I am embarrassed to admit that this issue never occurred to me begore a friend sent me an article about it. Or maybe I should be proud.
Voucher Codes Pro is a company that offers coupons to internet shoppers. It surveyed 2,634 people, and almost 20% said they had cheated while using a grocery store self-checkout. Over half of the cheaters said they took advantage of the system because they realized being apprehended was unlikely. A 2015 study of self-checkouts with handheld scanners conducted at the University of Leicester audited a million self-checkout transactions over a year’s time.Out of $21 million in sales, goods worth nearly $850,000 left stores without being scanned and paid for.
How does this happen? There are several techniques:
Ringing up a T-bone ($13.99/lb) with a code for a cheap ($0.49/lb) variety of produce is known as “the banana trick.”
When a pricey item leaves the conveyor belt without being scanned, it’s “the pass around.”
Then there is “the switcheroo,” where you peel the sticker off something inexpensive and place it over the bar code of something pricey. You do have to make certain that the two items are about the same weight to avoid triggering the “unexpected item” alert on some machines.
“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” reads a comment in a Reddit discussion on the subject. Another one says, “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”
My father was a lifetime admirer of Jimmy, and eventually I joined him: we had all of his albums, and as a stage director I often played his renditions of a ballad (like “I’ll Be Seeing You”) for singers to demonstrate the importance of phrasing and expression, both of which Durante excelled at despite having a distinctive but hardly euphonious voice. He also impressed me with his professionalism. When my father was handling marketing for a Boston banking association, he helped arrange for his organization to be one of the sponsors of Jimmy’s show, which came to the Prudential Center in Boston. The Snozz was over 70 then, but he always seemed ageless, and his energy in person was even more impressive than it was on TV (in fact, Durante had learned to tone down his enthusiasm on the small screen, because it became exhausting to watch). He made his entrance in the stage show rushing on from the wings while singing and flinging his fedora to the back of the stage, where it landed neatly on the head of his band’s bald drummer. My father managed to get our family backstage (though Jimmy was not available because he had a charity appearance right after the show) and I talked to the drummer. I asked him how often Jimmy landed the hat on his head. He replied, “He’s never missed.” He went on to say that his boss rehearsed that bit for hours every week and before every show. It was a split second grace note, but Jimmy insisted on doing it perfectly.
Durante had a stroke after a show when he was almost 80, and never fully recovered. My father, who was uncomfortable expressing emotion face to face but wrote beautiful and touching letters (I hated getting them because they always made me cry; still do), wrote Jimmy, who was then bedridden, a letter thanking him his long entertainment career and explained what his work had meant to Dad. Jimmy’s wife Margie wrote back to say she had read the letter to Jimmy, and he had mouthed the words “Thank you.”
1. Politicizing everything. UCLA’s star gymnast Nia Dennis is getting accolades for turning her floor routine into an ” exuberant and powerful celebration” of black culture. Says Slate, “This routine has everything. Dennis pays tribute to Colin Kaepernick (she kneels!), Tommie Smith and John Carlos (she raises a fist!), and Kamala Harris (like a soror, she strolls and she steps!).” That’s funny: the only way I would recognize a reference to Harris would be if Nia cackled and blathered nonsense. The routine is more dance than gymnastics, but it’s a diabolical gimmick (don’t blame Nia: she has a woke choreographer, Bjoya Das). Any judge that doesn’t give the routine the highest marks knows he or she will be cancelled as a virulent racist.
2. Then there’s the Jeep ad…I’m not going to bother with surveying the ethically dubious Super Bowl ads this year, since they all are unethical for supporting the NFL’s ongoing negligent homicide, but I can’t let Bruce Springsteen’s obnoxious Jeep ad pass. Here it is:
[Whoa! That video was pulled from YouTube shortly after I posted it! I also can’t find a link that has it.]
“To The ReUnited States Of America.” Right. Springsteen is hardly an honest advocate for “the middle,” as a vocal Democrat and anti-Trump shill. The country is supposedly “re-united” because a Democrat is President. The entire theme of the ad is a cynical exercise in Rationalization #64, “It isn’t what it is.” Donald Trump was “divisive” because Democrats decided to paint him as such. Enforcing immigration laws shouldn’t be divisive. Withdrawing from an unapproved treaty with no actual impact shouldn’t be divisive. Calling the biased news media what it is shouldn’t be divisive. Now, calling half the country racists , Nazis and morons IS divisive, and the party that just won control of Congress and the White House has been doing that for four years. Surveys show that that half of the country is more angry, alienated and distrustful than ever, and for some very good reasons, like the current unconstitutional impeachment trial. Got it, Bruce: when Republicans win a national election it’s divisive,and when Democrats win one, it’s unifying.
