Incidentally, Twitter/X Also Sucks, And Can Bite Me.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

For reasons yet to be explained, my second attempt to maintain an account on “X” was foiled yesterday when I was suddenly blocked from my own home page, “EthicsAlarmist.” I have spent over an hour trying to wade through the laborious process of getting back on, all because the phone number I initially used to set up the account is no longer in use. There is apparently no way to fix this. They keep wanting to send me a code using that number, and when I give them my current cell phone number and try to use the code they send me, the site responds that the phone number I am using is not associated with the account. Like so, so many others, X has a terrible service website.

I just received this in the email they also say is not associated with the account:

Hello,
The phone number you provided does not match the phone number on the account.
If you have a different phone number that might be associated with the account, you can request a password reset via SMS text message using this link: https://x.com/account/begin_password_reset.
If you’re still not able to update your password, we may be able to assist you. Please respond to this email with the following:

  • Are you still logged in to https://mobile.x.com?
  • What is the @username you are trying to access?
  • Is the account linked to an app like X for Android or iOS, postDeck, Vine, Instagram, etc? 

Thanks,
X Support

I’ve gone through all of that, twice. It’s an endless loop. Then I received this:

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that we’re unable to verify you as the account owner. We know this is disappointing to hear, but we can’t assist you further with accessing your account. If you know which email address or phone number is associated with the account, and you no longer have access to that email or connected phone number, please contact your service provider for assistance. 

For privacy reasons, we can’t provide any information about this account’s registered email address or phone number. We understand it’s frustrating to get locked out of an account, but we have these policies to protect accounts and private data. We appreciate your understanding.

You’re more than welcome to create a new account to get back onto X. 

Please do not respond to this email as replies to this account are not monitored.

Thanks, X Support

My response: “You are welcome to bite me.” I do not understand, and I particularly don’t understand how a Big Tech company can be this incompetent.

Eventually I suppose I will have to open a third account (I abandoned #1 while Twitter was kicking out conservatives and Trump) just to have access to tweets and videos from other sources, but I won’t be investing any time in seeking followers or exposure for Ethics Alarms content.

A platform that behaves like this can’t be trusted—and I even paid for a “blue check.” And after my Verizon experience, Musk’s baby picked the wrong time to mess with me. I’m sure there is some secret to getting my account back, but X has wasted too much of my time already, and I will not forgive or forget.

To Hell with it.

And Now For Something Completely Stupid and Unethical Too: Carmel-By-The-Sea

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’m not sure why I never learned that the little California municipality of Carmel-by-the-Sea in Monterey has an illegal and unethical law against high-heeled shoes, since my brain is stuffed with even more useless trivia. I know now, however, and my conviction that California is hopelessly estranged from U.S. values and principles has been reinforced (again).

In 1963 the city passed a law, recommended by a City Attorney who was evidently an idiot, requiring visitors to get an official permit in order to legally walk around the place in heels higher than two inches. You can read the local ordinance here. If one wants to walk around wearing heels over two inches in height and less than one square inch of bearing surface, a permit from the city hall is required. The permits are issued free of charge, with the name of the individual making the request and the signature of a city clerk.

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Comment of the Day: “BREAKING! Verizon Sucks!”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Much thanks is due to Ryan Harkins for helping to keep this from becoming “Jake Tapper is an Asshole” Tuesday with some thoughtful commentary about why customer service is almost universally terrible. This comes in the wake of my beginning a vendetta against Verizon, which damaged my business, lied, cost me money, wasted my time, raised my blood pressure, and made it all worse by generously offering me eight dollars and change for my trouble.

Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post “Breaking! Verizon Sucks!”

***

My wife and I just encountered a situation with Spectrum, for internet services, and Ameritas, for life insurance. In each case, speaking with a different customer service representative ended up in wildly different stories and results, and in each case has left us angry and considering cancelling and seeking another company.

On the Ameritas front, my wife has a life insurance policy that was issued when she was a baby (I’m not permitted to say how many years ago, but she’s an early Millennial…), and we’ve been dutifully paying the annual premium for years for the $50k whole life policy. The problem is that since the policy is so old, the company apparently has no idea how to handle it anymore. It isn’t available to view through their website. Apparently it can’t be converted to a different policy that is able to be posted online. When discussing what to do moving forward, we’ve been told

  • We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date a few years from now
  • We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date far in the future
  • We haven’t paid all the premiums and need to pay late fees for not paying this last year’s premium
  • We don’t have to pay late fees, but we do need to pay the premium (that we’ve already paid)
  • We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and are in danger of losing our policy altogether
  • We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and our policy is changing into a different, inferior type of policy

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Ethics Hero: Megyn Kelly

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In the clip from her podcast above, Megyn Kelly, who has not always been the exemplar of ethical journalism, deftly eviscerated Ethics Villain Jack Tapper for his role in covering up Joe Biden’s galloping dementia and then turning around after the election (and the failure of his fellow propagandists to defeat Donald Trump) to profit from a book exposing the scandal that he was part of.

