“bias makes you stupid”

Encore! “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was about to write almost the exact same essay I wrote in 2019, but fortunately something deep within what I jokingly called “my brain” prompted me to check the Ethics Alarms archives and now I have an extra 45 minutes or so to spend organizing my sock drawer. Sure enough, I had published the lament before, and prompted by the same stimulus”: a New York Times news item.

Yesterday’s article (gift link!) was was déjà vu too: “MacKenzie Scott Gives $700 Million to Historically Black Colleges.” In 2019, I wrote “The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given more than $500 million to more than 20 historically Black colleges in the past year.” That was bonkers, her current gift is bonkers, but this item in the latest Times article is really  nuts: 

“President Trump has also shown support for historically Black institutions. In his first term, he distributed $250 million in annual funding and cut more than $300 million in federal loans for the schools. In April, through an executive order, he unveiled a new White House job to oversee H.B.C.U.s. But the position currently remains vacant.

“Dr. Gasman, the Rutgers professor, said the Trump administration has sent mixed signals. The president has sought to crack down on diversity programs in education and has complained about the teaching of Black history. The funds for H.B.C.U.s and tribal colleges were announced as the federal government cut programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs and schools with significant Hispanic enrollment.

“They are willing to support Black people in Black institutions, but they are not very comfortable with Black people in white institutions,” Dr. Gasman said.”

That’s deliberately negative spin, but it’s not completely unjust. What the hell? Historically black colleges are the epitome of “good discrimination” in the hypocritical style of DEI. Howard, Harris’s alma mater (Be proud,Howard—you graduated a babbling fool!), got the largest donation from Scott, 80 million bucks. Do you know what the white enrollment at Howard is? Less than 1%! Talk about disparate impact—you know, the EEOC trick that finds invidious discrimination based on statistics alone?

Across all of the HBUCs, there are about 10% white students  and 2% Asians. I thought Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the way to ensure no discrimination based on race, was to not engage in discrimination based on race. This is undeniably discrimination based on race.

The Trump Administration should not be supporting black colleges and universities. If most of our elite colleges are a sham, spending more time on ideological indoctrination than on teaching, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities are worse. By an “in isn’t what it is” PR haze endorsed by the news media (‘Oh! They are historic! That means they are good schools, right?’ Right, just as the historic Biden press secretary Karine Saint-Pierre was “good.” They aren’t good: they have inferior standards for admission, inferior faculties, and their graduates come out with misleading diplomas) the public is led to believe that these are elite institutions too.

Ten years ago, Ethics Alarms played a minor role in saving Virginia’s Sweet Briar college from being closed by a board that decided that an all-women’s college was an anachronism and no longer needed. I argued that there were many good reasons to have all female colleges as an option for women, but none of those good reasons apply to racially segregated schools.

OK, now I am getting into the substance of the essay from six years ago, and I have frittered away some of that saved sock drawer time. Heeere’s Jack!— from 2019….in “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

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Make no mistake: I know why they are getting a surge in donations: cynical virtue-signalling and mindless George Floyd Freakout tribute. However, like the historically black colleges themselves, the phenomenon of picking now to celebrate segregated education, and mostly inferior education, is self-contradictory. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the “antiracism” movement itself, and the incoherence of the “diversity” chants coming from the Left.

For these colleges are the opposite of diverse. They are, in fact, discriminatory in concept and execution, and to see them “thrive” while activists are demanding literal quotas in other institutions in order to create numerical demographic parity—at least—is a blazing example of how the George Floyd Ethics Train wreck is less a cultural awakening than it is an opportunistic and unethical power play fueled by white guilt and cowardice.

The front page article in the New York Times today is so full of head-banging-on-the-wall moments I ran out of head before I ran out of wall. Here are some…

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Elon Musk: “Delusional,” Huckster, or Credible Dreamer?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A twitter user I have never heard of (but who somehow has amassed over half a million followers posted that tweet above with the comment, “I don’t understand why people continue investing in a company whose CEO is self-evidently delusional and whose plans for the business have no basis in reality.” Another user quickly pointed out that the eccentric billionaire entrepreneur “reduced the cost of launch to orbit by ~90%, mainstreamed electric cars, and gave a paralyzed man the ability to control a computer with his mind.” Yes, that’s a complete rebuttal to the “influencer’s” snark. Why do investors trust Musk? Because he’s an out-of-the-box thinker with the resources to make impossible-seeming ideas reality, and has a track record that says, “Don’t bet against him.”

