A MSM Reporter Who Delivered Objective, Ethical Journalism Is Openly Attacked For It

Good!

Almost as infuriating as the unholy alliance between a totalitarianism-aspiring political party and the large majority of the news media determined to play Pravda is the persistent denial that such an alliance exists despite mountains of daily evidence. (It’s a right wing conspiracy theory, you know.) This episode, small as it might seem, shows both reporters and Democrats outing themselves.

NBC reporter Dasha Burns commented on the air that Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman appeared to have trouble understanding their conversation prior to their interview, because his closed caption device allowing him to read questions in text while she was asking them wasn’t on yet.

This kind of information used to be known as “reporting,” back when journalists saw their jobs as informing the public about objective facts they needed to know. But Fetterman, who is still recovering from the effects of a major stroke that would have prompted an ethical candidate to withdraw from a Senate race is going to great lengths to avoid letting the public know how serious his comprehension and communications problems are. Naturally, his party, desperate to hold on to control of the Senate, wants to keep Pennsylvania voters in the dark as well. Also naturally, the mainstream progressive media, of which NBC is a card-carrying member, is expected to assist in this deception, and certainly not undermine it with that old-fashioned “reporting” stuff.

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Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck Update, Part 2: Hospital Masking

I actually witnessed this exchange three days ago, as part of my four-day Alexandria, VA hospital adventure:

Woman: Put on a mask! This is a hospital!

Man: Why should I? You’re not wearing one!

Woman: I am!

Man: You’re wearing it under your nose!

Woman: I’m still wearing it! Put one on, or I’m reporting you!

Man. Go ahead!

Whereupon the woman turned to the elderly volunteer manning the desk at the entrance. He wasn’t wearing a mask.

Are the idiotic pandemic masks the official symbol and attire of The Great Stupid? I think so. My experience at the INOVA hospital convinced me. At the Emergency Room entrance. a large sign mandated masks. A security guard ordered me to put one on (but not my wife, who was being checked in). The masks being handed out were those cheap paper things that are either completely useless or mostly useless, depending on who you talk to. During the four days of hospital visits, I didn’t see a single N95 mask on the faces of staff, patients or visitors.

Around the busy ER waiting area, there were unmasked people, masked people, and people wearing masks under their noses or chins. When my wife was being checked in, nobody appeared to care about the masks at all. The nurse processing us wore no mask. I didn’t; my wife didn’t. The attendants who took her to the temporary room did. Later on, all of the nurses and techs were masked, but some doctors were not. Nobody ever asked me or my wife to put one on. In the nearby rooms, the typical scene was an unmasked patient and a mixed crowd of masked and unmasked family members, shoulder to shoulder.

Later, when my wife was moved to a regular hospital room, the signs even disappeared. The Patients Entrance and Visitors entrance had cheap masks available, but there were no apparent requirements. Sometimes the receptionists were masked, sometimes not. Sometimes one was and the other wasn’t. I walked in maskless (let’s see…) eight times, and nobody said a word.

What’s going on here?

Madness, as Major Clipton said. Virtue signaling. Confusion. Mixed messages. Chaos. Fear. Stupidity.

Science!

Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck Update, Part 1

[There’s almost no traffic here on Saturday if I don’t get a post up before 10:30am; I guess I’m going to find out what kind of traffic there is if nothing gets posted before 4 pm. Ugh. I’m sorry. Sitting down at my desk is still very painful, more so, in fact, today than yesterday. I also don’t understand why an 18 inch bruise on one leg makes the rest of me feel so terrible. I feel like a weenie, and I’m sorry.]

1. Biden again extended the Wuhan pandemic public health emergency, which was set to expire last week. Now it will remain in place past the midterm elections. This keeps millions of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program beneficiaries who might lose their coverage enrolled for several more months, and allows allowed vaccines, testing, and treatments to be offered for free. It also requires states to offer continuous enrollment for Medicaid and CHIP, public health insurance programs for low-income individuals, in order to receive additional federal funding.

That’s nice, except that there is no emergency, and Biden’s previous public statements admitted as much. This is an abuse of Presidential power, no more ethical nor legal than a leader’s extending a curfew or martial law to seize dictatorial powers—it’s the same principle, and the same tactic. Congress should throw a fit, but it won’t, because Congress has no principles or guts: the measures benefit voting blocs, and though the President is abusing his emergency powers to bypass the requirements of legislation and rule-making, the public can’t comprehend such details like due process and the separation of powers, nor, apparently, basic honesty. If the President can declare an emergency (extending an emergency is not different from declaring one) when there is none and get away with it, why not martial law?

