Above is Dr. Fauci during his baseball game theater last year, when he went out to the mound at Nationals Park to throw out the first pitch, and wore a facemask, though he was outdoors, there were no fans in the stands, and nobody was within a hundred feet of him. Then, once he thought he was off-camera, he took off his mask while sitting right next to two friends who were wearing theirs, for some reason. Thanks in great part to Fauci’s misinformation and pandemic fear-mongering, when I attended a Nats game this year I was required to wear a mask between bites of my hotdog, again despite there being nobody near me. What fun. Yet here is Fauci’s quote:
This email, one of thousands being perused after a Freedom of Information Act dump, demonstrates that the CDC official advising the Trump administration and treated like a benign, all-knowing God of Science during the first year of the pandemic was and is a manipulative, two-faced, untrustworthy hack.
This should not shock anyone at this point, though Fauci worshipers, like mask worshipers (my sister wears two, in her car alone, still) will probably be in lifetime denial. Oh, heck, let me digress to an example. My woke-diseased baseball writer/ lawyer colleague, Craig Calcaterra, who is peddling a substack baseball commentary newsletter that I would eagerly subscribe to if he could resist off-topic progressive madness, wrote today in part,
What’s the ethical reaction to this story? Angelia Mia Vargas, 24, has been charged with deadly conduct with a firearm after she accidentally shot her 5-year-old son while trying to shoot an over-enthusiastic 6-month-old boxer puppy that got loose from a neighbor and was running through her yard. Neither the dog nor the boy were seriously injured. My reflex reaction, I confess, was, “HA! That should teach this idiot something about gun safety!” and then I instantly regretted it. The child was innocent: what really would have been condign justice was if her shot hit her car’s gas tank and it blew up. Shooting herself in the foot would have been good. “She could have handled it differently,” said Bruno the puppy’s owner. Ya think? Here’s the terrifying beast that Angelia thought justified deadly force:
Should this woman have custody of a child? [Pointer: valkygrrl]
1. The rest of the story….There were a record number of Tulsa Race Massacre demonstrations on Memorial Day, as one might expect with “hate whitey” being the current fad. What was supposed to be the biggest one, in Tulsa of course, was cancelled after three survivors demanded $1 million each to appear. The May 31st Remember & Rise event was also supposed to feature John Legend and Stacey Abrams—boy, if only my sock drawer hadn’t been in such bad shape!– but it was called off because Viola Fletcher, 107, her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100 and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, increased their appearance fee from $100,000 each to $1 million each. Their lawyers also demanded that a reparations fund be increased from the agreed-upon $2 million to $10 million. What does this tell us about how reparations would turn out if the U.S. were ever so unhinged as to agree to them?
I did learn that the young African-American, Dick Rowland, whose arrest after a white woman accused him of rape (or something) during an encounter in an elevator was the fuse for the violence wasn’t prosecuted. He was released, left Tulsa, and never returned.
I wonder why…
2. Here I go, obsessing about group identity again...In New York, the “Career Opportunities in the Accounting Profession” program, sponsored by the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants and the Moynihan Scholarship Fund, will introduce 250 “promising underrepresented high school students” to the accounting profession. The program will include virtual sessions about forensic accounting, interviewing skills, public speaking, networking, and an “accounting profession overview” featuring a panel discussion with experts in the profession. What a great idea! Nine institutions, including Ithaca College, Medgar Evers College, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. John’s University, Siena College, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Oswego, the University at Buffalo, and Westchester Community College co-host the program, which is free of charge for students.
Oh—white students may not apply. The online application for the program includes options for Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American students, but no option for white students. When confronted about the apparent discrimination involved, SUNY Oswego Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Scott Furlong huminahumina-ed that “SUNY Oswego participates in supporting the program and sees this as a beneficial service to the profession, but we strongly believe that all disadvantaged students would benefit from the COAP program.While we do not participate in recruiting the student participants in COAP or in the setting of policy for student membership, SUNY Oswego would prefer a more inclusive perspective regarding membership in COAP and the NYSSCPA policy…[which would] “align with SUNY Oswego’s ethos that is rooted in diversity of thought and people, equitable practices and policies, and inclusive experiences.” Furlong said that the matter “merits much future discussion for the purposes of having SUNY Oswego reassess our involvement and reconsider our sponsorship.”
