” a tweet from Eric Nelson, the editorial director of Broadside Books, read. “We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus. People get used to it. We get less vigilant as it very slowly spreads. By December we’re close to normal, but still losing 1,500 a day, and as we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren’t concerned.”

How old is Warzel, 15? We accept the mortality of modern life, just as our ancestors accepted the mortality of their own periods. That tweet is simply making sinister the adjustments that human beings have to make to get on with civilization. To that, it adds scaremongering, and Warzel joins in the virtue-signalling. Anyone who isn’t willing to keep the lockdown in force indefinitely isn’t concerned.

That’s crap. I’m concerned: both my wife and I are in the high-risk category; so is my sister; so are most of our extended family. I do not advocate the destruction of American society for my own self interest, that’s all. That’s how members of a community and democracy are supposed to feel.

This hit me like a ton of bricks because of just how plausible it seemed. The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus. And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?

People die every day, and from predictable causes, many of them a direct result of our way of life and societal choices. The Times has been running a feature showing selected photographs of recently succumbed victims of the Wuhan virus with a biographical sketch. I have wondered each time I see it: why are these people more worthy of ostentatious memorials in the Times than anyone who has died in the same period? The answer is, they aren’t. This is part of the news media’s effort to build anxiety and hysteria, which will be weaponized for political purposes. Hardly mourned? Every American is supposed to mourn everyone who dies every day? We mourn our loved ones. I am still mourning Dennis Nollette, a former law school roommate who was among the best human beings I have ever had the honor of knowing.  He was carried off by the epidemic within a few days. That’s plenty for me right now. I’m not becoming callous because the deaths of strangers don’t hit me as hard as the death of a cherished friend.

Furthermore, it is not “plausible” that the pandemic will continue forever; pandemics don’t. And indeed, if they did, it would be an irrefutable reason to open up now.

Such loss of life is hard to comprehend when it’s not happening in front of your own two eyes. Add to it that humans are adaptable creatures, no matter how nightmarish the scenario, and it seems understandable that our outrage would dull over time. Unsure how — or perhaps unable — to process tragedy at scale, we get used to it.

Talk about complaining about an unchangeable feature of human life, sanity,  and reality! But that kind of lament is irresponsible progressiveness in a nutshell.

There’s also a national precedent for Mr. Nelson’s hypothetical: America’s response to gun violence and school shootings.

Here we go, down the rabbit hole.

We often talk here about incompetent analogies. This is a lulu. It is embarrassing that the New York Times would consider such a contrived and illogical argument to be published as an editorial—embarrassing, and signature significance.

You should skim the next part; I know my eyes glazed over. It’s standard CNN/Don Lemon/ David Hogg propaganda and emotionalism.

As a country, we seem resigned to preventable firearm deaths. Each year, 36,000 Americans are killed by guns — roughly 100 per day, most from suicide, according to data from the Giffords Law Center. Similarly, the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund calculates that there have been 583 “incidents of gunfire” on school grounds since 2013. In the first eight months of 2019, there were at least 38 mass shootings, The Times reported. Last August, 53 Americans died in mass shootings — at work, at bars, while shopping with their children. Some of these tragedies make national headlines; many don’t. The bigger school shootings and hate-crime massacres can ignite genuine moral outrage and revive familiar debates: over safe storage practices, gun show loopholes, red flag laws, bump stocks, comprehensive background checks, stringent licensing systems and, of course, the accessibility of endlessly customizable semiautomatic weapons like AR-15s. In every case, the death tolls climb but we fail to act. There are occasional marches and protests but mostly we continue on with our lives.

Yes, we are monsters for understanding the importance of the rights of self-defense and bearing arms to a functioning democracy. In reality, while there are usually, in hindsight, ways that any single abuse of firearms could have been prevented, gun deaths are not preventable as long as there are guns, law abiding citizens have access to them, and a police state doesn’t abuse its power to make us “safe.”

Notice that Warzel’s gun-virus analogy breaks down immediately. There is no societal value to pandemics. There is no right to get fatally ill. There are no Constitutional amendments preventing the government from eliminating a disease. Continue reading →

Ethics Warm-Up, V-E Day 75th Anniversary Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 56 Comments

To my father and all the rest…

Thank-you for saving the world.

1. About that Eva Murry story. The last we heard from Eva Murry, she was telling the story of how creepy Joe Biden complimented her on the size of her breasts 12 years ago, when she was 14. Ethics Alarms noted at the time that the woman’s detailed account had no effect on the credibility of Tara Reade’s allegations one way or the other, since we already knew Biden was creepy.  However,earlier this week Fox News reported : 

A past organizer for Delaware’s First State Gridiron Dinner now says Joe Biden did not attend the event in 2008, after a woman recently claimed the former vice president and senator sexually harassed her there, Fox News has learned….

