Month: February 2024

Helpful Ethics Alarms Tip For Girls’ and Women’s Athletes and Sports Team: Refuse to Compete Against Biological Males BEFORE Someone Gets Hurt

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The KIPP Academy girls high school basketball team includes a (“transitioning”…or not, reports are unclear) a male player who “identifies” as female, which is all that the increasing wokeness-crippled Bay State requires. Section 43.3.1 of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association handbook states that “a student shall not be excluded from participation on a gender-specific sports team that is consistent with the student’s bona fide gender identity.”

And what, you may ask, is “bona fide gender identity”? The player in question is six-feet tall, appears to have facial hair more consistent with a teenage male, and is much stronger than the average drum majorette. The Daily Item reported that “KIPP officials refused to confirm the player’s gender identification,” but if she (he?) is playing on the girls team, presumably he (she?) identifies as female. Now, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association also says a student like that one can’t be included on a roster “solely for the purpose of gaining an unfair advantage.” The key word there is “solely,” a weasel word all lawyers are familiar with. It literally means that having a boy who will seem like a superstar in a girl’s sport on a team supposedly for females will be acceptable no matter how unfair it is and no matter how much of an advantage it gives that team if there is any other reason for letting him (her?) change locker rooms. Maybe the newly minted female needs a boost in confidence!

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Still More Anti-White Discrimination Whack-a-Mole, But This One Is Really Funny…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As currently inclined, Google’s artificial intelligence bot “Gemini” will not produce an image of a Caucasian no matter how many times you ask or what you ask for. The above pictures were among the results when Gemini was asked to show “Founding Fathers.” In another example, a user asked for images of the Pope and got these:

I love it!

When Gemini was asked directly to “create a portrait of a white male,” the DEI-addled bot replied, “While I am able to generate images, I am currently not able to fulfill requests that include discriminatory or biased content.” Of course! White people are inherently discriminatory and biased.

Google brass isn’t denying the glitch. “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” Google’s Senior Director of Product Management Jack Brawczyk told inquiring minds. “Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”

Gee, I wonder how this happened?

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Pointer and Source: Liberty Unyielding

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Why do communities keep electing officials who are ignorant of the law, history, and the U.S. Constitution?

Three days ago, North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown, (Guess which party!) announced on social media that her city would host a Black-owned business fair this coming weekend at the conclusion of Black History Month. The fest would feature local black vendors, community resources, an art corner and an area for children. Food trucks and live entertainment would enliven the proceedings. It would be a fun day of promotion for all participating—black-owned only!—businesses.

Who could have a problem with that?

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Ugh. Ann Coulter Was Right. I Hate When That Happens…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Performance artist pundits as a breed are an ethics stain on public discourse. These are the glib, often attractive loud mouths who make their living selling books and getting speaking fees for being outspoken and outrageous. Many of them, not all but too many, don’t really hold the some of the opinions attributed to them. They calibrate what position is most likely to attract rage, controversy and publicity, and issue statements with the Machiavellian calculation of a hedge fund investor. Prominent examples of this slimy, manipulative breed are Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, Candace Owens, James Carville, and today’s topic, Ann Coulter, who might be the most cynical of them all.

She is not dumb, however. Occasionally she is even perceptive, as much as I hate to admit it. This was one of those times.

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The Harvard University Ethics Train Wreck Not Only Isn’t Slowing Down, It’s Picking Up Steam

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A Harvard University faculty group. the“Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine,” had the anti-Semitic cartoons above appear on its Instagram page. It is a newly-formed organization of Harvard University faculty and staff “committed to supporting the cause of Palestinian liberation,” as the group explains on its webpage. It “wholeheartedly reject[s] accusations that critique of the Israeli state is antisemitic.” One hundred and twelve members signed a statement that attacks “Israel’s genocidal war and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.” The group does not mention Hamas or the terrorist attack that thrust the terrorist organization and Gaza into war with Israel.

Rabbi David Wolpe, the Harvard Divinity School scholar who resigned from the anti-Semitism advisory committee set up by disgraced ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay, wrote at the time that he had concluded that “the system at Harvard… is itself evil.” In reaction to the above cartoons, Wolper wrote on Twitter/X, “The cartoon is despicably, inarguably antisemitic. Is there no limit?”

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Three Ethics Dunces I Try To Ignore Turn on Each Other

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Few pundits are as worthy of being ignored as Jon Stewart, Mary Trump and Tucker Carlson. Unfortunately, they imposed themselves on my consciousness, which really is needed elsewhere, by turning on each other for saying things one or more of them didn’t like. In doing so, they again drew my attention to the unethical habits of people who should not have the influence on public opinion that they do.

I briefly and reluctantly defended Tucker Carlson against hypocritical critiques from the Left that there was something unseemly about his interviewing Vladamir Putin, when liberal journalists have been interviewing various international villains for decades without similar criticism. It’s the typical double standards tactic that we now see constantly from our corrupt punditry. Jon Stewart piled on in his return to Comedy Central, where he again is posing as a comedian playing a pundit and a pundit doing comedy simultaneously. Stewart’s “clown nose on, clown nose off” act is tedious and obnoxious as well as corrosive: I hold him responsible for the all-progressive political propaganda organs that the late night talk shows have become, dividing the country by taking the unsustainable position that only conservatives are ridiculous.