Regular readers here know that I detest John Lennon’s anthem for idiots, “Imagine.” John identifies himself as a “dreamer,” which he rationalizes “Everybody does it” style: He’s not the only one who thinks we can achieve his juvenile version of utopia (“Nothing to live or die for…”). But John was a minimally educated lifetime musician and poet: like the Everly Brothers, all he could do was dream (and they were silly dreams anyway). Elon Musk has shown that he is capable of making some previously impossible dreams possible. That deserves awe and respect.

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Observations on the Epstein Drama. Summary: I Don’t Understand This At All.

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

Right now, a sniffling groups of women including past victims of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking operations are standing in front of the Capitol before Congress’s vote on releasing “the Epstein files,” whatever that means at this point. One speaker—they are all saying not just kind-of the same thing, but exactly the same thing but in different words (sometimes) said that their lament isn’t about politics. It’s obviously about politics. Both CNN and MSNBC, the most aggressive Democratic propaganda agents broadcasting, are showing the demonstration live, as if it’s important news. Fox News is barely mentioning it.

The issue is political and partisan. The proof is irrefutable. Why didn’t the victims, or whoever organized them, or the mainstream media, insist that the Biden Administration release the files when the power to do so was entirely within its grasp? Nobody thought of it? The Democrats were fabricating ways to “Get Trump” and had been since 2015; everyone knew he had once been pals with Epstein; and the scandal was 20 years old. The Epstein revival only became a thing when the Axis of Unethical Conduct became desperate in its efforts to slow down Trump 2.0 as his administration began dismantling the Obama-Biden nascent totalitarian state. Naturally, Axis media was all in. Naturally, publicity hound Marjorie Taylor Greene, who comprehends neither law nor logic, decided to use it to get cheap clicks. Maybe she really thinks a rehash of the evil deeds of a man who has been dead for six years is a good use of her time; who knows? She’s an idiot.

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And Now…Here Comes A.I. Derangement Syndrome!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Coca-Cola’s AI ad just ruined Christmas… again” rages tech blog CB (Creative Bloq) Wow. A Coca-Cola by-the-numbers holiday ad lasting a bit more than 60 seconds ruined Christmas just like the Grinch or Mr. Potter. How is that possible?

It isn’t, but apparently the new tool of artificial intelligence which can create things like the Coke ad faster and cheaper than CGI has some folks losing their jingle bells. What’s going on here?

This: the Marxists and progressives on social media and elsewhere are upset because AI puts actors out of work, or soon will. Of course, except for Santa, there are no humans in the ad to be put out of work, but the critics on X and elsewhere aren’t fooled. Coke used cute animals, see, so people would be fooled into thinking that AI wasn’t taking away human jobs. “Firstly, can you really put aside the issues of AI generated creative displacing artists simply by using animals instead of humans?,” Fergus McCallum, CEO at TBWA\MCR wonders. “Even if you can, there’s no getting away from the lack of joy and authenticity. As audiences start to turn away from the AI slop being served to them on a daily basis, Coca-Cola are in danger of becoming inauthentic too. Whatever happened to ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’?!”

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Discovered While Researching “Trump Derangement”(And Seeking A Cure)…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The poster, who didn’t created the bad “Calvin and Hobbs” meme, is a Facebook freind, a Harvard grad, a performing arts executive and very nice man. I left his name off this because I don’t want to embarrass him. He made the silly and wrong comment on top of the meme, which he got off the page of the user below the meme, who authored the fatuous idiocy under it. He once was smarter than this. He is hopelessly Trump-Deranged: I have posted his symptoms on Ethics Alarms before.

Christina Lorey is a journalist who has hundreds of thousands of followers all over social media, and claims to be a “Good News” reporter. Is it “good news” that a journalist has so many followers who take such self-contradictory junk as what she wrote under Calvin and his friend (after having dumb words cruelly rammed down their throats) seriously?

