“bias makes you stupid”

Rep. Omar’s Dumb Tweet (Continued…)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was so tempted to headline this post with the res ipsa loquitur tag, but didn’t at the last minute. The reason: I was convinced that as obvious as the scientific and logical nonsense her tweet represented should be, a lot of usually intelligent people wouldn’t allow themselves to see it, because, as Ethics Alarms notes repeatedly, “bias makes you stupid.” The post’s comments turned out to be a marvelous example of that.

One persistent defender of Omar insisted that it was crucial that I had checked the alleged authority for her gaffe before criticizing her. It happens that I did, but I didn’t need to. Nobody did: that’s the whole point. If the woman had the requisite number of brain cells to rub together to start a bonfire, she would have known what emerged from her keyboard when she typed that was hilariously silly with the application of basic critical thinking skills.

Recently, Major League Baseball teams broke the record for the most runs scored in all games on a single day. It was remarkable, because the record was more than a century old: the day occurred in the 19th century. All of the articles about this event specified the day. If, as Omar’s ignorant tweet claimed, the Earth had broken its previous record for “hottest day in 120,000 years,” there would be a day from 120,000 years ago that held the broken record. No source mentioned such a day, however, because there are no daily records of the Earth’s weather—daily temperature is weather, not climate—from 120,000 years ago or even a thousand years ago (though we know Pompeii got pretty damn hot when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.) Estimates of global climate in the periods before records were kept depend on “proxy data.” Here is a chart explaining what proxy data can tell scientist about distant climates:

Continue reading →

Regarding Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town”

/ Jack Marshall / 78 Comments

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like

Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough

Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they’re gonna round up
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck

Try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right
If you’re looking for a fight
Try that in a small town
Try that in a small town

Try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Try that in a small town
Ooh-ooh
Try that in a small town…

Suddenly, a fairly standard issue Country Western anthem released in May by a singer I had never heard of is a battleground in the culture wars. I’ve listened to it several times now. Woke Central Command apparently put out a memo declaring that the song is an existential threat to democracy, or something, and the mainstream media has rallied to the cause. State Representative Justin Jones of Tennessee (Guess which party!) condemned the song on Twitter, describing it as a “heinous song calling for racist violence” that promoted “a shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism.” The Washington Post, incredibly, has published six op-eds attacking it in hysterical terms. The song is a call for lynchings! It’s advocating vigilantism! Major Tipton would like a word…

For heaven’s sake: the song is an unsubtle paean to traditional values, individual rights, respect for the law, and community harmony, while impugning the priorities and values of urban centers. That’s all. It’s hardly an unusual theme for a Country Western song. Far more significant than the song is the extreme reaction to it on the ideological Left. The song’s sentiments represent a threat to Woke World’s mandatory conformity with the progressive agenda, so the song itself must be censored, canceled, wiped out of public consciousness.

These people are getting desperate.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ah, how I love it when readers send in superb and informative Comments of the Day when I am strapped for time and have ProEthics deadlines to meet! This post in particular has generated several COTD-worthy responses. I may re-post them all.

But first, here’s Michael R.’s Comment of the Day on “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”:

***

One of my big problems with the whole ‘climate change’ agenda is that the people who are pushing it don’t believe it, either. If they believed it, they would push agendas that would further the goal of counteracting global warming, but they don’t. They push agendas that are outrageously expensive, damaging to the economy and the well-being of people, and don’t do much, if anything, about the warming of the planet.

(1) Electric vehicles. This is an easy one. The demand to eliminate cars and trucks and replace them with electric vehicles is a high-profile and telling example. First of all, electric vehicles are not capable of replacing many of our vehicles, such as semis. Secondly, we probably lack the resources to replace even most of our cars (alone) with electric vehicles, especially since we oddly won’t allow the mining required to obtain the materials. Thirdly, of electric grid is completely incapable of powering this massive addition to the electric load, especially since we are making it more unreliable with renewables. Most importantly, however, THEY DON’T REDUCE CO2 emissions significantly or at all. Their increased energy involved in production and the battery replacement cycle makes them worse or marginally better than today’s gasoline powered cars (depending on your assumptions). For my use, my gasoline powered cars are better for the environment.

(2) Meat. There is a big push to eliminate meat from our diets for ‘global warming’. However, anyone with half a brain realizes that the ‘fake meat’ they are creating takes vastly more energy to produce than a cow does. Lets take a large vat of rhizobium and extract a few hundred milligrams of leg-hemoglobin so we can make our soybean patty taste like meat? Sure, that’s so much more efficient than a cow or chicken. Of course, a lot of our beef is grown on western grazing lands where you are ONLY allowed to graze cattle. Removing the cows from that land, without opening it up to other agriculture (as the Biden administration has done) only reduces the amount of food produced, increasing the world starvation we are facing.

Continue reading →

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Since some EA commenters have chosen to send their credibility to die on the metaphorical hill of Rep. Omar’s ridiculous climate change tweet of last week, I felt this paired set of reports made an important point. Amazingly, so far at least, these irreconcilable contradictions—and this is far from the only one in the climate change “settled science” debate—- don’t seem to shake the faith of climate change fanatics even a little bit.

Which itself is useful information….