Update:Apparently Jeep has received so many complaints about Bruce that they decided it was a major gaffe. How can this happen? It happens when the entire company and its ad agency is so overloaded with Democrats and progressives that they can’t see what’s right in front of them.
I’m a Presidential history junkie, and I’d watch re-runs of “Three’s Company” before I’d tune into the current debacle in the Senate. If it’s not worth the Chief Justice’s time, it isn’t worth mine. The think is unconstitutional and sure to be over-turned if there is a conviction, and a waste of time if there is not. And frankly, it’s an embarrassment to my country. It’s like watching one’s senile mother run naked through the streets, screaming.If someone writes commentary on some aspect of the “trial,” I may weigh in. Otherwise, I regard it as just the late stages of the 2016 election tantrum.
1. For example, Law professor Douglas Kmiec wants Senators to vote in secret because he wants to see them convict Donald John Trump. This, of course, would be a travesty of democracy, preventing citizens from knowing what their Senators did in an important matter.
“Yet, despite Trump having neither law nor fact nor common sense on his side, it is largely predicted that conviction in the Senate will lack the requisite two-thirds vote. When Trump faced the earlier impeachment, I urged that the Senate have the benefit of a secret ballot like almost all jurors have in non-impeachment matters and that all of us enjoy in primary and general elections. The wisdom of a secret ballot is even greater because of the Jan. 6 riot, the continuing threat of violence against members of Congress, and in state capitals around the country.”
This guy is really a law professor (at Pepperdine)! HE has neither law nor fact nor common sense on his side, and has the gall to write that: astounding. Jurors are not elected, nor are they accountable to the public for their decisions. Senators are.
The AUC so hates Donald Trump that they are willing to pull down any laws and principles of democracy that get in their way. Sound familiar? It should. Here, let me run this again:
Some day when my stomach is feeling strong I will have to analyze which profession more thoroughly destroyed its credibility in its pursuit of President Trump. Academics? Journalists? Historians? Lawyers? Elected officials?
Seeking to avoid the politics of division and the to restore respect for the rule of law, President Biden (or someone pulling his strings) has, ironically, nominated Kristen Clarke to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. In January, with this post, Ethics Alarms urged fairness after a letter surfaced from Clarke’s college days espousing anti-white racist attitudes:
….that letter to the Crimson from 27 years ago should not, by itself, disqualify Clarke for national service. Students say and write a lot of foolish stuff in college; that’s part of what it is for. Student presidents of niche campus groups like BALSA are expected to say extreme things….However, that letter is pure black supremacy, and thus racist. In the hearings on her fitness to lead the Civil Rights division, which requires no bias for or against any race, she must be asked about the letter and, under oath, rebuke its assertions to the satisfaction of all.
Now we know, however. That letter was not just young, raw, still-learning Kristen Clarke. That is Kristen Clarke. The career NAACP lawyer has a history of opposing civil rights prosecutions of black defendants. She criticized the Justice Department for bringing a complaint against an African-American party boss in Mississippi who worked to suppress white votes.
A federal judge found that political boss Ike Brown violated the Voting Rights Act by suppressing white votes in a rural Mississippi county where whites are the minority, directing election workers to count deficient absentee ballots from blacks but disqualify ballots from whites. Brown also was shown to have held biased and manipulated caucuses in the homes of friends and supporters.
According to 2010 testimony from Justice Department official Christopher Coates before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Clarke “spent a considerable amount of time criticizing the [civil rights] division and the voting section for bringing the Brown case.” He described Clarke as a civil rights litigator who believes “incorrectly but vehemently that enforcement of the protections of the Voting Rights Act should not be extended to white voters but should be extended only to protecting racial, ethnic, and language minorities.” Like, for example, her.
President Biden nominating such a racially biased individual to lead a civil rights division that must serve all Americans is an audacious and defiant example of doing the opposite of what one claims to be. It is a good time to recall this tweet:
I was going to write an Ethics Dunce post about Jamie L.H. Goodall, a staff historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History who wrote a truly stupid piece for The Washington Post headlined“The Buccaneers embody Tampa’s love of pirates. Is that a problem?” Goodall is triggered by the fact that the NFL’s now champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers carry a nickname that romanticizes pirates, who were bad people.
