“bias makes you stupid”

Unethical Quote of the Month: Illegal Immigration Activist Pedro Rios

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 “It represents denial, represents exclusion and is pushing people away.”

—“Migrant advocate” Pedro Rios, complaining that the devices recently installed on top of a wall at the U.S.-Mexican border are “inhumane.”

As the Texas Ranger (weakly, unfortunately) portrayed by Glenn Campbell in the John Wayne “True Grit” says at one point, “I don’t understand this conversation at all.”

And neither do I. If someone can explain to me how the whole concept behind Friendship Park at the US-Mexico border makes any sense when it spawns the kind of wacko protest enunciated by Mr. Rios, please do.

Until I saw this story, I was happily unaware of Freedom Park’.’s existance. Here’s the description of the place from the “Friends of Freedom Park” website:

“Friendship Park is a binational park located at the western end of the US-Mexico border. For generations people have gathered here to meet up with friends and family “across the line.” While this historic location remains fully open and joyously well-utilized in Mexico, the U.S. side is marred by a system of double walls erected by the Department of Homeland Security.  Since 2008, San Diego Border Patrol officials have severely restricted public access in the United States. In February 2020 they completely closed the Park to the public in the United States.  At present they have made no commitment to its re-opening.”

Of course not! It shouldn’t re-open, because the thing was always an open invitation to Mexicans to illegally enter the country. Right now, people on the Mexican side can only communicate with those on the American side by touching fingers through the fence and speaking. It would be nice if citizens of both countries could meet unrestricted in a neutral zone, but the Mexicans can’t be trusted not to abuse the park to sneak into the U.S. Betrayal of trust has consequences.

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Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was all set to designate Rep. Lee as the Incompetent Elected Official of the Month when I realized that this month, even more than most, President Biden had that honor locked up. So Rep. Lee only gets second place. The long-time California progressive has a substantial dossier at Ethics Alarms, much of it for her habitual race-baiting, but I hadn’t written about her much lately because of the Julie Principle: she’s an idiot, even most Democrats can see she’s an idiot, and thus there is not much to be gained by repeatedly pointing out that she’s an idiot. However, Rep. Lee is running for the Senate to replace the recently departed and slightly less-recently dementia-afflicted California Senator Diane Feinstein, who even at her most reduced mental state was a more trustworthy and responsible public figure than Lee on the best day of her life. Someone like Barbara Lee should be kept out of the Senate with razor wire, but this is California, so you never know.

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Oh NO! I Missed “Black Love Day”!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The New York Times, which when it isn’t using its reputation and influence to promote leftist agenda items and Democratic politicians can still be a source of useful information, explained a new black holiday that I had been mercifully unaware of until now. Meet “Black Love Day,” February 13:

On Feb. 13, 1993, Ayo Handy-Kendi, a community organizer and native of Washington, D.C., created the holiday to celebrate communal love and pride in being “unapologetically Black.” …Handy-Kendi…felt compelled by a higher power to bring her community together, she said in an interview with The New York Times…A decade prior, Ms. Handy-Kendi founded the African American Holiday Expo in Washington to promote Black businesses and the observance of holidays celebrating Black history, like Kwanzaa. She then created the African American Holiday Association, a nonprofit that encourages the celebration of alternative holidays focused on Black history and the preservation of Black culture, in 1989. In 1993, “the [C]reator,” Ms. Handy-Kendi told The Times, instructed her to organize the first Black Love Day. She hosted the event, which resembled the expo’s gathering of Black vendors and artisans, at Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon’s office in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., drawing from her own experiences and the history of the Black community…Black Love Day and its rituals are guided by the original five tenets: love for the creator, love for self, love for the Black family, love for the Black community and love for Black people.

Celebrating Black Love Day is about acknowledging those tenets throughout the day, Ms. Handy-Kendi said, and can involve a ceremony to honor Black love and relationships. “It’s not where you go on Black Love Day, it’s what you do on Black Love Day,” she said. “The Black Love Book” by Ms. Handy-Kendi outlines ways to practice those values…

You can read the rest if you want, but you get the idea.

