Author: Jack Marshall

Twitter Files VII: Here’s More News That’s Fit To Print That The NYT Won’t, And Sunlight That The WaPo Will Block To Keep Us In Darkness…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The latest document drop from Twitter is reported by Michael Shellenberger. I shouldn’t have to do this: real journalists, if there were any, should do it. Yes, I know there’s a Twitter app that will collect tweet-burts like this, but I’m not on Twitter yet and won’t be until I’m certain where this wheel-of-chaos will stop.

As ought to be apparent by now, there are three separate but interlocking ethics matters here. One is, of course, the dastardly and fair election-staining conspiracy by the mainstream news media, social media and the “deep state” intelligence and law enforcement agencies to ensure that Joe Biden won the Presidency in 2020. (No, it is irrelevant that he probably would have won anyway. That is like saying that Barry Bonds deserves to be in the Hall of Fame because he was good enough that he didn’t have to cheat.) The second ethics issue is the implications of the convincing evidence of government agencies using their power and influence to work around the First Amendment and censor speech (and specific individuals) they found inconvenient to their political agendas.

The third is the ongoing refusal of the mainstream media to report this. I regard this the most serious of the three, and the other two are very serious indeed.

Here is “Twitter Files,” part 7. As before, you’ll need to go to the link to see the attachments, which are helpful. A lot is repetitive, but this quote alone is worth reviewing the material: “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — “Bu alumni” — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.”

In Twitter Files #6, we saw the FBI relentlessly seek to exercise influence over Twitter, including over its content, its users, and its data. In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.

The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him On Dec 9, 2019, the FBI issues a subpoena for, and takes, Hunter Biden’s laptop. By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time. In early Oct, Giuliani gives it to@nypost.

Shortly before 7 pm ET on October 13, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, emails JP Mac Isaac. Hunter and Mesires had just learned from the New York Post that its story about the laptop would be published the next day. At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter.The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans. Why is that? What, exactly, happened?

On Dec 2, Matt Taibbi  described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article. Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms. First, it’s important to understand that Hunter Biden earned *tens of millions* of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China’s government, for which Hunter offered no real work. Here’s an overview by investigative journalist  @peterschweizer

And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation. This is from a sworn declaration by Roth given in December 2020:

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Ethics Hero: Colorado Avalanche Defenseman Cale Makar

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I bet this doesn’t become a trend.

During the Colorado Avalanche–New York Islanders game last night in the first period, Avalanche star defenseman Cale Makar had the puck behind his team’s net while being pursued by Islanders forward Mathew Barzal. Makar fell, and looked like that Barzal tripped Makar, so a penalty was called, which would give Colorado a one-player  advantage. But when the referee blew his whistle, Makar  waved at him to indicate it wasn’t a penalty after all.  After briefly conferring the referees retracted the penalty.

This literally never happens in hockey, nor basketball, nor pro football, not Major League Baseball. A player telling a referee or umpire that a call benefiting his team was wrong? That’s not how the professional sports roll. The assumption is that eventually the bad calls even out. If you don’t accept gifts, your team will suffer in the long run.

Barzal’s reaction:  “I honestly didn’t even know he waved it off until I saw it after. I thought the ref just made the call but, yeah, good sportsmanship on his part, not taking that. I don’t know if I would have done the same, to be honest with you.” Continue reading →

Nah, The Democrats Would Never Cheat To Hold On To Power! Whatever Would Make Anyone Think That?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I saw the photoshopped Joe Biden photo that “allegedly” had been sent out by “Team Biden” last night, and decided that I couldn’t rely on the conservative source, since I would not put it past “Team GOP” to photoshop a picture and then claim Democrats were responsible. This is what we’ve come to—we literally cannot trust any source, any account, any claim, and neither Right nor Left nor their media mouthpieces are sufficiently trustworthy, fair, honest or decent that you, I or anyone can be sure of the facts about virtually anything.

(Fuck.)

However, I traced down the source of the fake. Here’s the whole photo, in a tweet from Democratic strategist and former party chair Chris Jackson….

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Ethics Quiz Of The Day: “Gotcha!” Or “Benefit Of The Doubt”?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

That’s yesterday’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, titled “Some Theme’s Missing,”, above. Does the pattern of the letter squares remind you of anything? Given that December 18 is the first night of Hanukkah, many found the resemblance of the puzzle to a Nazi swastika…disturbing. Sinister even.