Of course, everyone knows pirates were (are, since there are more pirates operating now than back in the “Arrrgh!” days) bad, but they were scary and tough, see, and teams are named after scary and tough symbols, sometimes. Only people who have nothing better to do but to try to bend others to their will make the fatuous kinds of arguments Goodall does. ( “There is danger in romanticizing ruthless cutthroats…Why? Because it takes these murderous thieves who did terrible things — like locking women and children in a burning church — and makes them a symbol of freedom and adventure, erasing their wicked deeds from historical memory. These were men (and women) who willingly participated in murder, torture and the brutal enslavement of Africans and Indigenous peoples.” ) Oh yeah, we had to get the racist angle. I wonder how the good people of Pittsburgh managed to have a much-loved baseball team called “The Pirates” for more than a century without anyone, or any of their many, many proud African American and Caribbean players feeling that they were honoring raping and pillaging. Perhaps it’s because the team doesn’t and neither do “Treasure Island” and “The Pirates of Penzance (which I have performed in and directed).
The problem isn’t the Buccaneers; it’s the far too successful ongoing strategy of the oppressive Left, which seeks to keep anyone with normal sensibilities and an appreciation of history, literature, humor, whimsy and proportion constantly apologizing and retreating under a barrage of manufactured indignation and artificial moral superiority. The blunder has been that instead of responding to the power-hungry ideologues and their allies like Goodall who make these claims with the mockery and contempt they deserve, those under assault make the mistake, again and again, of saying, “Well, if it bothers you that much, okay. We’ll give you what you want. After all, it’s only a name.”
But it’s not only a name. It’s a word, a street, a mascot, a flag, a logo, a book, a song, a movie, a statue, an artist, a leader, a President, a Founder, a culture, and a nation. The strategy and its purpose should have been obvious long ago, and it should have been fought against hard, right at the beginning, with all the fury and determination that goes into any other existential battle. Or a war.
As I said, I was going to write this post about Jamie L.H. Goodall, but her idiocy is already a cliche, and at this point, arguing over team names is a distraction. (Too bad, though, as I had a fun post ready explaining how almost every professional sports team name was vulnerable to woke attack.) But I realized that the recent action by San Francisco’s school board represents the metastasized end game in the totalitarian Left’s cultural bull-dozing plan.
Ethics Alarms has been chronicling the mounting evidence that pro football condemns a large percentage of its players to future dementia and premature death for a long time, often in conjunction with what a Georgetown professor friend calls “The Concussion Bowl.” Many of those posts are here, under the CTE tag. Incredibly, the NFL has done little to stop the carnage, perhaps because seriously addressing the inherent damage to brains caused by a necessarily violent sport would end football as we know it, and that would cost owners, TV networks, colleges and merchandisers billions. Can’t have that.
Equally amazing, the public and the news media have allowed the NFL to get away with distracting from its unethical priorities with the flagrant and cynical virtue-signalling of pandering to Black Lives Matter. I’m pretty sure that when it is all tallied, the NFL will have killed more innocent black men by far than all the brutal police officers over the same period. But most people just don’t care. If they cared one hundredth as much about athletes getting permanent brain damage for their Sunday (Monday, Thursday) TV viewing as they do about a single ugly incident where an overdosing lifetime petty crook died under the knee of a Minneapolis cop, there would be action. Not riots and take-overs of public property, but serious, effective action, including safety regulations.. Football would have to change, evolve, or vanish. The public and the media (and government officials) don’t care, and neither do the NFL executives. If Colin Kaepernick had performed his on-field protests against CTE, he would have been suspended and eliminated from the sport faster than Deion Sanders running for the goal line.
Talk about conspiracies….
1. False Narrative Dept. Now dishonest anti-Trump propaganda is showing up on Turner Classic Movies, which has been generally exemplary in avoiding partisan pandering over the last four years. Today, Eddie Muller, TCM’s film noir maven, pointedly showed the 1950 move “The Killer Who Slaked New York,” about a potential smallpox outbreak that was shut down by New York City health officials in 1947. Ultimately only 12 people were infected, and the threat was a single contagious smallpox victim who had to be found and contained. As you can see, this is a perfect analogy for the Wuhan virus outbreak in 2020. Noting that New York City quickly launched a mass vaccination effort (because there was already a smallpox vaccine, another close parallel), Eddie raised an accusing eyebrow and said,voice dripping with contempt, “That’s how we did things then.”