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Forget “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Proper Reaction Should Be “What the Hell Is the Matter With You Hacks?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The furious wagon-circling by left-biased journalists (or “journalists,” for short) in response to the DOJ Special Counsel’s stunning “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!” declaration in his report is another smoking gun in the “controversy” over whether Donald Trump was as right as he has ever been to call the media “enemies of the people.” It might even be the smokiest gun of all—more damning than the news media’s blatant cheer-leading for Barack Obama’s candidacy and destructive Presidency, more damning than its Black Lives Matter pandering during the BLM riots and its fearmongering during the pandemic, even more damning, perhaps, than its successful efforts to hide the evidence of Hunter Biden’s laptop until Donald Trump was safely defeated.

Confirmation bias and willful blindness still have their limits. How can any American with two brain cells to rub together observe the shameless gaslighting compiled in the video above and not be offended, disgusted, and angry?

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My Annual Boycott the Super Bowl Edition…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Feb. 9th was the 60th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, leading me to muse on what other momentous cultural (as opposed to political and international) events American society has shared in caring about and observing since. There haven’t been many. I remember that the first Super Bowl, when the AFL and the NFL agreed on a championship game between the upstart rebel league and the establishment attracted such intense interest and coverage (two networks covered the game—when has that happened since?) which was a wipe-out by the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. I didn’t know any families that didn’t watch that first one. Once upon a time, everybody tuned in to the Academy Awards: it was a unifying ritual, but no more. It is disturbing to think that there can’t be a unifying cultural event in the U.S. today, but I’m coming to that depressing conclusion.

Meanwhile, I hope you are boycotting the annual hoop-de-doo by the evil NFL, which happily kills its player for profit. This NFL season I didn’t catch a second of a single game, and wrote less about the cynical, ethics-free league than I have in years. The most recently discussed incident when an NFL head coach was pilloried for trying to inspire his players by extolling the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. I didn’t write about, but should have, a study from almost exactly a year ago that found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of 345 former NFL players among 376 former players studied. That’s 91.7% compared to the normal incidence of CTE in the general public, which is in the vicinity of .4% I didn’t write about it because, as far as I can tell, none of the sources, ethics and news, that I usually check for ethics stories bothered to treat the study as newsworthy. I assume that’s because they chose not to issue a buzzkill on Super Bowl week.

Think about that for a while, assuming that you haven’t played professional football and can think.

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Normalizing Theft

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Since we began the day with a dead canary in the mine of democracy, here’s another. That video shows a thief rampaging through an Apple Store in Emeryville, north of Oakland (where Woke Kindergarten romps). Nobody tries to stop him. Nobody even appears alarmed by him. He escapes by running right by a police car.

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Stop Making Me Defend Tucker Carlson!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m reasonable sure I have made my ethical assessment of Tucker Carlson clear for years now: he’s an opportunist, he’s a demagogue, he’s ambitious and it is impossible to determine what he really believes. He’s also glib and articulate, and I could not care less what he advocates or opposes, since he makes such calculations based on ratings and their perceived usefulness in giving him fame and power.

However, lately Carlson is taking flack because he is in Russia, apparently preparing to interview Vladimir Putin. The criticism is across the partisan and ideological spectrum. The Left, predictably, detests Carlson and would criticize anything he did. But conservatives are attacking him too. Bill Kristol, the NeverTrump director of Defending Democracy Together, said sarcastically, “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital on CNN that Carlson is “either remarkably stupid or consciously evil.” “He’s not stupid,” replied CNN’s John Harwood. Adam Kinzinger, who along with Liz Cheney served as one of the only two Republicans on the House select committee that turned the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot into an extended “Get Trump!” kangaroo court, pronounced Carlson “a traitor”.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Flat Learning Curve at Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Two depressing items to diges in the apparently unstoppable decline of Harvard University: the headline was composed based on the first, but the second may be even more disturbing. (Incidentally, I feel I should apologize for presenting so many EA posts involving my alma mater —and that of my sister and father, and where my mother was briefly a dean. However, its decay and current crisis mode would be ethics fodder of the same import if I had matriculated from Podunk U.)