Local news reports from the time said Biden was having sinus surgery earlier that week — to address issues including a deviated septum — and was scheduled to be out of work for the whole week.

At the time, his spokeswoman said that she “anticipates that he’ll be out for the remainder of the week recovering at his home in Wilmington,” according to a report in the News Journal at the time.

Murry’s aunt, Christine O’Donnell (of “I am not a witch” fame) says she remembers Murry talking about the event at the time, and  stood by her viece’s accusation, telling Fox,

“Yes, it could have been another year. So what? She was a teenager when I ran for office. It doesn’t make it okay. It happened when I was running for office against him. If it was 2007, that makes it even worse.”

But it couldn’t have been in 2007 either, because records place him in Iowa that evening.

All anyone can figure out is that young Murry ran into a different creep that she thought was Biden, though that seems unlikely too. What’s going on here? Why would the woman subject herself to national scrutiny and embarrassment by telling her story in such detail when it wasn’t true?

Since the new evidence came to light, she has been notably silent. That’s not right; she made an accusation against Biden, and needs to follow up with either an explanation or an apology. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear, Part I: Stipulations”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The second Comment of the Day to come out of  Part 1 of the pandemic analysis ethics conflict analysis, like the first, does a lot of the work I would otherwise have to do to complete Part 2. A couple more like these, and the issue might be thoroughly covered without any input from me at all!

Here is Michael R’s Comment of the Day on the post,  “The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear, Part I: Stipulations”:

The global warming cult has conditioned leaders and the media to trust models over data. If the data doesn’t match the model, it is the DATA that must change, which is why they keep adjusting the temperature measurements more and more to match the model. As with global warming, the model does not match reality and we are being told to trust the model, not the data.

Just to put things in perspective:

—Roughly 2.8 million Americans die each year. Around march, that is roughly 8000 people/day.

—If 5% of the population has asymptomatic coronavirus, that means that 400 dead people with test positive for coronavirus each day, even though it did not contribute to their deaths. Under current practice, that means 400 coronavirus deaths that really weren’t coronavirus deaths (or 12,000/month).

—It is hard to tell, but the number of deaths/month does not seem to be rising over previous years. It seems that most ‘coronavirus deaths’ are due to reclassifying cause of death, not actual effects of the virus. You can view the California doctor’s censored interview about that somewhere, if you can find it anymore.

—The number of actual extra deaths from coronavirus appears to be within the yearly standard deviation of deaths. Meaning: Deaths from coronavirus are not statistically significant yet.

—The fatality rate appears to be less than 0.1%. The flu is about 0.1% and the flu without the flu vaccine is about 0.3%, so this appears to be not as dangerous as the flu. More people are getting it, however, because it is new and people don’t have an natural immunity to it yet. This is why everyone needs to get it.

—Roughly 500,000 people die each year from medical mistakes.

—Places that had more restrictive lockdowns did not suffer from worse outcomes. They seemed to have suffered less.

Verdict: It seems that our ‘experts’ are morons. Let’s look at some of the policies from those ‘best people’. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear, Part I: Stipulations”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Matthew B fulfilled my fervent wish (as did Michael R, whose comment will be going up later today) by dealing with the risk assessment issue authoritatively and clearly so I wouldn’t have to.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear, Part I: Stipulations”:

We’re seeing the problem with the vast majority of people’s inability to grasp statistics, and in particular the statistics of risk. That’s the problem here – with the Wuhan flu, we’re talking about something that – at most – could kill 1 in 100 people. We’re seeing higher numbers for death rates in many places, but they’re talking about case fatality rate. 1% in the US means 3 million people die, and we’re at 70K dead as of this morning in the US, 3.2 million short in 1% of American’s dying. Yes, I get many haven’t been infected and many more will die, but we’re absolutely on a trajectory far short of a 1% fatality rate.

As soon as you’re talking about numbers that low, far too many people’s brains stop being logical and emotion takes over. The tell for this is the saying “if it just saves one life.” People say that, but they’re turn a blind eye to so many things that kill people an no one addresses. Because there is no critical thought being applied, they remain illogical and darn near impossible to considering any position other than those formed by emotion.

We take risks every day that we don’t think about and we ignore things that people die from because of normalization of that risk. If you’re under 45, your odds of suicide, homicide and accidents killing you outweighs your risk of dying of health complications. If you’re under 25, that risk is three to one that it’s something other than a health condition that kills you. Even amongst the health conditions, there are many that are swayed by our own conduct and we ignore that.