I think her display is self-indicting (res ipsa loquitur) but to start you off:

1. Woke” does not mean “treating everyone the same” (it is the condition of trying to prove to doctrinaire progressives that you embrace all of their cant, narratives and delusions no matter how harmful and illogical, and thus deserve to exits), nor does “treating everyone the same” describe what DEI aims for. That definition is a radical concept, because people are, and always should be, treated according to their conduct and positive (or negative) value to society. It isn’t even a concept that my demented fried and his fellow travelers believe in or practice. Heck, they don’t even believe that elected American Presidents should be “treated the same.”

2. Calvin’s statement, in addition to being dumb and depressing in its stupidity unlike Calvin’s real observations, which were wise and funny, is self-rebutting. What it advocates is presumed racism, the rotten heart of the George Floyd Freakout, in which discriminating against whites is declared to be the necessary means of keeping the intrinsically evil race and the organizations members of that race lead from discriminating against minorities, which they will always do. A clogged toilet full of glaring examples renders this proposition null and void: disgraced DEI Harvard President Claudine Gay; Kamala Harris, of course (Do Democrats really believe that she was the best nominee they could find for either President of Vice-President?), the Worst Paid White House Liar Ever, Karine St.Pierre, now embarrassing herself and her party coast-to-coast on a book tour, the two DEI SCOTUS Justices, Sonia The Wise Latina and Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson; finally fired MSNBC host Joy Reid, the current and previous mayors of Chicago…you can add to the list if you have the time and stomach for it. Sure, no white candidates were more qualified and able than those villains and fools.

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What Would We Do Without “Experts”?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Over the last two days, the listserv of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL) had been embroiled in a debate over ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 3.10 and its application to a hypothetical posed by a member. The association, which I belong to, includes law professors, ethics partners, CLE trainers, and ethics consultants, expert witnesses—pretty much all of the legal ethics experts in the United States.

There is no ABA Model Rule 3.10.

Eventually, after a lot of replies, someone figured out that the question really involved California’s Rule 3.10, which neither the ABA nor any other jurisdiction includes. The big clue was that the member who posted the hypothetical practices in California, though the state was not mentioned in the original post. Most of the responses to the post were also California lawyers, none of whom mentioned that this was an issue confined to their state.

Question: are these legal ethics experts unaware that the rule in their state is an outlier? Or is the Golden State such an impenetrable bubble that legal ethics experts there assume that its often bizarre sensitivities are the only ones that count?

[Perhaps relevant (or not): the lawyer who started the debate over the almost imaginary ethics rule includes mandatory pronouns in each post.]

Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani’”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Gee, we haven’t had a Comment of the Day on a Comment of the Day for quite while around here. This one was especially satisfying. Reacting to Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s discouraged coda to his COTD on Mayor-to-be Mamdani’s scary-stupid victory rant, Old Bill registered commentary that should have been already featured on or in every legitimate news source. Unfortunately, there are no legitimate news sources, and the fact that OB’s point has been so far almost completely ignored by the Axis media has been making me doubt my own sanity. Am I missing something? How is a President supposed to actually lower grocery prices after inflation he had no responsibility for hit 9% under his predecessor, particularly after less than a year in office? How dare the Democrats choose “affordability” as a rallying cry against Trump when the affordability crash happened on their watch? Do they think the public is that stupid? IS the public that stupid?

Please don’t tell me that you really can fool all of the people all of the time.

It was high time for Old Bill ( we once had several Bills among the commentariate, now all among the missing; maybe they are hanging out with A Friend, Curmie and Charles Green somewhere….) to have another Comment of the Day. He is among the most attentive and prolific commenters Ethics Alarms has, and we should be grateful for him. I certainly am.

Here is Old Bill’s Comment of the Day on “Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani.’” I know its mostly a quote, but it is the right quote, I hadn’t seen it, and maybe you haven’t either.

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“I was hoping from what I’d heard about Mamdani earlier that he was standing up for legitimate concerns of the people regarding the government and the economy.”

This is the “affordability” talking point Dems have surfaced and harped on over the last few months and during the off-year elections. Remember when everything was “income inequality” and everyone pretended they’d read Thomas Piketty’s book.