Kelly’s coup-de-gras comes when Tapper, cornered, whines, “There is a difference between the clips of Joe Biden falling on a stage… forgetting a Republican congressman had died… Those are embarrassing… but there is a difference between that and the investigative journalism that Alex and I were able to do—and only able to do after the election.”

Kelly goes for the jugular, and get it. “I don’t diminish the importance of the book,” she says. “But there is no way we can have that conversation with an audience that is as skeptical of your ability to tell the story as mine is without addressing your role in this, right?…you’ve watched the coverage since it came out that you wrote this book…. there’s a legion of articles comparing you in some instances to like, O.J. Instead of ‘If I Did It,’ this is ‘If I Hid It.’”

Perfect.

As a side note, should I give Tapper a teeny bit of credit for agreeing to do Megyn’s podcast? Surely he knew what was coming…or did he? I think he is mired in such a bubble and has been so corrupted by his stay at CNN that he really has convinced himself that working for the Axis of Unethical Conduct makes him one of the good guys. Either that, or he’s a moron.

Whatever the case, he’s lucky I wasn’t the interviewer. My questions to Jake would have made Megyn seem like Mr. Rogers….

Ethics Quiz: Trump’s Banners

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This isn’t the quiz question, but are we entering Julie Principle territory here? Should I keep flagging this very Trumpian conduct as ethically dubious, or just resign myself to “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Trump’s gonna troll ’cause he likes to, that’s why”?

Those banners are currently hanging at the Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C. Naturally, my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends (and certainly the rest of that zombie herd that I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting), is triggered. “This is SHOCKING,” writes one of the TDS inflicted (whose posts I have noted before). “Authoritarian craziness is now on full display. What happened to DOGE? We now have Soviet style banners. POTUS is a very ill man.” A reply asserts, “Unfortunately, the ‘uneducated’ would never see this.”

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BREAKING! Verizon Sucks!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

For the nearly four days Verizon’s incompetence cost me, including two angry clients, one lost assignment that would have earned me at least $200, a missed bill payment that resulted in a penalty of 22 bucks, and over four hours wasted on phone calls and technicians, the company just texted me what its penance would be. Here’s the full text:

“Due to a service outage, we’ve issued a credit of $8.61 that will appear soon in your account.”

Anticipating this, yesterday I tried to get through to a human being in Customer Service to register my objections to both the Verizon service I received (and didn’t receive) over those four days, and my conclusion that the company owed me a lot more than just compensation for the time the internet and phone weren’t working. First I was trapped in a loop trying to sell me various products and services offered by Verizon’s “partners.” Next I reached an AI who mimicked a human being, even saying “um” here and there, who wouldn’t stop talking even when I did my best Michael Palin impression from the immortal “Travel Agent Sketch” (his screaming “SHUT UP!” begins at around the four minute mark)….

On my third try, I was told that a live representative would pick up after an estimated “13 minute” wait; the wait time was really 44 minutes. Then I was told that I had reached the repair department, but I was promised that I would be forwarded to a live person “who can help you” without dealing with recordings and AI liars. After a half hour of the most horrible elevator music since Montovani played “The Pina Colada Song,” I hung up.

I can’t even buy a good straight-edge razor to go on my planned “Sweeney Todd” rampage for $8.61.”

CNN Gathers Enemies of the People to Sit Around and Lie Among Themselves To Fool Its Audience..What IS That?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I mean, other than “disgusting?”

From “Real Clear Politics”: Ethics Villain Jake Tapper hosts Lying Racist Van Jones and Obama Propagandist David Axelrod on CNN in a discussion of the “shocking” revelations regarding how Joe Biden was a walking vegetable while he was supposedly the “sharp as a tack” President of the United States….

TAPPER: Van, I remember how emotional you were in the immediate moments after the June 27, 2024, debate because of what you saw on the stage. And with all this new reporting coming out — and I should disclose that I gave both of you copies of the book so you would have a little bit more information. Do you feel like you were duped, Van? Like, how do you feel?

JONES: First, this book is extraordinary. I don’t care who you are, left, right, or otherwise. Anybody who cares about this country and about just the dynamics of power, this is “the emperor’s new clothes” playing itself out in real time. Everybody knew, but everyone was afraid to say — except for David Axelrod, for two years — that something was wrong here. I was shocked. I love Joe Biden. I don’t like him. I love him. I got a chance to work with him when I was a part of the Obama administration and loved him more every day. I was shocked to see his condition when he came out. And so was the world. And that wasn’t the first time he was in that condition. The book makes it very, very clear. There are people who knew and said nothing. And that is a crime against this republic. And I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.

Here, let me fix that for you, asshole: “….for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up” in which all of us were complicit. I’m sure that’s what you meant to say, you shameless totalitarian hack.

Conservative pundit Stephen Green adds, “Biden’s decline was obvious in 2020 — for those with eyes — and yet Democrat insiders still thought that Biden was better than any of the alternatives in 2020.” And I’ll add to that: last February I wrote, regarding President Trump’s attendance at the (yecchh) Super Bowl,

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Bill Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Vigilante commenter “A Friend” has now sunk (or risen?) to defending comic Bill Maher after supergluing himself onto the New York Times hill to die on, but undeterred or intimidated, I declare this latest from HBO’s manipulative hypocrite yet another “Unethical Quote:

“Let me tell you, folks, if the standards on the Left are going to be this high, and politics is going to be this much of a cock block, we’re never going to win elections or have any more babies.”