Meanwhile, his institution will continue to participate in a program that discriminates against white students.
I periodically am asked why I insist on referring to the pandemic virus, which unquestionably originated in China, almost certainly in the Wuhan province, and was allowed to spread world-wide in part by cover-up activities by the Chinese government, “The Wuhan virus.” After all, the edict came down from our politically-correct betters that this term was “racist,” despite the fact that it conveyed useful and accurate information that the technical term “COVID” does not.
I typically reply that I call it the Wuhan virus because that’s where it came from, and virtually every other virus has been named for its place of origin (sometimes inaccurately). I also do so in defiance of the open scheme among the news media to try to advance the Big Lie that President Trump was being racist by using the term when the news media itself had employed it before deciding this was one more opportunity to undermine Trump’s Presidency.
In addition, I furiously reject the proposition that because idiots and assholes react to truthful statements by behaving unjustly, violently and stupidly, as with the still relatively few who have attacked or abused Asian-Americans using the same cretinous rationale as those who killed dachshunds during World War I, anyone should shade the truth or avoid stating a fact. I reject the Asshole’s Veto, in other words.
There is also this motivating me: China is an international villain, and nobody should pretend otherwise or make any effort to excuse or disguise that nation’s true nature. Moreover, I am not running for office, and have succeeded in making anyone trying to justify the ban on calling a Chinese virus a Chinese virus look like the race-baiting tool that he or she is.
The entire effort to label as racist any statement, theory or belief that China bears responsibility for the virus that has killed millions and savaged the world economy would not have occurred with such fervor if it were not fueled by anti-Trump hatred and bias. Now the inconvenient truth that the virus may have originated in a Wuhan lab is exposing the despicable censorship effort for what it is, so its purveyors are desperately trying avoid the opprobrium they richly deserve.
“In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent….In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks. Hard as it may be to hear, he said, he believes that it may take close to 90 percent immunity to bring the virus to a halt — almost as much as is needed to stop a measles outbreak.“
No, what is hard to hear, though at this point hardly a shock to anyone with a functioning brain, is that Fauci now admits he’s been lying….you know, “for our own good.”
Don’t heed the spin, the double-talk and the euphemisms: when someone tells you something other than what he or she knows to be true or believes to be true, that individual is deliberately attempting to deceive you by communicating what they believe to be untrue as true. That’s lying. No debate. No defense. That’s what it is, by definition. “I did it for your own good” is a rationalization.
Joan Baez, the iconic folksinger, painted that, posted it, and wrote, “Dr. Fauci continues to be disrespected & marginalized by the administration’s lack of commitment to science. My painting offers the message to TRUST FAUCI. We can put our faith in science & truth, not lies, smoke screens & snake oil.”
It is amazing to me that so many people who continue to blame President Trump for the results of the Wuhan virus simultaneously exonerate and extol Dr. Fauci, whose advice the administration has almost completely followed, who has frequently contradicted himself, who was saying in March that there wasn’t much to worry about, who initially said not to wear masks and then admitted that was intentional disinformation, and did this:
Moreover, the argument that policymakers should blindly follow the opinions of scientists is ignorant, and indeed infantile. All a doctor is going to care about is the disease; he will not consider the practical aspects of his advice in other areas, like wrecking education, strangling the arts, crashing the economy, and indeed, that is something to which his expertise does not extend. Dyed in the DNA liberals like Baez want a virtual dictatorship by scientists because of climate change, which Baez almost certainly knows nothing about other than what people like Al Gore have told her. Continue reading →
I usually skip the New York Times Sunday Review section now. By mid-2017, it had become so partisan and such a nest of rabid Trump Derangement that it was not unusual for 75% of the content to consist of anti-Trump screeds. I finally got bored with it; the stuff was predictable and too often completely bats. If I read it at all, I did so to check how fanatically the Times was supporting the various coup efforts.
Charlie Warzel is one of the less hateful of the Times op-ed writers, though based on his Ethics Alarms file he is also one of most juvenile. He was the author of a New York Times editorial 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?” that I had fun shredding—it wasn’t hard—here. I was curious to see if he’s gotten any better since May in his Wuhan virus hysteria. His title seemed promising: “How to Actually Talk to Anti-Maskers: You cannot force public trust; you have to earn it.”
