Frank Thomas Feels Insulted By The Chicago White Sox Black History Month Graphic. He Should Be.

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

After the Chicago White Sox posted the above graphic to honor “momentous firsts for the White Sox organization related to Black History Month,” White Sox slugger and Hall of Fame member Frank Thomas, “The Big Hurt,” posted bitterly on “X”: “I guess the black player who made you rich over there and holds all your records is forgettable!”

Petty? Childish? I don’t think so. If you look at the graphic, Frank Thomas appears only a virtual footnote, an afterthought following the recognition of Dick Allen, nowhere near as great a player as Thomas and certainly not the credit to the game that Frank was, as the Chisox’s first black MVP. Yet if the purpose is to honor standout African -American members of the team over its long history, Thomas’s record should have earned him top billing.

Thomas played for the White Sox from 1990–2005, winning back-to-back American League MVP awards (1993–1994) and now holds franchise records for home runs (448), RBIs (1,465), and walks. He tied Ted Williams on the lifetime homer list with 521, and ended his career with a .301 lifetime batting average in an era when .300 averages have become rarer every year. Thomas has the highest on-base percentage of any modern player who wasn’t Barry Bonds, as in “a freak steroid mutation that pitchers were afraid to pitch to.”

Thomas isn’t just the greatest black player in White Sox history, he is the greatest player in White Sox history of any color or ethnicity. But Thomas’s snub by his team is even more outrageous than those facts suggest.

Chicago is one of the eight original teams in the American League, meaning that the franchise has been operating as a major league team since 1901. Of the eight, only the White Sox can boast that a black man was unquestionably its greatest player.

The greatest Boston Red Sox player was Ted Williams. The New York Yankees: Babe Ruth; the Cleveland Indians: Bob Feller or Nap Lajoie; the Detroit Tigers: Ty Cobb; Washington (now Minnesota): Walter Johnson ; St. Louis (now Baltimore): Cal Ripken; Philadelphia (now Las Vegas, previously Kansas City and Oakland): Jimmy Foxx. All white. Frank Thomas stands alone as the sole black star to dominate an American League franchise over 125 years. If the idea is to honor “firsts,” he is the first black star in the league to achieve the status of all-time franchise great.

So the Chicago White Sox, seeking to celebrate Black History Month, minimized the impact, contributions, achievements and reputation of its greatest player, even though he is black.

Frank Thomas regards that as a slap in the face, and I don’t blame him.


I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone, “Experts,” Researchers and Scientists Included: My Dan Ariely Disillusionment

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

We’ve had some interesting discussions here about “experts” here of late, notably this post. I am rapidly reaching the point where anyone who appeals to authority to justify his or her position, particularly if the authority is a study, a report, an “expert” or a scientist, immediately inspires my skepticism and even suspicion. Now what?

Once again, Duke professor and researcher Dan Ariely is in the news, and not in a good way. Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business is named 636 times in the more than 3 million additional Epstein files released on January 30. He may be innocent of any wrong-doing and he and Epstein may have just played in a Fantasy Baseball league together, but the problem this creates for me is that I have been using Ariely’s work as authority in my ethics seminars for as long as I can remember.

For more than a decade, I told incoming members of the D.C. Bar as part of their mandatory ethics training that such sessions as mine were essential to making their ethics alarms ring. To support that thesis, I related the finding of research performed by Dan Ariely when he was at M.I.T. Ariely created an experiment that was the most publicized part of his best-selling book “Predictably Irrational,” giving Harvard Business School students a test that had an obvious way to cheat built into it and offering small rewarde for the students who got the highest scores. He tracked how many students, with that (small) incentive to be unethical, cheated. He also varied the experiment by asking some students to do simple tasks before they took the test: name five baseball teams, or state capitals, or U.S. Presidents.

