Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck

It’s The Wuhan Virus, And Attention Should Be Paid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Boy, have I gotten a lot of grief for never capitulating to the thought-control demand that the contagion responsible for the pandemic, the lockdown, my business losing 45% of its income for two years (and counting), my sister wearing a mask in her car, seven-inning baseball games, an untrustworthy 2020 election and more be called the anodyne name “Covid 19,” or just “Covid” to its mask-obsessed friends. Here at Ethics Alarms, it is the Wuhan virus and always has been, because it was obvious from the start that China’s province is where this disaster (and its equally disastrous cover-up) started, but as usual of late, the mainstream media and progressives decided to use the adoption of a fair and informative name that ensures permanent responsibility, if not accountability, for millions of deaths and the savaging of the US economy for its favorite hobby of race-baiting. Yes, once again, the truth was racist, and censorship necessary because assholes incapable of rational thought would abuse facts to justify beating up and terrorizing anyone who looked Asian.

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Ethics Quote Of The Day: Ethics Villain Dr. Anthony Fauci

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive.”

—Dr. Anthony Fauci, major architect of the Wuhan virus lockdown catastrophe, in a discussing how the government’s dictatorial vaccination policies caused a drop in pubic trust of all vaccinations.

I have a lot to write about Dr. Fauci’s long interview in the New York Times, as well as some of his other jaw-dropping comments last week, but I’m lacking time and energy right now, and this quote demands immediate attention.

Fauci, who used his reputation and influence to trap the United States into a disastrous course of action that caused lasting harm to the nation, its culture, its economy, its children and society, articulates above the totalitarian’s lament about the United States of America. We are hearing this a great deal of late, as the Democratic Party, now the locus of totalitarian aspiration here, is increasingly open and candid about what so many of its leaders hate about America. Too many people just refuse to take orders from the smarter, more virtuous, more social justice-minded in power. Clearly, something needs to be done about it.

There’s nothing paradoxical about the phenomenon Fauci’s whining about at all. The lying, manipulation, false “facts” and abuse of authority used by health officials, Fauci prominent among them, eventually became apparent. Americans, who call themselves that rather than United Kingdom citizens because a nation was organized around the bold theory that the people—not kings, not unaccountable groups, not “experts”— have the right and duty to decide what’s in their best interest, returned to core values. Millions of people moved here to embrace the new experiment, and as a result, the independent streak is more deeply embedded in the culture than our native fans of dictatorship seem to comprehend. Decades of indoctrination from the now fully complicit news media and most of the education sector have weakened it and threaten it, but like the flag over Fort McHenry, it’s still there.

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The Rotting American Public School System’s New Philosophy: “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Call Failure A Success.”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the ultimate expression of “The Great Stupid,” New York has gone to a bad Jerry Lewis movie (no, they aren’t all bad) for inspiration in revising its education policy. Faced with terrible math and reading scores for students—in some school, not one achieved what was considered minimum proficiency— a state school board lowered the standards so more students would “succees”. This was the measured response after, as one media source reported,

“A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight. Some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

No doubt? There are several reasons this crash is occurring. One is that the disastrous decision to close the schools in response to the health “experts” and news media-driven panic over the Wuhan virus seriously (and perhaps permanently) set back the intellectual development of America’s young. Before that, there was already evidence that U.S. IQs are declining, and not just in the White House. The politicized public school system now devotes crucial class hours to teaching black kids that they face a lifetime of permanent oppression in a racist nation, and making white kids believe that their skin shade signifies evil embedded in their DNA. Then there is the little problem of the education profession being riddled with incompetents from top to bottom, as well as today’s children spending more time on social media and video games than reading, while their parents have abdicated their traditional duties to stimulate their children’s intellectual life at home.

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It Looks Like I May Have To Hang My Front-To-The Wall Georgetown Law Center Diploma Beneath My Front-To-The Wall Harvard Diploma, Which Will Require Digging a Hole…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Recent Georgetown Law Center grad William Spruance has written a chilling account of how he was treated by the administration at Georgetown Law Center when he challenged the school’s pandemic edicts. he begins “What Happened at Georgetown Law with Covid?” like this:

For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations. 

The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.

All the harrowing and, for a Georgetown Law Center grad (and former assistant dean and director of development) like me, profoundly embarrassing and depressing details follow. Read it.

Observations: Continue reading →

Something Else To Blame On Wuhan Hysteria Baseball’s Corrupting “Ghost Runner” Becomes Permanent

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I am just about as loyal and devoted a fan of baseball as there is, and if recent developments in the game under the misguided and incompetent stewardship of Commissioner Ron Manfred risk alienating me, the “National Pastime” is in big trouble.

In the 2020 season, Major League Baseball responded to the Wuhan-interrupted Spring Training and shortened season by instituting the “ghost runner” rule that had been used in some minor leagues as an experiment. Each half inning after the 9th if a game was tied would begin with a runner on second base, that runner being the player who made the final out of the previous inning. The theory was that this would decrease the likelihood of marathon games, decrease player workloads and mitigate the chances of injuries to the supposedly under-prepared players. It was pushed, of course, by the Players Union, which wants its millionaires to have to do the minimal among of work possible for their lucre. Players have always hated extra-inning games; it’s like unpaid overtime. Never mind the fact that such games have frequently resulted in some of the most exciting and memorable contests in baseball’s history. I was in the stands for one of them: Carlton Fisk’s legendary home run off the foul pole in Fenway Park’s left field in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.

