Category Archives: Ethics

Cyril Wecht On Freddie Gray’s Likely Cause of Death

Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Race, Reason, Science

Forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht has been around the block a few times. Two minutes and 31 seconds into this typically tedious, CNN broadcast, Dr. Wecht ventures the following with conviction, about the Freddie Gray murder. I paraphrase:

Legs shackled and hands cuffed, placed in a prone position, face down—a position that has been banned for decades, claims Wecht—how, pray tell, did Freddie Gray run around, banging himself against the van’s interior?

The victim is yelling and screaming for help. His body is inert and the van is moving. Right there is the velocity needed to create the force for the injuries! Those injuries are not spontaneous pathological fractures; the injuries came as the body flapped back and forth, breaking the vertebrae in the neck and eventually severing the spinal cord.

Indubitably, the injuries were sustained by the police by their stopping Gray. Gray did not sustain those spontaneously. Also quite possible, says Wecht, and as I’ve hypothesized, the initial injuries were produced when police compressed and leaned into Gray’s back, to be aggravated by the flopping around in the van.

UPDATED: Bruce Jenner And Chris Kyle: Is Either A Hero? (Or Ho?)

Ethics, Pop-Culture, Sex, The State, The Zeitgeist

“Bruce Jenner And Chris Kyle: Is Either A Hero?” is the current column on hedonism vs. heroism. An excerpt:

“True bravery is shown by performing without witness what one might be capable of doing before all the world,” said a wise man named La Rochefoucauld, centuries ago. That man’s definition excludes most of America’s contemporary heroes.

La Rochefoucauld’s understanding of courage certainly rules out most black community leaders. In Baltimore, a city devastated by anti-police, race rioters, these “leaders” made sure they were seen calling for calm following the orgy of destruction. Away from the cameras, their lives have been given over to causing chaos by preaching racial grievance against white America.

The same imperative of privacy and consistency precludes Bruce Jenner. …

… The famous Olympian athlete turned TV personality has come out very publicly as a transsexual, who is in the process of transitioning to full womanhood; Jenner already has the psyche of a woman. For providing 17 million ABC viewers with a glimpse into his very real inner struggle with sexual identity, Jenner has been hailed as an American hero.

… This is not to diminish Jenner’s excruciatingly difficult journey. However, a stoic Olympian battling his demons in private would have more closely approximated the qualities of a hero.

.. Still, Jenner is more of an American hero than the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle …

Read the complete column. “Bruce Jenner And Chris Kyle: Is Either A Hero?” is now on WND.

UPDATE (5/1): Heroes or Hos? The MailOnline pictorial, referred to in the column:

Sycophants’ Supper, 2015 & Cecily Weak

Affirmative Action, Celebrity, Ethics, Journalism, Media

The nitworks have been all guffaws and genuflection in anticipation of their correspondent’ participation in what I call the “Sycophant’s Supper.” Other than to reproduce my annual post distilling the essence of the event, I’m pleased to report that “the un-watchful dogs of the media” have at last begun to ask whether they indeed have any business frolicking with the president and his minions. Here’s how the dolled up twits at CNN are parsing their craven, journalistic co-optation, annually, at the event, and all year round:

Should the press party with those they cover?

Something along those lines.

Barely A Blog’s annual Sycophant’s Supper post reminds our readers of the following:

Almost all—your favorite opinionators, too—attend the annual Sycophant’s Supper, where they cozy up to Kim Kardashian and Beyoncé Knowles. (Kudos to the few, such as former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, who’ve excoriated the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or who’ve refused to attend, irrespective of the political affiliation of the man ensconced in the White House.)

The annual White House Sycophants’ Dinner is where the most pretentious people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us in Rome’s provinces. Those gathered at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or its Christmas party, are not the country’s natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy.

The events and the invited say a great deal about the press, its ethics and code of conduct. Like nothing else, the Sycophant’s Supper is a mark of a corrupt politics and press, as the un-watchful dogs of the media have no business frolicking with the president and his minions. This co-optation, however, is the hallmark of the celebrity press, in general. The days following these glitzy events, the Gilded Ones spend genuflecting to … themselves.

As for this affirmative action stand-up comic: WTF!!!!!!!! And I thought Jimmie Fallon’s Millenial humor was weak. Fallon is Jay Leno compared to this bleating bimbo.

Government’s Critter Kill List

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, IMMIGRATION

Central planners and their scientists, especially the liberal ones, like a perfect natural world. To that end, they’ve developed a utopian idea of the natural world and will kill, kill, kill to achieve Order at all costs. Thus, when a remarkable flock of conure parrots made San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists wanted this flock—which has a complex and highly evolved social life—exterminated because it was not indigenous. It took a remarkable man to save these precious parrots.

While animals may not deviate from the preordained natural order, unless part of the indigenous human population, established human populations must be destroyed by centrally planned, human mass migration.

Of course, bureaucracies under Republican are no different in the critter kill lists they develop. Via Mother Jones:

… Department of Agriculture’s tally of every animal it killed or euthanized over the last fiscal year [is] … 2,713,570 … from 319 different species. … The culling, conducted by the agency’s Wildlife Services division, is controversial. That’s because—much like the actual kill list—the USDA’s operations are shrouded in secrecy, prone to collateral damage, and symptomatic of an approach that often uses force as something other than a last resort. (A 2012 Sacramento Bee series explored the problems with the USDA’s methods in detail.) One of the problems with culling wildlife is that once you’ve gotten into the business of killing some animals to save other animals, it’s awfully hard to get out of it.
The contradictions can be glaring. To wit, the USDA killed cats (730) to save rats, but if you’re scoring at home, it also killed 1,327 black rats, 353 Norway rats, 74 Hutia rats, 7 Polynesian rats, 4 bushy-tailed woodrats, and 3 kangaroo rats. It slaughtered more than 16,500 double-breasted cormorants to save salmon. It’s shooting white-tailed deer (5,321) to save various plant species and the small fauna, like rabbits, that eat them. But the woods aren’t safe for Thumper either—the agency bagged 7,113 cottontail rabbits, plus assorted varieties of jackrabbits, swamp rabbits, and feral pet rabbits. The USDA killed 322 wolves and 61,702 coyotes to save livestock, perhaps in an attempt to atone for the 16 unspecified livestock it killed by accident.

Via RT: “The Obama admin accidentally killed 113 porcupines last year.”

And:

Avoiding controversy can lead to cover-ups.

Gary Strader, a former USDA employee, told the Sacramento Bee he once discovered a federally protected golden eagle dead in a trap.

“I called my supervisor and said, ‘I just caught a golden eagle and it’s dead,'” said Strader. “He said, ‘Did anybody see it?’ I said, ‘Geez, I don’t think so.’”

“He said, ‘If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don’t say nothing to anybody.’ ”

“That bothered me,” said Strader, whose job was terminated in 2009. “It wasn’t right.”