None of these pre-test questions had any effect on the students’ likelihood of cheating, except for one question, which had a dramatic effect.  He discovered that students who were asked to recite a few of the Ten Commandments, unlike any of the other groups, never cheated at all. Never. None of them. Ariely told an NPR interviewer that he had periodically repeated the experiment elsewhere, with the same results. No individual who was asked to search his memory for a few of the Ten Commandments has ever cheated on Ariely’s test, though the percentage of cheaters among the rest of the testees is consistently in double figures. This result has held true, he said, regardless of the individual’s faith, ethnic background, or even whether they could name one Commandment correctly.

The classic moral rules, he concluded, reminded the students to consider right and wrong. It wasn’t the content of the Commandments that affected them, but what they represent: being good, or one culture’s formula for doing good. The phenomenon is called priming, and Ariely’s research eventually made me decide to start “The Ethics Scoreboard” and later this ethics blog.

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“Everybody Does It”or “Just Playing the Game”: Being Disabled At Stanford

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I found the London Times story “Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them” so annoying and rife with cultural and ethics rot that I decided not to post on it for the benefit of my own mental health. Now I see that it is getting a lot of attention all over the web and on social media, so I am ethically obligated to weigh in.

In the article, the poor, disabled student above reveals that she decided to claim endometriosis as a disability at Stanford, which would bump her to the head of the line for the best housing on campus. Her reasoning: a friend told her that Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation. “She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it,” Elsa Johnson writes. “But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as ‘disabled.'”

“Everyone was doing it,” she continues. “I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.”

That’s lying. It’s also cheating. At a college. “The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage,” she writes.

Elsa cites how much everybody does it to justify her embrace of corruption.

“The Atlantic reported that 38 percent of undergraduates at my college were registered as having a disability — that’s 2,850 students out of a class of 7,500 — and 24 per cent of undergrads received academic or housing accommodations in the fall quarter.

At the Ivy League colleges Brown and Harvard, more than 20 per cent of undergrads are registered as disabled. Contrast these numbers with America’s community colleges, where only 3 to 4 per cent of students receive disability accommodations. Bizarrely, the schools that boast the most academically successful students are the ones with the largest number who claim disabilities — disabilities that you’d think would deter academic success…at Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough. Another student told me that special “accommodations are so prevalent that they effectively only punish the honest”. Academic accommodations, they added, help “students get ahead … which puts a huge proportion of the class on an unfair playing ground.”

Conclusion here: Colleges and universities are not merely indoctrinating students in Leftist ideology, political theories and world view, they are also teaching students to accept cheating, lying and corruption as “the system” that they would be fools not to master.

This does not come as a surprise to me, as I saw this slippery slope coming when President Bush the First signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, saw it roll out of control, and watched it lead to lawsuits, employees who were impossible to fire, drags on organization budgets and productivity, and now students at colleges and graduate schools getting special privileges and advantages if they can make administrators feel sorry for them.

First, this trend is antithetical to individualism, one of the cornerstones of American values, and explains why the culture is becoming increasingly hostile to the idea that citizens are responsible for their own success, failures, advancement, and achievement. Second, it benefits the least ethical rather than the principled among us.

I had two epiphanal experiences with this ethical dilemma, and I’ve written about both on Ethics Alarms.

The first was as an administrator at Georgetown Law Center when a college applicant asked me whether she should note on her law school application that her grandfather was Japanese, making her a minority in the eyes of GULC’s (then and now) affirmative action obsessed admission process. She said she didn’t want to apply as a minority student, since she was from an affluent family, nobody knew she had Asian ancestry, and was not in any way “disadvantaged” by it.

I told her that the admission process was already arbitrary. Her grades and scores indicated that she was qualified for Georgetown Law, but borderline for a white female in the tough pool of applicants. As a minority, however, she would be guaranteed admission: her scores were in the top 20% of that pool. And by the school’s own rules, she was a minority. I told her I agreed with her, that applicants like her should not get any special advantages, but that the school’s policies were its policies. She wouldn’t be cheating or lying to take advantage of them, since her competition would be.