Notes one baseball website,

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What Unidentified Flying Objects Tell Us About Unethical Federal Obstacles To Democracy

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2SU8RdkGZk

Shortly before the U.S. military, flushed with success after shooting down a Chinese spy balloon after it had floated across the country’s air space, began shooting down unidentified flying objects with wild abandon, I happened upon “Into the Blue,” a 2003 documentary about the long-running UFO controversy. Unlike just about every other documentary I have seen on the subject (I wrote a book report on the UFO phenomenon when I was 10), this one, narrated by Ken Burns’ favorite voice of late, Peter Coyote, is not hysterical, nor does it destroy its credibility by going off the rails with conspiracy theories.

But despite my interest in the topic, what I took away from the film had nothing to do with UFOs at all. The evidence doesn’t prove that we have had visitors from outer space, though that conclusion seems hard to avoid. It does prove, however, that the “Deep State” is real, pernicious, persistent, and an existential threat to democracy. What is so frightening and striking about the documented efforts by individuals in the military, scientists, ordinary citizens and in at least two cases (as of 2003, the date of the film), Presidents of the United States to get an open and honest assessment of what evidence there is for the existence of extra-terrestrial vehicles visiting Earth is how thoroughly these efforts have been foiled by Federal agencies and bureaucrats with their own agendas. Not only is the Deep State powerful and sinister, it is apparently impenetrable, especially because the news media and those who benefit from having a shadow government wielding lies that advance their ends continue to deny its existence.

The serial horrible instances of cover-ups, fake investigations and calculated disinformation exposed in the film confirm that… Continue reading →

Still More Evidence That No One Who Cares About Individual Liberty, Freedom of Expression And The Increasing Threat Of Totalitarianism In The US Should Live In California Voluntarily…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

With AB 2098, California’s legislature passed a bill that would punish doctors offering “false information” on the Wuhan virus and its offspring. It okayed direct government action to punish speech based on content, and was obviously unconstitutional. Naturally, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law anyway: he doesn’t believe in the Bill of Rights, his party doesn’t, and apparently the California voters that keep voting for him and officials like Adam Schiff don’t either.  Their state has devolved into a kind of Bizarro World gradted to the rest of the country, a place that increasingly rejects the underlying values and principles the United States was built on, and increasingly, basic logic as well. Here’s a meme that appeared on Powerline’s always entertaining “The Week in Pictures,” which I heartily recommend:

That’s not even satire. It’s just true, and emblematic of how ethically inert the entire stat has become.

The new law prevents doctors from providing “treatment or advice” “to a patient” “related to COVID-19” when that treatment or advice includes (1) “false information” (2) “that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus” (3) “contrary to the standard of care.”  Threatening disciplinary action (such as the loss of one’s license to practice) the law sends “a chilling message to physicians to toe the line.” in Prof. Turley’s words. Though a first year law student would quickly see the measure was unconstitutional, California has California-culture judges. In McDonald v. Lawson one of them held the law to be just fine. Now, however Judge William Shubb (E.D. Cal.) in Hoeg v. Newsom, another challenge to the law, has granting an injunction against its enforcement. Continue reading →

The Bottom Line On The Moderna Booster Scandal: Apologies Please, And Now

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is nice to see CNN practicing journalism again. though.

A CNN report published yesterday revealed that the pharmaceutical company Moderna withheld data from both U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisers last summer pointing to “the possibility that the updated booster might not be any more effective at preventing Covid-19 infections than the original shots.”

The booster’s impact on actual infections, based on trials, indicated that “1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected” while “those who got the updated bivalent vaccine – the one that scientists hoped would work better – a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected.” The FDA authorized the Moderna bivalent vaccine on August 31, and did not publicize the previously omitted infection data until September 13. Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Why Do You Insist On Calling Covid “The Wuhan Virus”?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Because that’s what it is?

I’m actually grateful for the question, because I have become more adamant about resisting the deliberately deceptive misnomer for the virus as time goes on and more information becomes available. In 2020, when the pandemic was just starting to wreck the United States’ on many levels, it was pretty obvious that the virus had its start in the Wuhan province of China. Whether it was from a lab or the (disgusting, third-world level wet markets) was and still is uncertain, but Wuhan is where the first recorded case emerged, and where the pathogen took first hold in December of 2019.

Early on in 2020, then-President Trump and some media sources referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus,” and these useful and descriptive terms were quickly declared unfair, inaccurate, and “racist.” by the Left. Part of the motivation was, I believe, to suck up to China, a corrupt and dangerous nation that too many businesses and industries (like Hollywood and the NBA) view as a profitable target for unprincipled pandering, Another aspect of the linguistic cover-up was to, as usual in the age of The Great Stupid, choose censorship and public confusion in the quixotic and bizarre effort to make certain groups feel “safe” (as in “safe from reality”). Because there are morons who will bully and mistreat Chinese-Americans as “punishment” for a disaster they could not be rationally blamed for, the widiculous woke decreed that the origins and true responsibility for the pandemic must be obscured by technical jargon. Continue reading →

These Are Poisonous Fruit Of Squandered Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A just-released Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that 49% of American adults believe it is likely that Wuhan virus vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths. Twenty-eight percent think it’s “Very Likely” that the side effects of the vaccine have been deadly to many  in contrast with 37% who don’t believe that a significant number of deaths have been caused by vaccine side effects. Fourteen percent are not sure, the usual group that isn’t sure of anything.

You can question the accuracy of this poll or all polls, you can believe that the vaccine skeptics are hysterics, you can believe that these numbers are in large part the result of “misinformation.” However, there is no question that even if they are inaccurate, the numbers show a shocking level of distrust in the pandemic vaccines, and, by extension, vaccines in general as well the health professionals and elected officials who have promoted them. When asked if there are legitimate safety concerns surrounding the shots, or whether doubts have been seeded by conspiracy theorists, 48% said there that concerns are valid. Only 37% indicated that false conspiracy theories were behind the public’s fears.

Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the most widely read conservative blogger, has it exactly right, writing, Continue reading →