First, here is the main substance of the proud announcement I was gifted with over the weekend from Harvard’s interim president. Recall that Harvard’s recent fiasco was seeded by a leadership group and campus culture that prioritized “diversity, equity and inclusion” to such an extent that it elevated an under-qualified, academically devious dean who had been involved in woke debacles during her tenure to be the new university president, primarily on the basis of her career-long obsession with “diversity” (and her color and gender, naturally). Coming under just and vituperative criticism for both engineering Claudine Gay’s ascent and later, after she had proven herself unfit for the job, acting to cover-up the scandal until the pressure by donors and students became too intense, was the Harvard Corporation, an all-Democrat and progressive woke cabal that ironically lacked diversity itself in the areas of world view and thought. Behold the two new members of that body selected in the wake of the criticism:

“…We write to let you know that two accomplished alumni will join the Harvard Corporation in the coming months…

Ken Frazier, a 1978 graduate of Harvard Law School, is former chairman and CEO of Merck & Co… he has had a distinguished career as a practicing lawyer, first in private practice and later as Merck’s general counsel. Known for his dedication to expanding opportunity for others, he recently co-founded OneTen, a nonprofit coalition focused on expanding family-sustaining employment opportunities for people lacking a four-year degree with an emphasis on Black Americans....

…His many honors include the Anti-Defamation League’s Courage Against Hate Award (2020) “for using his platform to speak out on behalf of marginalized communities and serving as an exemplary role model for corporate leadership.”

…Joe Bae, a 1994 graduate of Harvard College, is co-CEO of KKR, a global investment firm…he has served on numerous boards, including institutions such as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (current vice chair), Phillips Academy Andover (former trustee and chair of nominating and governance committee), the Asia Society, the Hong Kong Ballet, and the Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific Council. He is also a co-founder and board member of The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), which was established in 2021 to serve the Asian American and Pacific Islander community….Along with his wife, the novelist Janice Y. K. Lee ’94, he led a recent philanthropic drive to support an FAS initiative to expand education and scholarship in Asian American studies.

Frazier is black, and has concentrated on programs and initiatives assisting African Americans. Bae is Asian, and his focus has been substantially in the area of advancing the interests of Asian-Americans. Bae’s appointment is a pretty transparent reaction to Harvard’s losing the lawsuit by Asian-Americans who claimed they had been discriminated against by the school’s affirmative action policies, recent ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.

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Unethical Headline of the Week: The LA Times

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“How throwing soup at the Mona Lisa can help fight climate change”

You can read this opinion piece if you want, but the headline accurately conveys all you need to know by itself, I hope. The author, an associate professor of environmental studies at USC (so you know the quality of critical thinking and ethical analysis they are teaching there), essentially is making an argument for terrorism, because sometimes it works.

“Objections to acts of climate activism such as the latest food fight at the Louvre are understandable but might miss the point. Protesters’ perceived madness is indeed method,” Shannon Gibson writes. And the method is attracting attention to a cause by disruptive, selfish and destructive acts having no relationship to the goals of the activists. In some respects, violent acts of terrorism are easier to rationalize: at least those seeking a Palestinian state are directing their “method” at those with some direct relationship to the entity the terrorist blame for their plight. Throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” or the Mona Lisa has no such relevance.

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There is Hope! Part 2, The Vindication of Waylon Bailey

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Waylon Bailey, the social media-user who was arrested by a Wuhan virus totalitarian idiot for making a joke and initially denied justice by a U.S. District Judge who doesn’t know the law, finally was awarded $205,000 in compensatory and punitive damages by a federal jury. It’s not enough, not even close, and the publicity the episode has received (virtually none) underlines that point.

These are the kinds of cases juries should address with $83 million in damages (just picking a number out of the air, there) to make the next Gestapo-inclined officer who considers punishing a citizen for exercising his constitutional rights think twice, or even three times. At least, however, Waylon Bailey was vindicated by our lately maladjusted justice system.

There is hope.

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