The other episode was when, as a law student, I had a lazy, jerk of a professor who gave us a Constitutional Law exam that was take-home, and self-timed.I followed the instructions and stopped writing when my alarm clock went off, failing to complete the last essay question. I then learned that almost nobody else in the class did. I complained to the professor, who didn’t care. My reward for not indulging in the “Everybody Does It” rationalization was a C+.

Our culture, of which educational institutions are a major and crucial part, increasingly send the wrong messages to our rising generations. We are seeing the results in the caliber of our elected leadership, in policies like DEI, and in the empathy being lavished on law breakers and illegal immigrants.

Elsa writes, “The students aren’t exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them?” My answer: yes, I can and do blame them, because they are cheating. I also blame the parents, teachers and society that allowed them to reason they way they do.

Here’s Absolutism At Work: Nobody Should Ever Die As A Result Of Hazing, And The Only Way To Make Sure Is To Ban Fraternities.

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Those three college assholes made a “pledge” drink himself to death, or helped him end his life in some other foolish way. Nice.

An Arizona college student was found dead over the weekend after attending a fraternity rush event the previous night. The 18-year-old student couldn’t be revived at a residence near the campus of Northern Arizona University, even after bystanders in the home had performed CPR on his lifeless body. The student was pronounced dead at the scene despite their efforts.

Interviews with witnesses revealed that the student was a pledge candidate at Northern Arizona University’s Delta Tau Delta fraternity. Police arrested three students who were members of the fraternity’s executive committee: Carter Eslick, 20, the chapter’s “member educator” (that pledge sure learned his lesson, right?) Ryan Creech, 20, the fraternity vice president; and Riley Cass, 20, its treasurer. They were booked and charged with hazing.

Northern Arizona University issued a statement announcing that it had suspended Delta Tau Delta and pledged to support the police investigation.”We want to be clear: The safety and well-being of our students remain our highest priorities,” the university said. “Violence hazing or any other behavior that endangers others has no place at NAU. The university has robust hazing prevention training and requirements, and has high standards for the conduct of all NAU-associated organizations and individual students.”

Not “robust” enough, though, right? This is garbage. Where there are fraternities there is a risk of hazing. (Sororities engage in hazing too, but it’s usually not fatal. Only two verified sorority hazing deaths have been recorded. That’s still two too many.) The latest death means that therehas been at least one hazing death every year from 1959 to 2026, and more than one in many of those years. 2026 is a good bet now to be a multiple death year. That’s more than 87 needless deaths.

The all-time total is, counting from the mid 19th Century, is believed to be more than 330 deaths from hazing.

Delta Tau Delta International also issued a statement, saying,”The Fraternity is aware of an ongoing investigation into the incident and encourages its members’ cooperation with local law enforcement.Our position on hazing is clear: it is the antithesis of brotherhood and a violation of the values of Delta Tau Delta.” The organization “vigorously supports the implementation of anti-hazing legislation” in Arizona and federally.

Well, legislation wouldn’t be needed if fraternities voluntarily accepted that they are archaic and dangerous relics of a more ignorant time.

Harvard has done a lot of things wrong, but it was astute enough to get rid of fraternities in the 1850s. There is no record of any Harvard student ever dying from hazing, which strongly suggest that the solution works. What benefits do fraternities confer on an educational institution and society to justify sacrificing one or more young lives every year?

Isn’t the clear answer “None”?

Nominee for Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Decade: Someone At The Grammys, It Doesn’t Matter Who, Since The Audience Erupted In Cretinish Applause…

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

“No one is illegal on stolen land.”

—Okay, I do know who it was: Billie Eilish, accepting the Grammy for song of the year.

I can’t imagine why anyone would watch the Grammys, and find it even more unimaginable that anyone would care what these under-educated, bubble-dwelling narcissists think about anything, but as usual for this crowd, one after another stepped up to the mic last night and again proved the immortal wisdom of Laura Ingraham’s edict, “Shut up and sing!”