Through most of the existence of the automobile, it’s ranked as the number one cause of premature death in the United States. Only in the last decade has the rise of the opioid epidemic managed to surpass the death rate of automobile fatalities. The opioid epidemic is a harder one to discuss, so I’ll start with the automobile. Automobile deaths are ignored, few people are afraid to get into a car because it might kill them. There are marginal improvements in automobile safety, but many of the key contributors have had little improvement. Mass use of air travel has had about 1/2 the time of the mass use of the automobile, but air travel has had massive improvements. At first there were many crashes because airplanes broke and directly or indirectly through the distractions they caused resulted in mass fatalities. That got fixed first. Then aviation regulators figured out that a growing fraction of accidents were pilots flying perfectly good airplanes into the ground or each other. They borrowed ideas from the nuclear industry, and instituted many policies that have resulted in a remarkable fall in airline fatalities. Do you realize the last time an passenger aircraft went down in the United States was November, 2001? 19 years. The only other crash was a 777 in San Francisco that stalled on approach, and most of the passengers came out with no or minor injuries. That’s truly remarkable. Continue reading →

The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear, Part I: Stipulations [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

[Warning: I’m sure there are typos below; I’ll be fixing them, but I’m a bit swamped, and I want to get this post up. It’s a utilitarian decision. Update: I think I’ve fixed them all.]

I have been consciously avoiding wading into this issue, first, because its components are beyond my expertise in two fields, second, because to do a proper job would take a book rather than a  blog post, and third, because to even do an inadequate  job, I will have to quote extensively from the arguments of others, which I try to do as little as possible (believe it or not). I detest appeals to authority, which is basically all I get from my deranged Facebook friends all day long.  Nonetheless, I can’t put this post off any longer, because this is an ethics issue encompassing several related ethics issues. I also can’t cover it in a post of reasonable length, so this will be Part I.

The grand ethics issue facing the nation, the public, the President and our future is when to begin re-opening the  economy, allowing people to get on with their lives. Let’s begin with ten stipulations:

1. This is an ethics conflict, not an ethics dilemma. There are ethical considerations and values on both sides of the equation.

2. Many, too many, of those involved in the problem are going to approach it as an ethics dilemma, in which ethical values compete with non-ethical considerations. Unfortunately, that group includes almost all, and maybe all, politicians and elected officials, including the President.

3. It is a cruel trick of fate, or a bizarre joke by a sadistic Creator, that this crisis is occurring in an election year, and with a national leader with the personal characteristics, chaotic leadership, management style, and divided constituency of Donald Trump….but that’s the situation. It is particularly unfortunate that he does not have a reserve of public trust, because that, if not essential now, would sure help a lot as he makes some difficult decisions. He is significantly responsible for that trust deficit; the media and “the resistance” are even more responsible. That doesn’t matter right now. It is a different issue, though a related one.

4. We still do not have adequate information to make a fully informed decision, and will not have before a choice is unavoidable. That’s a fact. We still aren’t certain how the virus is transmitted, or the degree of infectiousness by the asymptomatic. We don’t know why some areas of the country are experiencing higher rates of infection than others. We cannot compare the U.S. statistics with other countries, because we can’t be sure of the accuracy of those foreign statistics. We aren’t even sure of the effectiveness of the supposedly essential precautions, like masks and social distancing. For example, I have articles on file from the last 30 days by credentialed medical professionals arguing that wearing masks may increase the likelihood of infection. I don’t care if this is a minority opinion; minority opinions are often right. Meanwhile, I just watched HLN interviewing a researcher who claims that social distancing should be 12 feet or more, after measuring how “droplets” from coughs spread. But a social distance requirement of much more than six feet is impractical, meaning that it’s not worth talking about.

5. Making important decisions without perfect information is what effective leaders have to do. Two recent weak Presidents, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, were marked by a habitual reluctance to make difficult and urgent choices without “all the facts,” and this resulted in multiple fiascos. The danger in making a premature decision, as defined by those two intelligent men, is that the decision will be subject to second guessing after the missing facts are known. President Trump has to be courageous and responsible and make any choice, knowing that whatever he does will be attacked whatever happens. He has to place his fate in the hands of moral luck, and the fate of the country as well. That’s a terrible situation to be in, but that’s the job. Continue reading →

Ethics May Day, 2020: Biden, Reade, Planned Parenthood, A Renegade Times Pundit, And The Democrats Get Their Way.

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

It’s May! It’s May!