It’s Eddie’s show. I don’t think he should be fired or suspended. He’s welcome to his ignorant and obnoxious opinion. But he’s part of a disinformation campaign and an effort to distort reality, He’s also annoying TCM’s generally mature audience members who have been paying attention, and who presumably watch old movies to get a break from political BS, not to be subjected to more of it by movie nerds driving out of their lane.
My brief post about “You Have No Enemies, the Charles Mackay poem that was a source of solace and inspiration for Margaret Thatcher, was the top Ethics Alarms article of 2020. It’s a good thing I learned about it, because Ethics Alarms Derangement Syndrome seems to be catching on. One self-banned commenter is now writing hate mail to my personal email spam account. Mark Draughn, who blogs at Windy Pundit and was once named an Ethics Alarms Commenter of the Year, now routinely posts “Jack Marshall is evil” screeds. There are others. Part of this, though not all, seems to stem from my adamant refusal to join the mob seeking to drive Donald Trump from office, and to insist that such ethical niceties like fairness, due process, objectivity, avoidance of bias and consistent standards should apply to him the way they had always applied to previous White House occupants.
For all I know, the would-be censors, vendetta-mongers and Trump Hate Posse is behind the otherwise inexplicable dive in traffic here since Christmas. Well, to quote my late, tragic college roommate Andy Kinkaid, a traumatized Viet Nam veteran whose response to problems great and small was always the same: “Fuck it, right?” One of the many invaluable lessons my father taught me early was never to back down when you believe you are right. He didn’t, and I don’t.
1. Feb. 4 is a major day for ethics, good and bad:
In 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst,was kidnapped by a real domestic terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and subsequently brainwashed into joining their cause, even to the extent of participating in an armed bank robbery. This was the first instance of the term “Stockholm Syndrome” being widely publicized, but the defense didn’t work. Good. “Tania,” as she called herself, was sentenced to seven years in prison and served 21 months before her sentence was commuted by President Carter. She later married her bodyguard, and ended up acting in John Waters films. She was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001. Poor little, dumb little, rich girl…
In 2004, Facebook launched—a day that will live in infamy.
Rosa Parks was born on this date in 1913.
In 1861, the slave-holding states met to form the Confederacy. Now THAT was an insurrection…
In 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected (by 69 Presidential electors) as the first President of the United States. Washington was a natural leader, wary of executive power, and a ethical to his bones. A worse choice could have sunk the fledgling nation. That Washington was so able was largely moral luck, but until recently, the United States had been extraordinarily lucky.
Feb. 4, 1945 saw the Yalta Conference, in which President Roosevelt and Churchill sold out Poland and laid the groundwork for the Iron Curtain in exchange for Stalin agreeing to join in the war against Japan.
And in 1983, singer Karen Carpenter died, the victim of an eating disorder brought on by the cruelty of conventions regarding women’s appearances in both the entertainment business and American society. She was 32.
2. Today the House will vote on whether to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments because she is an unapologetic, conspiracy theory espousing embarrassment. Headline News this morning termed the vote a “struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.” That’s typical, and false. There are legitimate arguments for not punishing Greene. Most of the statements prompting her attempted censoring occurred before her election, and that’s a dangerous precedent to set. The Democrats’ motives are also suspect, since she has filed impeachment articles against President Biden, and is a vocal Trump supporter. The problem could have been mitigated if Minority House Leader Kevin McCarthy handled Greene as a matter of party discipline. He is a weenie, however, and a coward, terrified of a backlash from pro-Trump fanatics. Thus he will permit the entire House to demote an elected representative based on conduct the voters had a chance to consider.
Country music superstar Morgan Wallen was suspended indefinitely by his record label and removed from hundreds of radio stations across the country yesterday. The reason? He was captured on camera saying “nigger.” TMZ posted a video this week showing Wallen loudly returning home with friends. A neighbor started recording the scene and the video included Wallen using the word. If you can tell the context of his words, please explain it to me. Was “nigger” meant as an insult, or was it used playfully? Was the target white or black? There is no evidence that he “hurled” the word, because that suggest that it was hurled at someone.