Eilish’s quote is legally, logically, historically and factually absurd, and yet progressives increasingly find it inspiring and persuasive, which should tell you all you want to know about the current state of that ideological malady. Eilish’s nonsense was the most catchy of the many open borders outburst of the night, but there were many others, like…

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Fearmongering From The Left and Right, Part II: The Right

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The doomsday rant below is the “Morning Report” today on Ace of Spades Headquarters, a lively Far Right blog with five contributors in addition to the mysterious Ace himself (or herself). This entry is written by J.J. Sefton, but the style on this site is very consistent, and I find the various contributors interchangeable in their venom. There is never any pretense of objectivity or balance here, though I often find the rhetoric entertaining. It would be fun to write a blog like this, but unethical. I generally avoid it so as not to be tempted by the Dark Side.

Here is the hard Right’s prediction of looming doom “unless”…

Good morning kids. As I and many of you for sure have pondered lo these many months going on perhaps years now if we are in a state of civil war, but for sure we are in a phase of accelerating societal breakdown. On the surface, life goes on much as it always has, kids go to school we go to work or otherwise go about our routines mostly as per usual. Beyond the violence and mayhem we are witnessing in Minneapolis and elsewhere, the most alarming aspect is the utter breakdown and corruption of our judicial system that has now been infiltrated and weaponized against us.

This here is madness and things like this more than even the open violent insurrection against law enforcement which not only represents President Trump and his policies but is supposed to represent our collective individual and societal liberties, rights and freedoms, will be and are indeed our undoing, in the here and now.

First, Judge Gregory Carro in New York State argued that Luigi Mangione, the leftist terrorist, wasn’t a terrorist because he said he wasn’t.. . . More of the same now at the federal level where Judge Margaret Garnett, a recent Biden appointee, decided that Luigi Mangione stalking Brian Thompson in order to kill him wasn’t a “crime of violence”. . . The only thing tortured and strange here is that Democrats are trying not to pretend that they’re bailing out a leftist terrorist. Had Luigi Mangione worn a red cap and hunted down and killed a liberal judge, all of a sudden all of these rulings would be the opposite of what they are, and the ‘tortured and strange’ parts of them would be the sound of the law creaking to be bent backward the other way.

You better believe that the ICE agents who took down Good and Pretti, should some Soros prosecutor get the ball rolling are going to get the Derek Chauvin treatment if not a cell on death row. Donald Trump and Kristi Noem as well. The DemoKKKrats are already making noises about impeachement should they win back Congress this coming November and beyond that, they are itching to see those two and others dangling from a hangman’s noose.

They’ve learned their lesson. Next time they will completely wipe out all opposition to them and seize absolute power. And anyone who objects will ironically and disgustingly be labeled as a terrorist and insurrectionist, and be subject to the harshest of penalties. Like J-6 the process will only be the beginning of the punishment.

It is clear that the Democrat Left has the ability and the willingness to mobilize an armed force of internal terrorists and insurrectionists who will do their bidding knowing they face no repercussions. At least no repercussions in the legal sense.

Can you imagine if average law abiding and armed citizens had a similar system to communicate and rapidly mobilize to be on scene to counter the criminal terrorist insurrectionists and stand shoulder to shoulder with law enforcement, or to oppose any Don Lemon squad of goons bent on invading a church service?

We are heading down that road. But considering our innate sense of morality (that has been completely burned out of the Left since childhood over the past 60 years or more) and concomitant abhorrence of violence, Perhaps it might never come to armed response.

We as a nation are coming to a crossroads. The Left uses our Constitution as both a shield and a cudgel. And bearing all of the aforementioned in mind, there’s this frightening development:
Democrats spent years pushing for gun restrictions. Now they’re rushing to buy firearms and invoking Second Amendment rights after federal agents killed a licensed gun owner in Minneapolis.