The Wuhan gravy train has benefited so many (while wrecking the economy, whole sectors of the economy and the education and social progress of our children, just to mention a few of the self-inflicted wounds) that ending it will undoubtedly cause many considerable pain. HHS estimates that as many as 15 million people will lose their Medicaid coverage—but then, they aren’t supposed to have medicaid coverage. 

Many families will also lose supplemental money they received through the federal government’s nutrition program. But the only reason they were getting such funds was because of an emergency that no longer exists. Biden has already used the non-emergency to justify student loan forgiveness (we’ll see if he gets away with that) and make landlords continue to do without rent. HHS overrode state laws regarding which vaccines pharmacists could administer to certain age groups.  Whether the nationalization of pharmacy vaccine rules will expire when the “emergency” is lifted is still open to question. Essentially, this is a scheme to spend more taxpayer money and extend nanny state benefits and ratchet up big government control, using the pandemic as the tool. It is both an abuse of power and a cynical exercise in bypassing democracy. Continue reading

Thoughts On Spain’s Artistic Law School Cheat

Yolanda de Lucchi, a law professor at Spain’s University of Malaga, recently shared photos on her Twitter account showing the most impressive exam cheating attempt she had ever encountered. One of her students tried to cheat on a law final by etching the criminal procedure law on eleven BIC pens. You can see what the pens looked like up close above. Here they all are:

If the student had put half the time into studying the material that he devoted to his baroque cheating technique, he wouldn’t have needed to cheat anyway. I was immediately put in mind of several Ripley’s “Believe it or Not!” oddities involving meticulous engravings of text on grains of rice, like this one, featuring the Lord’s Prayer:

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/14/22: Bruised And Embarrassed Edition

The above is as close as I can get to the approximate predominant color of the bruise that runs from just above my left hip to below the back if my left knee. The thing is about ten inches across at its widest point. Then there’s the swelling, which reminds me of a joke in “City Slickers.” Thanks to everyone who has sent good wishes, both here and off site. I’m just embarrassed and frustrated, while metaphorically kicking myself for not buying that standing desk I was considering a few years ago. Right now, I’m just going to try to catch up a bit…

1. Apparently the Axis is really  going with the “threat to democracy” narrative. I was watching the News Mix channel on DirectTV. Fox News is nestled between CNN and MSNBC, so you can watch all three channels at once. In the time that Fox was covering rising crime rates (and WaWa pulling stores from Philadelphia after a mob ransacked one outlet), police officers getting shot, the latest inflation numbers, the border mess, and the Justice Dept. being sued to force an explanation for why it allowed illegal protests in front of SCOTUS justices’ homes, the other two networks never budged from reports on the Jan. 6 Star Chamber, backed by films of the riot that occurred 21 months ago. News! Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias… Continue reading

The Return Of David Leavitt, Ethics Villain [Corrected]

Actually, when we first heard of David Leavitt, a gaming writer with delusions of grandeur, the Ethics Alarms verdict was not that he was an ethics villain, because the particular misconduct that sparked that 2020 post wasn’t quite dastardly enough (or maybe I was in a charitable mood). That was after he had found a mislabeled electric toothbrush (priced at $0.01 rather than $100) at Target, and when the checkout employee refused to sell the item at what was obviously an erroneous price and the store manager backed up the clerk, David went on a full-bore campaign of vengeance on Target.

“This [Target] manager Tori is not honoring the price of their items per Massachusetts law,” tweeted Leavitt, including the young manager’s photo. He called the police on the manager, and said he was prepared to take her and the store to court. Recognizing an ethically-dead progressive determined to harass evil corporations, disgusted observers started a GoFundMe page that raised $28,000 to cover the victimized manager’s inconvenience. The law Leavitt cited but never bothered to check in fact says that an obvious pricing error, one that qualifies as “gross,” isn’t enforceable. I wrote in part:

Leavitt is being an asshole, in technical terms. He knows the price posted was a mistake. A decent, fair, rational citizen would accept that, alert the store that it needs to fix the label, and stop at that. Maybe such a citizen will get some kind a reward from the store (this once happened to me). Instead, this epic jerk goes, in the immortal words of Marsellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction,” “Medieval on Target’s ass,” and its poor manager too. His rationalization for his appalling behavior, and this is rich, is that he can’t afford to go to the dentist, so, presumably, he believes this entitles him to steal an electric toothbrush from Target…

I also wrote that I almost felt sorry for David because he had made a national fool of himself. I don’t feel sorry for him after his latest example of ethics rot. He obviously learned nothing, and indeed has decided to step a notch, several, in fact, from asshole to Ethics Villain.