I’m resorting to the enthusiasm of Mr. Durante, an icon in my childhood home, because I sense readers are exhausted, or depressed, or moping, or something. Even my dog is a bad mood—he growled at me a couple of times, which is out of character. The traffic and comments on Ethics Alarms are way down; last month was especially bad, with views topping 4,000 only once. Is it anger? Fear? Submission? Surrender? The weather? Have the pods all been successfully delivered while we sleep? Well,
This is no time to stop working on creating a more ethical society, when totalitarianism is slowly creeping up from the muck…
1. And now for something completely…something. I wonder: what is the ethical reaction to this?
The final product is an example of a visual tradition in Black culture that usually circulates during two specific occasions: When a Black person ascends in society or dies. In this case, the moment came when Ms. Harris, was sworn in as the first woman and the first Black and South Asian person to ascend to the position of Vice President….It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time when these works began to merge into the mainstream, according to Aaron Bryant, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. But “they have been around for a long time,” he said. “Throughout art we have always celebrated folks that we see as heroes. They become a symbol of good conquering evil”…While some of these images are camp or cringe, Mr. Cheatham’s image of Ms. Harris was sincere. “What makes these images particularly Black is that they aren’t made for the white public, he said. “If you don’t get the reference, you’re not going to enjoy it,” Desus said. “They’re not made in a way that is for general consumption. There is definitely a hood angle to it in that they’ll do something that if you’re not from the hood you’ll take the whole memorial as blasphemous. It is like graffiti in that way.”
The painting above has been circulating briskly among African-Americans on social media, we are told.
Today is the anniversary of Nipplegate, which, you probably recall, is when Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake executed their juvenile plot to get cheap publicity by flashing her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII half-time show (back when I watched the Super Bowl in my ignorance of just how vile the NFL was) and began lying about it. By the time the dust cleared, the Federal Communications Commission had received 540,000 complaints about the incident. Viacom, CBS’ parent company, received the maximum fine the FCC could issue for such offenses, and paid $3.5 million to settle indecency complaints about the broadcast.
Ethics Alarms has featured two reflections on that incident. One was a rebuttal, an easy one, of pop culture pundit Emmanuel Hapsis’s ridiculous analysis, declaring the episode as exemplifying America’s “patriarchy,” “racism” and “sexism.” I wrote then, tongue piercing my cheek, that “obviously no white singers flashing ten-year-olds in TV land would be criticized, and no male singer who decided to let Mr. Wiggly make a guest appearance would be similarly pilloried.” I received a wave of really nasty comments on that one, highlighted by someone named Troy whom I honored, sort of, with a Comment of the Day in 2018. I’ll revisit it with pleasure now, since it’s short, funny and stupid. He wrote,
Madonna’s white ass has been showing her boobs, coochie and anything else that is of a sexual nature all through the late 80’s up until today…and though she got criticized for her antics, even pissing off the Catholic Church with her attention seeking ways, as soon as a black woman gets’ exposed by a this privileged white boy, then the whole white world screams OMG, OMG, hang her, nail her to the cross…blame her, blame her…this whole fiasco is reminiscent of how whites back in slavery times would lynch blacks for solely being black and then again in modern times how white people can cuss a police officer out, spit in their face, fight them and get taken to prison to cool off with only a slap on the wrist…but a black person get’s pulled over and by a white officer for having expired license plates or a busted tail light and they never make it to jail, they are taken straight to the morgue, because like what White Boy Privileged Justin did to Janet, it becomes a black issue and she was the only one who got blamed, black balled and even her apology was not enough for the privileged whites, she had to PAY and pay dearly. So for all those white privileged reading this article, and saying she does not deserve an apology, I GET IT, you all want her HANGED…It’s what you all believe to be punishment to the full extent for this black woman, who has NEVER, EVER been in any trouble, caused any drama and had been low-key, and private all of her life until that one millisecond to be torn to shreds by the white privileged…well for those of us who are WOKE, we see What Madonna has made a career of doing, Janet should get the death penalty. So white privileged of you all.
“Madonna’s white ass has been showing her boobs” might be my favorite phrase to appear on this site in ten years.
It’s also disturbing to realize that Troy could probably be elected to Congress today with that level of analysis. But I digress.
The unexpected reappearance of The Ethics Scoreboard online now gives me the opportunity to re-post the commentary there about “Nipplegate” written shortly after it all occurred. So, in commemoration of that ethics train wreck, and also because I wouldn’t change anything I wrote then, here is an encore, slightly edited, of “The Breast,” from February 11, 2004.
Ethics Alarms 