Tag Archives: ethics

Dishonesty Doesn’t Always Pay

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The intrinsically mendacious press industry—the industry that spiked the Hunter Biden laptop story; that pushed Russia collusion; that announced no more balanced reporting, instead picking one political side in the news it presents; that cherry-picked Wuhan Virus data and associated vaccine and alternative palliative data; whose LA Times announced it would no longer print Letters to the Editor from readers who disagreed with the press guild’s predetermined “climate” narrative; and on and on—that industry, has seen 2024 start off with a layoff bang.

  • Los Angeles Times announced last week that would terminate at least 115 reporters, roughly 20% of its staff
  • TIME magazine laid off 15% of our unit members, with additional layoffs in edit and business
  • several Sports Illustrated staff members were let go, though not all of them, it turns out
  • National Geographic terminated all staff writers
  • Pitchfork is being merged into GQ, and all Pitchfork employees are being terminated
  • NBC News terminated “50 to 100” employees

Some press unions are protesting the layoffs and pending layoffs.

  • New York Daily News struck over chronic cuts ordered by the paper’s owner
  • Condé Nast struck for 24 hours to protest planned cuts

Those unions, IMNSHO, are self-identifying who goes in the next layoff round.

All of that is just in January. The year is yet young; it’s a start.

A Death Penalty Revival

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Former President Donald Trump (R) revived the use of the death penalty after a hiatus of some duration, and President Joe Biden (D) has moved to deprecate the death penalty anew, even if inconsistently so.

I confess to being conflicted regarding the death penalty. There are some crimes so heinous that they cry out for execution of the criminal. Rape, especially of children, and premeditated murder come to mind for me, along with mass and serial murder.

However, the error rate in getting convictions for these crimes is high enough to give me pause. Some errors are the result of police error in the investigation, police or prosecutorial misconduct in the runup to trial, prosecutorial or judicial error during trial, or prosecutorial misconduct during trial. These instances are very rare, but they happen. Another reason for my reluctance is improving technology. Increasing ability to analyze DNA data—even the basic ability to handle DNA as evidence at all—reveals what becomes erroneous trial and conviction today even when those convictions of yesterday were correctly obtained given the evidence then available.

Thus: it’s easy enough to execute a criminal tomorrow. But if he’s executed today, and tomorrow we learn that he was wrongly convicted, we can’t undo his execution.

It’s maddening, on the other hand, for the survivors of the criminal’s crime to suffer the delays defense attorneys and “liberal” Others throw up to obstruct and delay an execution, and those delays deny justice for those survivors.

One at least partial solution would be to streamline the death penalty appeals process. Require attorneys bringing a case for delay or sentence reduction to something less than execution to present all of their objections in a single case, to include consolidation of all of the several separate lawyer cases into a single, class-action if you will, case. Perhaps, allow a single additional appeal based on truly newly developed evidence.

That won’t address the errors later discerned with improving technology. However, we can’t allow heinous criminals to escape the death penalty on the basis of inherently speculative potential future technology advances.

Lost in the Reporting

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The People’s Republic of China had a nearly complete map of the Wuhan Virus genome two weeks before that government published the data for the world to deal with. The article’s author went on to emphasize the value of those two weeks to the various efforts to find ways to deal with the virus.

The extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses, and get started on an eventual vaccine, specialists have said.

There is this, though, in the second paragraph:

Documents obtained from the US Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a US government-run database on December 28, 2019.

That’s those two weeks prior to the PRC’s formal release. The US database was the National Institutes of Health’s genetic database, GenBank.

Hmm….

But NIH didn’t just sit on the genome. They deleted it on 16 Jan 2020, four days after the PRC’s official release on 12 Jan. Supposedly, NIH officials had asked Dr Lili Ren of the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology, who had uploaded the genome to GenBase, for more information and got no response. Furthermore, the requested information were submission-related technical matters that had nothing at all to do with the actual genome map she’d uploaded, nor had they with any of the science related to her upload.

So, rather than actually looking into the mapping, they just blew it off and deleted it after Ren didn’t answer—apparently without considering the possibility that she was actively blocked by the PRC from answering.

However, the sequence published on January 12, 2020 [by the PRC], was nearly identical to the sequence that was submitted by Lili Ren.

Again, I say, hmm….

The PRC was complicit in the spread of the Wuhan Virus Situation, but it’s clear that the Dr Francis Collins-run NIH delay and then suppression of Ren’s genome map was at least as complicit in the damage done our nation and the world at large.

Governor Crybaby

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Now it’s Illinois’ Progressive-Democrat Governor JB Pritzker who’s joining the Greek Chorus (and giving a bad name to Greek Choruses) with his bodice-ripping (not that I mix metaphors, or anything) sobbing about all the illegal aliens coming into Democratic states, Democratic cities.

We have migrants that arrive from Texas virtually every day, hundreds, and we don’t have places to put them.

This is the first of his cynical tear-jerks. Texas hasn’t transported a single migrant to Illinois, or to anywhere else, come to that. Texas has transported illegal aliens—every one of whom makes the trip voluntarily—to Illinois and to other places.

Hundreds: wow. So many. Never mind that Texas and Arizona towns and cities are getting inundated by thousands of illegal aliens every day, and that the “immigration” deal on offer in the Senate would seek to dam that flood at…5,000 per day.

We don’t have places to put them. Then stop enthusiastically—zealously, even—inviting them in with your open arms Illegal Aliens Sanctuary status.

There are plenty of other cities where, you know, if he’s going to send people, they could be sent, but no. He’s choosing only Democratic states, Democratic cities….

This is the second of his cynical tear-jerks. No, Texas’ Republican Governor Gregg Abbott is not transporting any illegal aliens at all to Democratic states, Democratic cities. He’s transporting them to sanctuary States and to sanctuary cities. That those receiving jurisdictions happen to be Progressive-Democrat-run says volumes about the Progressive-Democratic Party, and nothing at all about the torrent of illegal aliens flooding across our border compared to the tiny trickle these sanctuary States and cities are getting.

Maybe Pritzker should sit down. His caterwauling is damaging to the Chorus.

A Debate Idea

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden plans to refuse to participate in any Presidential debates in the coming Presidential campaign season. He’s already cowering away from any primary debates with his opponent, Marrianne Williamson and Minnesota Progressive-Democrat Congressman Dean Phillips, even ducking whole primary campaigns, getting States to completely suppress Democrat voters cancel their primary contests.

The Republican Presidential nominee—likely former President Donald Trump, but it still could be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley—should challenge Biden to open debate, and when he refuses, the Republican candidate should follow the example set a few years ago by Clint Eastwood and debate an empty chair.

Then challenge again, and then debate the empty chair.

And again.

Hold these first debates before any State starts early voting, and then continue the debates throughout the fall. Each debate should focus on a single subject of national importance.

I have to wonder why Phillips is so reluctant to do that during the Progressive-Democratic Party’s primary campaign season.