–—-Maher, reacting to the season eight finale of “Love Is Blind,” the latest stupid romantic link-up reality show. A nurse named Sara Carton, bailed out of her dream wedding to a sales consultant at the altar, telling him that he just wasn’t woke enough.

Bill Maher is trying to suck up to non-Trump Deranged sane people and conservatives to salvage his HBO ratings and popularity, and here is another example. Who knows what Maher really thinks, or if he believes in anything other than his own career, how much money he can make being a public asshole, and still getting dates with attractive starlets young enough to be his daughters. Here was his whole lament, so “A Friend” can’t say I’m quoting the jerk “out of context”:

The season eight finale of “Love Is Blind”: The bride, an impressive, attractive nurse named Sara Carton, walked out on her dream wedding to sales consultant Ben Mezzenga. They were at the altar, all dressed up, almost to the part where they eat cake and do the electric slide, when Sara broke the news to her man that she just couldn’t go through with it…. it was because of Black Lives Matter. Because if there’s one thing we know about the young liberal women of today, it’s that they are very, very high in their standards. About everything….He never really thought about it. And that’s when Sara realized she’d rather die alone. It wasn’t just Black Lives Matter. Ben also didn’t have much to say about the vaccine, and his position on trans was basically, ‘I don’t know, I guess.’ How dare Ben not throw himself enthusiastically into doing The Will of the Party? Let me tell you, folks, if the standards on the Left are going to be this high, and politics is going to be this much of a cock block, we’re never going to win elections or have any more babies. This inclination from certain liberals to always and immediately excommunicate instead of communicate is what makes them so unlikable. The guy must also have a nice car and make over 100K a year. Okay, but you know, how many 6’2″ Grand Prix drivers are there? How are the Democrats going to blow it this time? This is how. Posturing, purity tests, the politics of ‘I unfriend you if you’re not exactly with me a thousand percent.’”

Bill slipped up, you see. He signaled to the seal-clapping woke fanatics in his audience that still supporting the racist, lying scam movement and organization Black Lives Matter is showing “high standards.” In fact, doing so is irrefutable proof that someone is either a bigot, a moron, a sucker, or a con artist. It’s signature significance. Saying you support Black Lives Matter is like saying that you think Harold Staasen will stage a political comeback, or that you’d bet on Joe Bidden in a “Jeopardy!” match, or that you are Marie of Romania.

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Hollywood Film Clip #40, Dedicated to Jake Tapper, the Lying Axis Media, and the Unmasked Democratic Party

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This clip was just recommended by commenter deacondan86 in response to “How Can These People (Democrats, Journalists) Look Themselves in the Mirror Without Retching?,” and I thank him for it. I have a feeling it will get a work-out here in the coming months.

Is It Ethical to Continue to Slam Former President Biden Now That It Has Been Revealed That He Has Metastatic Prostate Cancer?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

ABSOLUTELY!

I might have published that answer in a slightly smaller font if it were not so obvious that the news of Biden’s probably fatal malady was timed to mute the outrage over the Hur interview tapes as well as the emerging evidence of how disabled The Worst President Ever was during the latter part of his administration.

I don’t wish death on anyone (well, almost); I empathize with any human being and his or her loved ones who have to go through this ordeal. But Biden’s revealed health issues are absolutely unrelated to his culpability for the train wreck his term as President became, and he should not be spared criticism, condemnation, exposure and contempt for a single second because of his illness.

I checked: at least six relatively recent serial killers perished of various forms of cancer this century….

Richard Ramirez (The Night Stalker): Convicted of 13 murders and numerous other offenses, Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma in 2013 while awaiting execution.

Joseph Edward Duncan III: Known for kidnapping and murdering multiple victims, including the Groene family in Idaho, Duncan died of brain cancer in 2021.

Carl Eugene Watts (The Sunday Morning Slasher): Suspected of killing over 100 women, Watts died of prostate cancer in 2007 while serving a life sentence.

Peter Tobin: Serving three life sentences for murder, Tobin died in 2022 after suffering from prostate cancer, vascular disease, and dementia.

Harry Edward Greenwell (The I-65 Killer): Linked to at least three murders in Indiana and Kentucky, Greenwell died of cancer in 2013 before being identified as a serial killer.

William Darrell Lindsey: Known as “Crazy Bill”, Lindsey murdered six women in Florida and one in North Carolina. He died of cancer in 2001 while imprisoned

Joe Biden and the party that installed him did far more harm to far more Americans and the nation not only than any one of those monsters, but than all of them combined.

Sure, I’m sorry Joe is sick. I’m still not letting him or the people who used him off the metaphorical hook for their actions. CNN has this headline: “President Biden has metastatic prostate cancer. Here’s what you should know.”

This is what you should know: the cancer is being cynically employed by the Axis of Unethical Conduct as a distraction and deflection to duck accountability. Don’t let them get away with it.