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Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani [First in a Long, Long Series…]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

—Zohran Mamdani‘s marathon victory speech on Election Night, after the Democratic Socialist (that is, Communist) was elected as New York City’s mayor.

A commenter asked my opinion regarding Mamdani’s speech and I demurred, because it was standard commie tripe that I’ve read and heard from everyone from Lenin to Castro, and now this guy. He speaks well, and I’m always in favor of that as a key leadership skill. So did David Koresh. However, as I kept seeing that quote being published by the disgracefully uncritical mainstream media, my inner Popeye scratched to get out (“It’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!”) Who does he think he’s kidding?

Perhaps more importantly, what is the proper reaction to any American who wasn’t raised in a cave who doesn’t hear that insane claim and conclude, “Oh, brother! So much for that guy. He’s either lying, ignorant or a moron”? At very least it’s “RUN AWAY!”

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One Non-Profit With Integrity, Another Without

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

First, on the ethical side…we have The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which picked up the metaphorical baton on non-partisan defense of freedom of speech after the ACLU threw their mission away and became just another lackey for the Democratic Party.

A federal district court today dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer stemming from her late and spectacularly wrong poll before the 2024 election showing Donald Trump losing reliably Republican Iowa to Kamala Harris. The lawsuit, brought by a subscriber to The Des Moines Register and structured as a class action asserted claims under Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act was fraud and attempted election interference. It was a stupid lawsuit, so Selzer, represented pro bono by FIRE, which explained that commentary about a political election, including polls, are protected speech. The court agreed that “polls are a mere snapshot of a dynamic and changing electorate” and “the results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false representation merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.” The court also held the plaintiff had “no factual allegations” to support his fraud claim, instead “invok[ing] mere buzzwords and speculation” to support his claims.

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Back Off, Progressives: Dwight David Eisenhower Was An Excellent President In His Time.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Which is, after all, the only time that matters.…at the time.

I just wrote a long rebuttal to a recently Trump Deranged friend of impressive mind and credentials, who decided to go after, of all people, President Dwight Eisenhower for a speech in which he extolled moral values because, my friend’s Facebook post declared, “in real life the years of Eisenhower’s administration—essentially all of the 1950s—did not even come close to measuring up to the tenets of social, racial, ethnic and sexual justice and economic equity that most of us today believe are the standards of a just society.”

“That is an important reminder for all of us us that times do change,” he continued, “and that as right-thinking as Eisenhower’s words seem on the surface, they were spoken by the leader of a society that was very repressive in many ways—economically, socially, racially, sexually and otherwise.” This, to use the vernacular, pissed me off greatly. Ike has gone higher in my estimation of him as President the more I read about him and especially the more I watch other President struggle with the job he seemed to do effortlessly. (Of course, Ike may be the only one of our Presidents for whom the office could be considered a step down in difficulty and responsibility, after overseeing the Allied effort to save the world in World War II.)

Here, with minor edits to protect the guilty, is what I posted in response to that slap at Ike:

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But this is the purest form of Presentism, and a grossly unfair assessment of Ike, one of our most under-rated and effective Presidents. It is always easy to go back and condemn figures of the past who did not have the benefit of many decades of accumulated experience and wisdom; easy and wrong. It is by this standard that we saw efforts in demented regions like San Francisco (and our own) to strip historical honors from, among others, the Founders, because they were not sufficiently psychic to reject their society’s and culture’s mistaken beliefs, such as the inherent inferiority of other races to theirs.

 I’ve studied Eisenhower’s own writings and those about him. His vision of the Presidency was that his job was to protect and preserve the culture, not change it; that the culture would evolve and change in its own time, when society was ready for it. As a result, Eisenhower led a United States that honored and trusted its institutions at a level that seems astonishing today. He had a great part in that.

Nobody accused him of being a “king,” but in Boston, even then a bulwark of the Democratic Party, kids listened to “Hail to the Chief” on the most popular children’s show (creepily titled “Big Brother”!) as a photo of Ike appeared (the one above, in fact) on the screen and we “toasted” the President of the United States with a glass of milk. The Horror.

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