The shift has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from conservative critics. Writing in “The Hill,” columnist Robby Soave noted that progressives “favor all sorts of restrictions on gun ownership” yet now champion constitutional gun rights following Alex Pretti’s death. The ACLU even backpedaled on whether it supports concealed carry rights for protesters, Soave wrote. But, they will acquire and use firearms in an offensive manner and when the smoke clears claim self defense as a judge like the one who let Mangione off the hook and the one who railroaded Derek Chauvin will agree. When you have mayors and governors now openly going after and attempting to impede ICE and other federal agents from doing their duty, no doubt their armed Antifa goons and gang-bangers as in Long Beach CA will be deputized and given the full protection of a bastardized legal system. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) we cannot deny anyone their second amendment right to bear arms based on their political beliefs. But considering a frighteningly large number of individuals not only want to destroy America as founded but as we have seen not just in Minneapolis but since the 1960s are willing and able to use violence to achieve their aims. Worse the Democrat Party in its eternal quest to seize absolute power is giving them political and legal cover to act as their street goons/enforcers.

If by some chance their election rigging machine fails to deliver them control of Congress, what we’re seeing in Minneapolis is just a foretaste of what is to come that will be orders of magnitude worse. The President will be forced to respond and in so doing potentially play into their hands despite being completely in the right to quash an armed violent leftist/Democrat insurrection.

Friend and friend of the blog Mark Pulliam lays it all out in his latest piece, on his blog which is worthy of bookmarking and following:

“. . .What happens if the Republicans lose control of Congress in the mid-terms this November? We don’t have to wonder, because the Democrats have told us. Expect a 180-degree reversal of everything President Trump has done. We can expect as abrupt a change, on a national scale, as the radical onslaught incoming Governor Abigail Spanberger is imposing on the commonwealth of Virginia. Elections truly have consequences.

And if the Democrats re-gain the White House in 2028, things will be even worse. President Trump’s historic victory in 2024, and the MAGA agenda in general, will be foiled by the Democrats’ radical policies . . The Constitution, as we know if, would be shredded.”

And for me it would essentially be the end of even the veneer of the illusion of regular order/business as usual that we barely are able to delude ourselves into believing. They will go all out to seize absolute power, crush any and all opposition and that will be that. A run of 250 years as they traipse around in the skin suit for another century or so demanding respect.

Unless something radical changes the course of history back towards sanity. As we had hoped the election, three times!, of Donald Trump would do.

Have a great day.

Now you have both sides. (Part I is here.) Your assignment: Compare and contrast.

Fearmongering From The Left and Right, Part I: The Left

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This stuff doesn’t help; it’s irresponsible and dangerous. I know both ends of the partisan spectrum are trying to emphasize the importance of the mid-term elections, and important they certainly are. But painting them in apocalyptic terms becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy at some point, and that point is being approached rapidly if it isn’t already here.

I could fisk both of the rants I read this morning, but so can you, I hope. Instead, I’m going to reprint them whole. That will be sufficient to highlight the hysteria and hyperbole, not to mention the lack of respect for our national values, the public, and the strength of our system.

This screed was brought to my attention by Steve Witherspoon (thanks, Steve, I think). The author, Dave Cieslewicz, calls himself a moderate on his blog, which advertises itself as “A safe place for moderates in a polarized world.” He was the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin for two terms, which alone debunks that claim. If Cieslewicz really is a moderate Democrat, it tells us something really scary about what the ones to his left are like.

Here is what’s on his site today:

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Yes, that screenshot does speak for itself, but I have some observations anyway:

1. If you’re not familiar with how “Rotten Tomatoes,” the film review aggregator, works, the “popcorn meter” at 98% reflects positive reviews by ordinary movie viewers, and the smashed green tomato tells us that theprofessional critic consensus was only 6% favorable.

2. There is always a chance that the popular reviews were rigged by MAGA zealots. The film “Melania” did have a surprisingly strong box office in its opening weekend, however.

3. The divide does not mean that the critics are wrong. A similar split occurred initially after the critics savaged the all-female “Ghostbusters” re-boot. That movie was, in fact, almost unwatchable.