I think “anti-maskers” are jerks. It is still unclear to me how much good masks do, and the information from the “experts” has been inconsistent. I still see no reason to wear the things outside when nobody is going to come within ten feet of you, and I don’t. However, the ethical reasons to wear them are still valid:
They might make a difference.
Wearing them demonstrates good will and that one is trying to be responsible.
It places those at enhanced risk at ease.
It can’t hurt. The recent claim of Louie Gohmert (R-Tx) that his mask probably infected him was spectacularly dishonest and irresponsible, but you know, that’s Louie.
I also regard fanatic pro-mask hysterics as ridiculous and will say so when pressed.
However, I was interested to see if Charlie, having gotten himself on the Ethics Alarms Naughty List with his previous screed about the pandemic, would redeem himself. For writing op-eds is all about trust too: if I know you shade the facts, omit relevant information, engage in bias and cheat in your logic, I really don’t care what your opinion is. It’s not worth reading.
Charlie begins with an anecdote about how health officials gained the trust of the public in Senegal during an Ebola outbreak. OK—as long as the idea is to make a point about trust. Ebola isn’t the Wuhan virus, and the United States’ culture isn’t remotely like Senegal’s. Then he writes,
Taiwan is welcoming baseball fans back into stadiums. As of June, more than 20 other countries have begun the process of bringing children back to school. Thailand, a country of 70 million, hasn’t had an instance of local coronavirus transmission in seven weeks, as of last Thursday. And yet Americans are staring down nearly 150,000 virus deaths while governors and health officials pleading with citizens to wear masks are starting to sound like substitute teachers who’ve lost control of the classroom.
One indicator of how bad things are: Last week, Anthony Fauci, the United States’ leading infectious-disease doctor, felt compelled to reassure his audience during an online talk, “You can trust respected medical authorities.” He added, “I believe I’m one of them, so I think you can trust me.”
Ah! So Charlie trusts Dr. Fauci on the topic of masks., and thinks we should to. And my immediate reaction to this is.. Continue reading →
1. Dr. Faucitold ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton yesterday, “If you have goggles or an eye shield, you should use it…You have mucosa in the nose, mucosa in the mouth, but you also have mucosa in the eye. Theoretically, you should protect all the mucosal surfaces. So if you have goggles or an eye shield you should use it.”
Now you tell us!
Though Fauci is in a high-risk demographic, he has never been shown wearing goggles. Or are glasses like he wears (and I do), good enough? If that’s true, he should say so, NOW. Then again, he didn’t wear a mask when he wasn’t social distancing at the Nats game last week.
2. Explain to me again why Fauci is so beloved and sucked up to by the same news media that claims President Trump has “blood on his hands” from his handling of the completely unpredictable pandemic. Fauci has been inconsistent; he has been flat out wrong on many occasions, and then we get head scratchers like a recent interview with PBS NewsHour, where he lauded New York’s disastrous response to the Wuhan virus.
“We know that, when you do it properly, you bring down those cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York,” he told PBS’s Judy Woodruff. “New York got hit worse than any place in the world. And they did it correctly.”
Really? Doing nothing to curb the obvious virus-encouraging subway travel at the peak of the outbreak…
was “doing it right”? Governor Cuomo dumping infected seniors into nursing homes was “doing it right?”
I had a friend who was sure the lyrics were about “ducks in the wind.” Dust, ducks, dusk…whatever. Never liked the song, but it suits my mood after today’s farewell to an old friend, maybe the sweetest person I’ve ever known or ever could know, at Arlington. Here were old friends, many who hadn’t seen each other in many years, standing around, six or more feet apart, trying to talk through masks and to recognize each other.
This is no way to live.
1. I have to say this: At a time when Gilbert and Sullivan is being “cancelled” by the sick combination of hyper-sensitivity to fantasy gender stereotypes and the ignorant belief that “The Mikado” is racist—morons!—I should not be forced to listen to Lifelight’s badly set, forced, incompetent parody of “The Major General’s Song.” I could write better lyrics than that, yes, even about vegetable meat substitutes, with half my brain tied behind my back. There’s no excuse for such lazy, lousy writing, especially for compensation. Was the writer the company CEO’s 12-year-old niece? Gilbert and Sullivan were geniuses; their work shouldn’t be desecrated like that.
