It is depressing to me that I feel it necessary to write anything here at all, other than to post the video above.

Mullins decided to make a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing about personal animus between him and Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien. He read into the record tweeted insults by O’Brien, who had called the Oklahoma Republican a “moron” and “full of shit” among other juicy descriptors. This precipitated the disgusting display above, with Mullin daring O’Brien to a fistfight, “right here, right now,” and both men apparently preparing to due battle in the U.S. Capitol. “If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” Mullins said.

Luckily committee chair Bernie Sanders appeared to have some sense of honor and decorum, and ordered Mullin to stand down, saying, “You are a United States Senator! Sit down!” Mullin is a former professional MMA fighter, and apparently needed reminding.

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For unexplainable reasons, my wife and I have been watching old episodes of “48 Hours” of late. You know the show, I assume: the CBS documentary/news magazine has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988, though in periodically mutating forms. It is currently the only remaining first-run prime time shows appearing Saturday nights on the four major U.S. broadcast TV networks, and as such illustrates what dinosaurs those networks are and where they are headed.

“48 Hours” illustrates a lot of other things too, I have discovered, many of them carrying useful, disturbing, or surprising ethical and cultural implications. Although the show’s format is sometimes chucked to cover a breaking news story, most of its astounding number of episodes are devoted to “true crime” tales, usually mysteries and recently solved cold cases.

The formula seldom varies: we get a quick description of a U.S. locale, snippets of local citizens describing it in glowing terms, then an ominous overview of the participants in the ugly event we are about to hear, almost invariably a shocking murder. Then the CBS host—here’s how old the show is: the original host was Dan Rather—is shown interviewing family members, witnesses, law enforcement officials, journalists, lawyers, jurors and other participants. The show is carefully apolitical, but it is still a fascinating series of snapshots of our society and the treatment of it by the news and entertainment media.

Among the striking impressions that emerge from the accumulated impact of “48 Hours”—

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Properly, “salmagundi” describes a salad or cold plate made from disparate ingredients that may include meat, seafood, eggs, cooked and raw vegetables, fruits, pickles, or something else. Metaphorically, the word is sometimes used to describe a chaotic confluence of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent mess. That is how Ethics Alarms will use the term going forward. An Unethical Salmagundi (U.S.) will describe one of those mass collisions of people, situations and institutions that are devoid of ethical logic, discipline or comprehension. An ironically named U.S. will be more disorderly and incomprehensible than an ethics rain wreck, and impossible to sort out. Here is an example from the weekend’s news:

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