4. The stats do appear to demonstrate, however, in this case, that movie critics tend to be members of the progressive bubble, and are probably incapable of watching anything connected to President Trump objectively.

5. In my opinion, the split also shows incompetent and irresponsible critics. The job of a critic is to inform audiences whether they are likely to enjoy a movie, not to solely apply the critic’s eccentric and personal tastes. Of course, I have my own biases as a periodic director, performer and playwright…and yes, occasionally a critic. My favorite theater critic was the great Robert Benchley, who often said, in effect, “this kind of play isn’t my cup of tea, but if you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this.”

____________

Pointer: Althouse

On The Limitations Of Expertise

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Guest Column by Sarah B.

[From your Host: This excellent essay arrived on an Open Forum, and as I sometimes do, has been elevated from Comment of the Day status to a Guest Column. I’ll even forgive Sarah for making me look bad in comparison to such thoughtful, eloquent and perceptive work.]

***

“The embarrassment is that chemistry was treated as a mere technicality rather than the foundation of the entire conclusion. The embarrassment is that skepticism—real skepticism, the disciplined refusal to accept claims without robust evidence—was framed as denial rather than diligence.”

This is, in my opinion, the money quote from The Brain, Microplastics, and the Collapse of Scientific Restraint. 

This particular article discusses the extraordinary claim that our brains contain a huge amount of microplastics.  The problem with this claim is that the study has a fatal methodological flaw.  The study relies on spectroscopy and detecting signatures of chemicals to determine a sample’s composition.  However, the fats in the brain break down into similar compounds as polyethylene, which means without further differentiation methods, there is no way to tell if the “microplastics” the study detected were actually just normal lipids found in the brain.  The whole article is worth reading, as it does an excellent job of explaining the issue. 

I recently saw a post on Facebook that decried the idea that experts could be challenged by some novice watching a few YouTube Videos and reading a few scientific papers.  This led to a long discussion in the comments, which was unfortunately extremely one-sided.  Most everyone agreed that trying to correct an expert in their field was utter hubris.

“Take something you are good at, like maybe changing transmissions.  Imagine someone who has watched a few YouTube videos comes up and tells you that you are doing it all wrong.  How would you respond?”

The main problem with this is that, in terms of changing a transmission, we can obviously see who is right and who is wrong.  The car will run, or the car will not.  Indeed, if you truly are an expert in changing transmissions, you can step up and, in simple terms, explain why your process is the correct one, what is wrong with the YouTube watcher’s process, and even perhaps teach your skeptic how to do it correctly. 

With any field of expertise, we have to remember that experts are people too, and all humans have flaws.  Experts can be tempted by money, power, prestige, and politics.  There are also limitations that even experts struggle to overcome.  For example, in many branches of research, there are serious problems (often ethical in nature) in creating a good control group. 

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Kristi Noem Shouldn’t Be Impeached But She Should Resign

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Being inclined to shoot off one’s mouth like the President does not a qualified and responsible Cabinet member make.

Handling the necessarily ugly process of removing the illegal immigrants deliberately inflicted on the U.S. by Joe Biden (or whoever was pulling his strings) and the incompetent Sec. Mayorkas requires skill, courage, and media savvy. Well, one out of…wait, one out three is terrible. Kristy Noem is a detriment to the policy and the President.

Noem told the world that Alex Pretti committed an “act of domestic terrorism” against immigration agents. That wasn’t true, and even the videos most damning of Pretti didn’t indicate anything of the sort. But her outburst undermined the credibility of Homeland Security and I.C.E., giving the open borders, nullification extremists on the Left just what they wanted.

Noem isn’t clever enough to talk her way out of this, either. She told Fox News last week, Oopsie!… the situation immediately following the killing was “very chaotic,” see, and she was just “being relayed information from on the ground from CBP agents and officers that were there.” “We were using the best information we had at the time,” Kristi blathered. Right: the best she had at the time was bad information, uncorroborated, and only an irresponsible ass would announce it to reporters as fact.

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