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Emergency Open Forum! (Injured Ethicist Edition)

I really hate to do this, because there is a lot to write about, but I’m going to have to open up the blog to reader commentary early this week. I took a nasty fall in a (poorly lit, dangerous) hospital parking lot two days ago, and now have a bruise the approximate size of South Dakota in my sitting area, bowling ball-level swelling, and skinned fingers on both hands. In order of painfulness, I’d rank them sitting, bending over (I had to get my son to tie my shoes), getting into the car, lying down, walking and typing. Standing still isn’t too bad. Plus I’m commuting back and forth to that hospital.

I hope I can figure out a way to get out some posts—you would not believe how long this pathetic entry took and how many times I had to re-arrange the pillows.

Here’s One Way Websites Lose Credibility On Ethics Alarms…

…Publishing ignorant “pit bull” hysteria.

I like “Not the Bee,” an oddity-collecting, usually political website that up until today sent me a daily bulletin. Today, however, the site decided to join the ranks of those who spread ill-informed anti-pit bull breeds propaganda. I saw a new wave of this coming: a recent news story had recounted how two “pit bulls” in Tennessee had killed a five-month old and a two-year-old and attacked the mother, wounding her grievously. “Not the Bee’s” appeal to authority is conservative pundit Michael Knowles, who as far as I can determine, has no special expertise about dogs whatsoever. Nonethless, NTB quotes a Knowles tweet [“I know some people like them, but we should obviously kill all the pit bulls.”] and headlines its irresponisble (and damaging) story, “Michael Knowles is 100% correct about pit bulls and I could care less how much you think I’m a monster for saying so.”

No, I don’t think the NTB writer (Jesse James) is a monster; he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His screed relied heavily on this chart…

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Stay Classy, Michelle!

Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s voting promotion group “When We All Vote” has partnered with the BLK dating app and is doing “voter registration activations” with the company.” The BLK dating app is aimed at Black singles looking for hook-ups.

Last week, BLK released a video encouraging Black voters to go to the polls for reasons other than civic responsibility. It’s title: “No Voting No Vucking.” Vucking! See, that’s not vulgar, like, say “fucking.” Former First Ladies can approve of “vucking” for votes. Sample lyrics:

“No voting, no vucking, no voting, no touching,” rapper Saucy Santana sings in the video. “You wanna hit this booty, gotta do your civic duty!”

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The Times Asks: “Is There a Future for Late-Night Talk Shows?” Ethics Alarms Asks: “Is There A Future For News Media That Has Been Made This Stupid By Bias?”

The New York Times John Koblin and apply all of their skill and experience to examine the apparent phenomenon of late night talk shows facing massive changes, and perhaps even extinction. “[A]s streaming has ascended, and network TV audiences and advertising revenue has dwindled, worries that late-night shows could be the latest genre affected by sweeping change are hitting virtually every corner of the entertainment world,” they write.

What’s going on here? Well, these career-long TV analysts conclude,  viewers no longer have a “deep bond” to single late night hosts. Ratings have been sinking because of streaming, and so many alternative options for late night viewing. The cost to produce some late-night shows”is no longer feasible in an era of sinking ratings.”Late-night shows have also struggled to make the transition to streaming video, another consideration weighing on executives,” we are told, in part because “the topical opening monologue, a staple of the genre, has virtually no shelf life in streaming libraries.” Current  late-night network hosts “don’t seem to want a lifetime appointment” unlike their predecessors like Johnny Carson, jay Leno and Letterman. “I think the Carson playbook of 40 years talking to celebrities is probably a thing of the past,” a former late night producer told the Times.

Is that it? I guess so: this long examination of factors and trens couldn’t find any other reason for the genre’s decline.

Funny…the reason I haven’t watched a late night talk show in almost eight years must be unusual: these media reporters don’t detect it. Funnier still, a substantial percentage of the readers who commented on the story seem to see the main reason for the rejection of such talks shows—the same reason I have—very clearly.

A sampling: Continue reading