I Know It’s Too Easy But I Can’t Resist: “An Irish Actor Playing Oppenheimer Proves Once Again That Jews Don’t Count” May Be The Most Hilariously Confused Casting Ethics Rant Yet

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

There is only one ethical way to cast a play, musical or movie: pick the actor whose portrayal will most entertain the audience and realize the full potential of the script. Casting is not the place (if anywhere is) for political correctness, quotas, “diversity,” or affirmative action.

Ethics Alarms is full of discussions of this issue, most recently here, in the post just last week about how Disney decided it was offensive to cast seven little people as the Seven Dwarfs in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Hollywood and Broadway are completely confused and hypocritical in this area, because the people who run both places are 1) desperate to be seen as progressive and to signal their virtue at every opportunity, 2) terrified of being branded as non-woke, giving extreme activist groups representing various tribes and interests groups the upper hand in their bullying efforts, and 3) not very bright, frankly.

This is why a Samoan-African American actor was found insufficiently black to play folk legend John Henry, but a black woman was cast as red-headed fish-girl Ariel in “The Little Mermaid,” and the Founding Fathers ended up being portrayed by black, Asian, and Hispanic women and “non-binary” performers in the revival of “1776.” Tom Hanks now says only gay actors should play gay characters, but a director who refused to cast a gay actor as a non-gay character would be run out of the business. It is, as I have written here before, Calvinball.

All of which brings us to the head-exploding essay by Malina Saval, editor in Chief of Pasadena Magazine, titled “An Irish Actor Playing Oppenheimer Proves Once Again That Jews Don’t Count.”

Continue reading →

Apparently “Bite Me!” In Response To Woke Pseudo-Social Science Research Is Facism

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Frequent commenter Other Bill gets credit for the headline as well as the pointer to a telling, if ridiculous, story.

Oregon State University researchers had circulated a survey regarding LGBTQ students in STEM to engineering undergrads. As described in the scholars’ paper, published in the Summer 2023 edition of the “Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies,” many of the students surveyed resented the questions about their gender as well as the premise of the research, and demonstrated their disapproval by entering gag and satirical responses to request for their gender and ethnicity.

Among the answers:

Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month (Well, One Of Them) And Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

Observations:

Continue reading →

Easiest Ethics Quiz Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Your Ethics Alarms Easiest Ethics Quiz of All Time is…

Do you detect any bias in the CNBC lists of the Best and Worst States to Live and Work in?

Here they are:

CNBC’s top 10 worst states to live and work for 2023 are…

  1. Texas
  2. Oklahoma
  3. Louisiana
  4. South Carolina and Alabama (tie)
  5. —
  6. Missouri
  7. Indiana
  8. Tennessee
  9. Arkansas
  10. Florida

CNBC’s top 10 best states to live and work for 2023 are…

  1. Vermont
  2. Maine
  3. New Jersey
  4. Minnesota
  5. Hawaii
  6. Oregon
  7. Washington
  8. Massachusetts and  Colorado (tie)
  9. —
  10. Connecticut

One of the criteria for determining the best states to live and work in is is the extent to which they permit relatively unrestricted abortion, since many single women regard this as a priority. Ironically, such states are not desirable places for unwanted children to ever have a chance live or work, but this was not one of the criteria.

USA Today and other mainstream media outlets reported the CNBC woke propaganda effort uncritically without noting the obvious. The USA Today article began, “How does life in your state compare to the rest of America?”

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

It’s Unethical For Democrats, the News Media And Activists to Gaslight The Public, But On The SCOTUS Affirmative Action Smack-Down, They Did It Anyway

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The coverage of the recent rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard almost universally created the impression that they were further attacks on democracy by a rogue Supreme Court, foiling the will of the people. In particular, these decisions blocking institutionalized institutional racist discrimination, which is what higher education affirmative action is, were assailed as creating disastrous hurdles to black Americans as they strive to succeed in this nation plagued by systemic racism.

Two recent polls show that this narrative was fake news from the news media and misinformation from the Left. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found that 65% of “Likely U.S. Voters” approve of the rulings, with 49% approving “strongly”. Just 28% disapprove of the conclusion that the prohibition on discriminating by race means no discrimination by race. You can read how the questions were posed here. Another poll from YouGov/The Economist asked “Do you approve or disapprove of Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action?” Both sexes, all races, every age group, and every level of income approved more than not. (See here.)

Yeah, I know: polls. In this case, however, these easily manipulated surveys perform a service. The Supreme Court’s function does not and should not involve following the mob, but appealing to mob emotions has been a central strategy by progressives as they seek to de-legitimize the one branch of the government they don’t control. An accompanying myth is that the Roberts Court is an obstacle to “the will of the people,” even when, as in this case, the will of the people is supported by the Constitution and our laws.

Even after a concerted and ongoing effort to inflict Marxist goals, racial quotas and “good” discrimination on the culture, our core values have stood up to the propaganda siege—so far.

There is hope.

Ethics Hero (Corporate Division): In-N-Out Burger

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Among the many ways the last few years of Wokemania has reduced the quality of American life and our access to the pursuit of happiness is the creation of the ideology-linked addiction to virtually useless masks and a near-crippling phobia regarding the threat of air-borne illnesses created by fearmongering during the pandemic.

Continue reading →