Stewart also should be held responsible for further lowering the civic literacy of the younger generations, who regard him as a trustworthy source of news, and he is not. Stewart chooses which items to talk about according to what he thinks his leftward fans will laugh at, not what they need to know. As a comedian, he does not feel any obligation to be fair or to include facts that might weaken his jokes. He would have no obligation, except that he aspires to be taken seriously when he wants to be.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring or Perhaps Because You’re an Idiot: U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s Gaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I know I’ve used this song from the musical “Li’l Abner ” recently, but it was all I could think of after hearing about another one of Joe Biden’s incompetents’ latest exploit, so Marryin’ Sam and that big Yokum kid’s duet is back for an encore.

When U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield defended the U.S. veto of a ceasefire resolution at the Security Council today (everyone else voted to make Israel stop punishing Gaza, except for the U.K., which boldly abstained), she said,

“We’re eager to continue working with the Council on this proposal – one that would see a temporary ceasefire as soon as practicable based on the formula of all hostages being released and one that would get aid into the hands of those Palestinians who so desperately need it. All told, we intend to do this the right way so that we can create the right conditions for a safer, more peaceful future. And we will continue to actively engage in the hard work of direct diplomacy on the ground until we reach a final solution.“

A final solution! The controversy involves Israel, which is being accused of “genocide” for deciding that it can no longer trust a region governed by terrorists after its citizens were slaughtered in a sneak attack. Meanwhile, Palestinian adversaries have made it clear that their mission is to wipe Israel off the map, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations describes the U.S. objective in the region as “a final solution,” thus quoting Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Göring and General Reinhard Heydrich.

Thomas-Greenfield didn’t blanch as she read the words, and it wasn’t an off-the-cuff gaffe, but was contained in prepared remarks. A verbal botch of that magnitude would justify firing for cause in my administration and any competent one, but this administration doesn’t fire anyone, no matter how poorly they perform. Maybe Democrats can use the incident to defend Biden’s stream of dementia-triggered gibberish. “See?” they cans say. “Joe’s never said anything that stupid!”

True.

The U.S. is working with Israel on a Final Solution in Gaza.

Brilliant.

The country’s in the very best of hands…

Still More Law and Ethics Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Boy, the laws and ethics intersection has been almost constantly in the news lately, led by the Fani Willis controversy in Georgia, which apparently will turn on whether the judge believes the justly beleaguered Fulton County DA really paid half of her paramour and co-Trump prosecutor’s expenses on various platonic < cough> trips and cruises in cash, though there’s no record of such payments. Willis’s father even took the stand to explain that keeping huge amounts of cash on hand is “a black thing.” I did not know that!

As Alice would say, “Curiouser and curiouser!” Then we have much ferment in the legal world over whether the New York County Supreme Court’s order for Donald Trump to pay an unprecedented $355 million for inflating asset values in statements of his financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers was just, cruel and unusual punishment, a bill of attainder, or self-evident partisan lawfare. Gov. Kathy Hochul didn’t help matters by trying to justify the award by saying that Trump is special (wink,wink) and we all know what that means when coming from a Democrat. I confess, I don’t know the New York law involved well enough to weigh in on this one, but the verdict certainly adds to the weight of evidence that there is a full-on press to use the courts to crush Trump before he can crush Joe Biden.

There were two non-Trump law and ethics stories recently worth pondering.

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Nate Silver Probably Comes As Close To Objectivity As a Left-Biased Pundit Can Be Regarding President Biden’s Dementia Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In sharp contrast to Ezra Klein’s slippery, dissembling spin-fest regarding President Biden’s decline, statistics maven Nate Silver has gifted us with a far more fair, responsible and honest—that is, ethical— analysis on his substack newsletter, “The Silver Bulletin.” (Nate has 45,000 paying subscribers while I have trouble getting more than a few hundred people to read my free blog every day, so attention must be paid.) Nate’s leftward bias crept out into the light periodically even when he was primarily a sports analyst, but to his great credit, he tries to conquer his biases, which is all any of us can do.

His is a sharp analysis for the most part, and a bracing nostrum from all the “it isn’t what it is” Democrats and media pundits who expect us to believe that old Joe is in tip-top shape. Silver writes,

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In Which I Comment on That Absurd Presidential Ranking Poll Without Reading It, Because My Head Doesn’t Need Any More Explosions, Thanks…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Several readers and friends sent me this new poll, described as the product of historians in some sources and a the opinion of political science organization in others. It looks to me like the latter is more correct: the thing was the brainchild (I’m being generous here) of Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin Vaughn, both professors of political science, and that’s what their degrees and credentials are in as well. Calling them “historians” is misleading, but that’s what the Times and others sources are doing. Political science is not the same academic field as history, though of course it involves the study of history. I would never call myself a professional historian. My degrees are in American Government ( the College That Must Not Be Named’s version of political science) and law.

I was tempted to dissect the poll, which famously ranks the spectacularly incompetent Joe Biden as the 14th best President and Donald Trump dead last as the worst, in order to add to previous posts in which I described how ruinously political and untrustworthy the field of history has become. I decided that this would be unfair, since these biased history dummies are not a group of historians. I also decided that such an obviously partisan and politically motivated poll was not worth dignifying by treating it as anything but.

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