Republicans pounced. New York Times-haters pounced. Donald Trump Jr. pounced, on Twitter. Israel’s Israel National News thought it notable that the swastika crossword was published following what it deemed an anti-Semitic op-ed by the Times the day before, warning that Benjamin “Netanyahu’s government…is a significant threat to the future of Israel — its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland.”

The publication also posted a poll asking readers if the puzzle’s design was “intentional Nazi imagery or an unfortunate coincidence?” Of the 440 votes, nearly 85% deemed the symbol to be deliberate.

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Institutional Ethics Dunce: The U.S. Congress

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The House of Representatives passed legislation last week ordering the Capitol’s bust of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court Chief Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, to Hell, or someplace. It will be replaced by a new bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first black judge to serve on Court.

Of course it will. This naked political grandstanding wouldn’t be complete without installing a black judge’s image as a rebuke to the evil white judge. The legislation now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed, probably followed by a victory jig.

The pandering legislation says that Taney’s bust is “unsuitable for the honor of display to the many visitors to the Capitol.” It currently sits at the entrance of the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860. Taney led the court from 1836 to 1864.

“While the removal of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s bust from the Capitol does not relieve the Congress of the historical wrongs it committed to protect the institution of slavery, it expresses Congress’s recognition of one of the most notorious wrongs to have ever taken place in one of its rooms, that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision,” the legislation says. I wonder how many of the members who voted for the legislation know anything about Taney or have ever engaged in an objective reading of his opinion. My guess: not many. Maybe none.

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The Elon Musk-Twitter Ethics Roller-Coaster Ride Continues

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(I hate roller-coasters.)

The last week has demonstrated clearly, I think we can all agree, that 1) there is an urgent need for Twitter to be de-politicized, stripped of partisan censorship, and become a trustworthy platform for the unfettered distribution of news, information and opinion to the public, and 2) Elon Musk is too much of a loose cannon to be the manager of Twitter’s reform.

Yesterday almost qualified as a meltdown, or a tantrum, or something. Maybe a joke. Who knows with him? He teased his withdrawal from the daily management of the reeling social media giant. He hinted that the company was teetering on bankruptcy. He put his continued tenure as CEO up for a vote, pledging to abide by the results.

Chaos. Musk is quite a bit like Donald Trump, which shouldn’t be surprising: the successful entrepreneur/ CEO/ autocrat/narcissist is a well-understood personality type, and management by chaos is a management style that can be very effective for the short term in a private company (but not the U.S. government). I worked for a chaos manager for seven years, and he was brilliant at it, but I decided then and there that I could never operate that way. It is hard on subordinates, employees and stake-holders; only the chaotic manager enjoys the pressure. It is a non-Golden Rule management style that relies entirely on utilitarianism as its ethical justification. Yes, the methods causes breakdowns, anxiety and constant crisis, but if it “works,” it’s worth the pain. That’s what Musk has been doing.

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He’s Right Of Course, Turning Back The Clock On This Predictably Disastrous Progressive Policy Requires More Competent Leadership Than This…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Brevard County (Florida) Sheriff Wayne Ivey chose the county jail to make a passionate public statement about the deteriorating discipline in public schools and its catastrophic consequences last month. Flanked by law enforcement partners, school board chair Matt Susin, and 18th District State Attorney Phil Archer, Ivey needed urgent reform.

As it was his job,to keep schools safe from all forms of harm,  “the clowns who continually disrupt our classrooms, our assemblies, with their bad behavior” had to change, Ivey said, and he pledges to be active in executing that change:

“Our teachers are distracted, they can’t do their jobs anymore, they’re spending more time dealing with children disrupting their class than they are in teaching those that came there to learn….As a result, we are losing teachers in mass order. Teachers that can no longer take having their class disrupted by these clowns. We are losing those that came here to passionately teach our students, that are passionate about teaching others.”

 Ivey pointed to “the failure of school discipline policy” in Brevard County allowing a minority of students to repeatedly engage in class violence, disrupting lessons while attacking teachers physically and verbally. The sheriff said that teachers and principals were “handcuffed” regarding  discipline, with excessive bureaucratic obstacles rendering the process to request disciplinary action slow, burdensome and ineffective. Continue reading →