2. Shut up, David. David Price, who couldn’t be bothered to play baseball and help relieve the public’s stress for a paltry 10 million dollars, is home and sniping at Major League Baseball for not shutting down after 14 members of the Florida Marlins tested positive for the Wuhan virus. Well, some of his colleagues need their salaries, unlike Price, who has a 150 million or so in the bank unless he has a gambling habit, and baseball, to its credit, is determined to gut it out, much as it did during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Good. Thank-you.
3. How can anyone take an award seriously that does something like this? On the other hand, it’s comforting that after all these years, the Kennedys are still hyper-partisan, hypocritical, and silly. 2020’s Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Awards, which supposedly honors “changemakers” who are advancing human rights, equality and justice, have been awarded to, among others, Dr. Fauci and Colin Kaepernick. The Kennedys’ game could not be more transparent if they admitted it. Kaepernick, whose questionable contribution to human rights has been kneeling where he shouldn’t and cashing in with Nike, but he’s a walking Black Lives Matter ad, and so it’s a poke in the President’s eye. As for Fauci, the message is that he’s brilliant, so Trump is the reason why the pandemic has raged.
Here are some recent award winners: Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi. Continue reading →
I am disgusted with this brain-dead talking point: perhaps my most Trump Deranged Facebook friend posted a rant–at least he wrote his own this time rather than searching the web for the latest from established “resistance” pundits (Dana Milbank, Paul Krugman, Joe Scarborough, about a hundred others)—making the “point” that President Trump wasn’t “elected to do heart surgery,” so the argument that Dr. Fauci’s opinions on the Wuhan virus shouldn’t dictate policy because “he wasn’t elected” were foolish. How did people like my friend get this way? He is obviously amazingly receptive to Democrat-crafted narratives, and probably hypnosis as well, so I guess I should be glad he doesn’t think he’s a chicken.
We elect leaders to consider and weigh many opinions of advisers, experts and specialists in narrow fields to balance those among other considerations in deciding what is in the best long and short term interests of the nation. That’s why, among other reasons, the we have a civilian in charge of the armed services. This increasingly popular (and tiresome) claim from the Left that if the recommendations of scientist aren’t followed, it is proof of ignorance and recklessness is logically, historically and politically unsupportable. If it’s sincere rather than a partisan tactic, it is ignorant as well.
Scientists aren’t accountable to the public for their opinions; if they are wrong, they just come up with new theories and conclusions. Scientists and health care specialists also, as we have said here many times, operate within the tunnel vision and priorities of their own specialties. All Dr. Fauci focuses on is the likely (as they appear at any given point) health consequences of national policy. Economic, security, political consequences are not his concern, nor should they be. Arguing that his position on the best national policy must be accepted by the President is irresponsible as well as incompetent, and this is true without even considering the fact that Fauci and the “experts” have been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic already, as Senator Paul pointed out this week.
1.How sports teaches character. I am going to have to take two hours out of my day because the MLB channel, improvising like crazy to come up with programming without any baseball games to cover, is replaying the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, best known for Game 6, when Carlton Fisk hit a walk-off home run in the 12th inning of arguably the most exciting World Series game ever played. I was at Game Six and two more in that seven game series (thanks to the generosity of my late law school friends and classmates Mitch and Myron Dale, whose father was then president of the Reds), but it was one I didn’t see in person, Game 4, that was the Ethics Game.
Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant, with his team facing a daunting three games-to-one deficit if it lost, pitched a nerve-wracking, complete game 5-4 victory, protecting a one-run lead for most of it despite lacking his best stuff against the toughest line-up in baseball. Nearly every inning, the Reds had men on base and threatened to take the lead; over and over again Sox manager Darrell Johnson trudged out to the mound to replace Tiant, only to have his ace shake his head, insist that he would get the job done, and demand that his boss return to the dugout. TV closeups of the Cuban’s grim and sweat-covered face showed pure determination as he took the fate of the team on his own back fearlessly and without hesitation. Tiant, an old man in baseball years, threw over 180 pitches that night in the era before they counted pitches; today, starters are seldom allowed to throw more than 100. Even more than the famous Curt Schilling “bloody sock” game in 2004, that athletic performance epitomizes for me the ethical virtues of professionalism, honor, perseverance, accountability, fortitude, courage and sacrifice. I have pictured Luis Tiant’s face many times since when I have been under pressure to succeed, or facing a challenge while not feeling at my best. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 