1. So Joe Biden went on “Morning Joe” and denied that Tara Reade was telling the truth. So what? What does this tell us? Was there any chance whatsoever that he was going to say, “Yup, I finger-fucked her. I don’t know what came over me!”? No. This is like the Kurt Gödel conundrum about the island where there are only truth-tellers and liars, and there are some questions where they will give exactly the same answers. He picked a screamingly partisan journalist, Mika  Brzezinski, to ensure soft-ball treatment (she actually was a bit tougher than expected), and, to some eyes, looked as if he had rehearsed his statement. Ann Althouse does an extensive analysis here.

I don’t see the point. It’s a pro forma denial, and Biden was pressured into it.

I do think the Post article used some unfortunate phrasing..

“The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was rebutting Tara Reade’s accusation that he reached under her skirt to penetrate her with his fingers somewhere in the Capitol in 1993. This denial requires him to thread a thin needle.”

2. Showing it has more integrity than most women’s groups, Planned Parenthood, the Daily Beast reports, was the only one among  the major pro-abortion groups in the nation that responded directly to the progressive site’s request for a comment regarding Tara Reade’s allegations. The “Democrat-aligned” groups either “did not respond” or ” replied and did not provide a statement”…except Planned Parenthood.

Its president released a statement saying in part, “We believe survivors—and saying we believe survivors doesn’t mean only when it’s politically convenient…Joe Biden must address this allegation directly.'” Continue reading →

Nah, I’m Not Getting Royally Sick Of Writing “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!”!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Imagine how much we would benefit as a nation from knowing that news organizations were telling us about real events and conveying objective facts without concern about who or what they might hurt or benefit.

That doesn’t quite fit the music of John Lennon’s fatuous song, but it’s a much more useful hypothetical to consider than “Imagine there’s no countries.”

Yesterday, a thoroughly Trump-Deranged relative who is otherwise reasonable, informed and perceptive, was telling me that one reason he was convinced President Trump had mishandled the current virus threat is that “he doesn’t read his briefings.” This is a press-driven trope, as I tried to explain, and like so much fake news, designed to undermine trust by people who are ignorant. My relative isn’t ignorant. He just wants to believe what he already had decided before the election; it’s confirmation bias.

I pointed out that 1) the briefings smear came from unidentified leaks in the Administration, from those who by definition were attempting to damage the President. 2) The sources have been anonymous, and of the same level of trustworthiness that led to so many false reports and headlines during the Russian collusion investigations. 3) A lot of people, including very successful executives, process information better aurally than visually. I worked for one. Reading was hard for him; he was dyslexic. I would send him a long, detailed memo on an issue, and he would call me into his office, hand the memo back, and say, “Tell me what it says—the important stuff.” He was, by furlongs, the best manager I ever worked under. My relative, a lawyer and a manager himself, gets all of his information from reading (and based on our arguments, isn’t all that hot at processing it aurally.)

He also believes what he’s told by his fellow Deranged, and they told him yesterday that  the Washington Post had reported , in a story titled, “President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat,”  that…

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.
For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

No sources were given, just “sources”—you know, like those sources during the Mueller investigation. A month ago, the same Post reporters submitted  virtually the same basic story, headlined  “U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic.” It was also essentially the same story the New York Times had run earlier, “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus,” and that ABC ran around the same time, “Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources.”

You know: “sources.” Those “sources” were immediately debunked by none other than the Director of DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence , who sent this out: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz And Poll: The Nurse Practitioner’s Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

Sure.

It is seldom that I strongly disagree with NYU philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Ethicist” of the New York Times Magazine’s long-running advice column. A month ago I did, and emphatically so.

The question posed to him involved a professional ethics dilemma, and “The Ethicist” was so certain he had the correct answer that he was uncharacteristically terse about it. I’m pretty certain about the answer too, except that my certainty is that he’s wrong. But I have some doubts, based on my ethical positions in related situations.

The inquirer was a a nurse practitioner working at a primary care clinic for low-income patients. She said that a 16-year-old patient told her that she had stopped coming by the clinic to have her birth control pills replenished because she and her partner were trying to have a baby together. She had been having unprotected sex for  a while, and she was concerned that she might have some physical problem preventing her from conceiving. The nurse practitioner asked,  “Would it be ethical for me to steer her away from trying to get pregnant? …Or, as her health care provider, do I have an ethical duty to try to help her conceive?”

Appiah doesn’t see any wiggle room. He says,

“You’re her health care provider. You should certainly tell her about the medical consequences of pregnancy. But the social and economic consequences don’t fall within your professional competence. An intervention about her life choices may seem moralizing and intrusive to her, and it could drive her away; and then she’d be losing your guidance on the things you are trained to help her with.”

Really? Continue reading →