Mid-Annual Tree Lighting Ordeal Ethics Ornaments, 12/18/2022: A Slippery Slope, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, A Dinner For Schmucks, And A Hungry Hippo…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I type this with scratches on my wrists. Let’s see: my Christmas tree lighting saga began yesterday when I discovered that almost half of the thousand plus lights  I tested and put away a year ago went dead for no apparent reason. A wild hunt to five stores revealed a run on multi-colored lights all over Alexandria, and the terrible news that the Old Town Alexandria landmark “The Christmas Attic” had closed its doors, so my hope of purchasing some unique colored lights as I have in the past was foiled, perhaps forever. Today, having eventually found some barely acceptable replacements for the dead strings, I discovered that my lovely 9 ft. Fasier fir was one of those perverse trees with dense branches growing sideways, Then the first string I hung, in the middle of the tree, stopped working after several more had covered it, and the hunt for the loose connection, ultimately successful, scarred my arms for life. I’m writing this post to calm down; I have several hours of pain and frustration ahead of me.

Mel Torme left all of that out of his song….

In the midst of all this, a Trump Deranged commenter whom I had passed through moderation called me a “Maga propaganda” channeling “hack” because I use the term Wuhan virus” to describe the destructive pathogen that originated in the Wuhan province in China. I have explained in detail why Ethics Alarms does this: the short justification is that I am nobody’s political correctness monkey, facts aren’t racist, and the Left’s campaign to eliminate Wuhan virus from the lexicon was in great part a feature of the ongoing effort to cast President Trump as a racist based on nothing at all.

I also, I hope you notice, refuse to capitalize the b in “black” (and the w in “white”) just because a white-guilt-predator activist committee somewhere decided that was a hoop good little antiracists had to jump through. This is exactly the same principle behind my refusal to let anyone dictate that I use their pronouns if I doubt their accuracy and the individual has done nothing to justify my trust and  good will.

1. Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder, and Jim Abbott, the one handed pitcher, applaud (figuratively)…  Hansel Emmanuel,  a 6-foot-6 freshman guard on the  Northwestern State basketball team, dribbled between two defenders to deliver “a thunderous dunk” in a 91-73 win over Louisiana-Monroe. It was his first basket of the season. Emmanuel has only one arm. See?

Emmanuel,  19,  lost his left arm just below his shoulder in a childhood accident. He ended the game scoring five points with two rebounds in eight minutes. After the game, Emmanuel said, “I know my family was proud. I had to keep working. You can’t give up.” Continue reading →

No, Anti-Kavanaugh Obsessives, Attending A Holiday Party Does Not Constitute “An Appearance Of Impropriety” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ooooh, scary! Politico reported that Justice Brett Kavanaugh attended a private holiday party last week at the home of Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC). Attendees included Stephen Miller, whose group America First Legal Foundation, it reported, “has interests in cases now pending before the court.”

Bloomberg Law seems to think social engagements over the holidays aree suspicious actions triggering “the appearance of impropriety” prohibitions all judges are told to avoid. They are not. The problem is that now there is a glut of committed ideologues determined to intimidate, neutralize and delegitimatize the Supreme Court, and to those biased critics, virtually anything a conservative justice does appears improper. In Kavanaugh’s case, unsubstantiated juvenile conduct while in high school was cited as sufficiently improper to overshadow his impeccable record as an adult judge.

Attending a party with people who “live, eat, and breathe conservative political action” is either reflective of a level of insensitivity to that development or indifference to it, says Charles Geyh, an Indiana University Maurer School of law professor. “This is the worst possible time for this,” he said. “That development” is the Court being unjustly and disingenuously attacked for legitimate and legally justifiable decisions that the Left hates. The prohibition against “the appearance of impropriety” means conduct that could be reasonably and objectively seen as improper, not conduct that partisan fanatics find convenient to call improper. Professionals like lawyers, politicians and judges should be capable of interacting socially with those they may disagree with, and there should be no adverse inferences from accepting a private party invitation. As the late Justice Scalia insisted, even Supreme Court Justices are entitled to a social life. If the job requires living like a cloistered monk, no one will want the job.

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Dinesh D’Souza

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“The mainstream media can’t risk covering the Twitter Files. If they admit rampant collusion between govt agencies and Twitter, they’ll have to inquire about Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Google. The whole censorship regime would unravel. Better to pretend nothing’s happening!”

—-Conservative scholar and author Dinesh D’Souza, via Twitter, of course.

Whatever one may think of D’Souza, and wherever one may fall in the partisan divide, I don’t see what other explanation there is for the stubborn, self-destructive refusal by the mainstream media to acknowledge what the Twitter files’ reporting by Matt Taibbi et al. has revealed. (Once again today, the New York Times contains no mention of the issue at all.)

It’s a mass, extended Jumbo. Continue reading →