Tag Archives: ethics

CDC Fail

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Again.

The CDC’s latest “guidance” directly contradicts and rescinds its immediately latest “guidance,” issued just weeks ago.

CDC’s latest guess is this:

[c]larified that healthcare facilities, including nursing homes, have discretion on whether to screen-test asymptomatic personnel. It also now says asymptomatic patients “in general” do not require “empiric use of Transmission-Based Precautions”

Because the vaccines aren’t all that. British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, Visiting Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Brazil’s Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health:

By reanalyzing the randomized controlled trials used for emergency authorization and other medical reviews, Malhotra concluded it takes thousands of vaccinations in the non-elderly population “to prevent a single death” from COVID and that severe adverse events are more likely than prevented hospitalizations.

CDC is only just getting around to doing the relevant research that would have identified this apparent ineffectiveness or objectively refuted it. Instead, we just get another rotation of the CDC Guidance Weather Vane.

It’s time for a general elimination, and replacement, of CDC managers from mid-level on up to the Sobbing Doomsayer herself, Director Rochelle Walensky. The agency as currently manned is useless.

But We Need to Take your Guns Away

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A bad guy armed with a shotgun walked into a Florida store with the intent of robbing it. And bragged about being “from Chicago” in the process.

I got a big (expletive) (expletive) gun, but I’m not from around here is what I’m saying. I’m from Chicago bro.

Then, as paraphrased by Fox News, this armed thug

 ask[ed] the employee what kind of weapon he is holding.

Which the employee showed him, whereupon the thug left.

The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, the county where the attempted armed robbery occurred, has the right of it [emphasis added]:

He then fumbles for words, resorting to meaningless babble about being from Chicago. Words seem to fail you when your felony attempt is thwarted by lawful and righteous force.

But the Progressive-Democratic Party and its (what has become) mainstream Leftist supporters want us all disarmed. The store’s employee should have been left unarmed, helpless, and possibly murdered during the course of this robbery attempt.

Shameful

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The subheadline has the question:

Why is Joe Biden skipping Shinzo Abe’s funeral in Japan?

Never mind that Japan has been a staunch ally of ours since the middle of the last century. Never mind that Abe has been a staunch ally of ours his entire time in office and during his nominally retired years.

The other members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—the Quad—are going to be there to pay their respects.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are set to attend the ceremony alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Regardless of all of that, our President Joe Biden (D) stiffed Abe, and our ally Japan, at his funeral. Biden couldn’t be troubled to make the trip and attend. Instead, Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris (D), tsar of everything in the Biden administration and doer of nothing, to take up that space.

Cashless Bail and Flight Risk

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Illinois has passed its cashless bail law, euphemistically styled the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act—how cute, how misleading). This is a law that will allow lots of suspects accused of violent crimes to walk without even needing a hearing—an Illinois magistrate can simply release the suspect, functionally, on his own word that he’ll appear in court when called to do so.

Supporters of the law, set to take effect at the beginning of next year, point out it does not prohibit detention and that anyone deemed a flight risk can be detained.

This is as cynical as it is disingenuous.

The degree of flight risk isn’t the only factor that should be used in assessing bail amounts; it isn’t even the most important. What’s central to bail consideration, or should be central, is the nature of the crime alleged and the degree of risk to the people in the local community from having the accused walking free among them.

A man accused of a violent crime needn’t flee in order to commit (further) violent crimes; indeed, most crimes (like politics) are local. And now he has a collection of targets in the local area against whom to commit further violence: witnesses against him, and their families.

Journalists Deceiving

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Project Veritas lost a case brought by Democracy Partnerships in the DC District Court, with the jury awarding $120,000 to the consultancy. The firm had been targeted by PV, and recordings made by an undercover PV operative strongly indicated that DP was engaged in efforts to incite violence at rallies for then-President Donald Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 Presidential campaign.

The DC jury, made up of residents of Washington, DC, decided that

the actions of the former operative…breached a fiduciary duty to the consulting firms and amounted to fraudulent misrepresentation….

Project Veritas has said it will appeal; founder James O’Keefe saying in part

The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating and that investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.

I generally agree with what Project Veritas does, discovers, and publicizes.

However.

Not here. No one should be able to deceive anyone; although in most cases, that’s a moral limit, not a legally actionable one.

There’s a fine line here regarding investigative journalism. Going undercover isn’t deception unless the operative openly lies about who he is or what he’s doing. Letting the target draw a wrong conclusion, though, is on the target: do a better job of vetting. The “fiduciary duty” is the target’s as part of its own decision to spend money.

Beyond that, though, deception is what journalists do far too routinely, especially to their readers and viewers. PV needs to do better in its defenses.