“bias makes you stupid”

The Pattern: Trump Makes A Decision That Can Be Legitimately Criticized, and the Media Reports It In a Misleading and Biased Manner To Rig the Debate…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

This one nearly got me!

The USA Today headline: “National parks cut free entry for MLK Day, add Trump’s birthday.” I almost leaped for my keyboard. Sure, trolling the “No Kings” Trump Deranged is fun for POTUS, but this crossed the line. It also seemed like a deliberately racially provocative act: substituting his own birthday for MLK’s among the days commemorated by the National Parks? This mandated an Ethics Dunce post that would write itself!

It was not until the end of the story (by USA TODAY hack Kathleen Wong, who “covers travel news with a passion for sustainable tourism and human-focused storytelling” —gag/ack/yecchh!) where the full list of days when admission to the National Parks will be free of charge to American citizens is listed, that I recognized the nasty partisan con.

The new list of 2026 free admission days to the National Parks during patriotic holidays: President’s Day (Feb. 16), Memorial Day(May 31), Flag Day (June 14) Independence Day weekend (July 3–5),  the 110th Birthday of the National Park Service (Aug. 25) Constitution Day (Sept. 17) Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday (Oct. 27)—Teddy launched the National Parks— and Veterans Day (Nov. 11).  I had forgotten, as I suspect many readers have, that Flag Day happens to be Trump’s birthday, but the holiday fits naturally into the category of non-interest group, non- divisive patriotic commemorations that was clearly the motivation for “patriotic fee-free days” announced by the Department of the Interior.

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Another Christmas, Another False “Mary and Joseph Were Illegal Immigrants” Analogy…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“Holy morons, Batman!”

The Lake Street Church of Evanston has erected a Christmas manger scene on its lawn that “reimagines the nativity as a scene of forced family separation, drawing direct parallels between the Holy Family’s refugee experience and contemporary immigration detention practices.”

Other than the reality that Jesus’s mother and her husband were not in any sense of the word refugees, as they were traveling from one part of the Roman Empire to another, and the even more relevant reality that this was over 2,000 years ago in a different culture and time that make attempted comparisons with modern immigration policies, problems and legal enforcement ludicrous, it’s a great point!

Defaulting to the Bible and religion as the cheapest “appeal to authority” imaginable is persuasive evidence of a lack of genuine arguments and an IQ deficit, or perhaps a cynical desire to confuse the intellectually deprived. In either case, its an abuse of Christmas. Indeed, the defenders of illegal immigration literally have no valid justification for their beliefs at all. A church that would engage in this cynical, ahistorical deception can’t be trusted.

And now…a song!

Why Are People Like This Teaching In Colleges…or Anyplace?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Like all holiday movies, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” has ethics at the core of its metaphorical heart, though not to the extent of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” the objects of the three Ethics Alarms holiday ethics companions. (Is there another film I should add to the series?) But it really takes effort—and pernicious bias—to claim that the John Hughes classic contains a “dangerous” pro-capitalist message, as SUNY Purchase College Professor Mtume Gant claimed on the insane leftist podcast “Millennials are Killing Capitalism” with host Jared Ware. 

The podcast describes itself as a “platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world.” Great. And it has to dig so deep for topics that it stoops to searching for sinister messages in a formulaic holiday movie?

Steve Martin plays an up-tight ad exec whose asshole tendencies emerge regularly when he gets involved in holiday travel hell as most of us have. He is desperately trying to get home to spend Thanksgiving with his family because it’s what you do, that’s all: he’s also especially sentimental about it. But circumstances conspire to force him to battle his way from Manhattan to Chicago with a gregarious shower-ring salesman (John Candy) who is his emotional and intellectual opposite.

It’s “The Odd Couple” crossed with “A Christmas Carol,” as Martin learns the values of empathy, kindness and good will by the end of the movie, while Candy, who has no family, is embraced by Martin’s in the misty-eyed finale.

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We Now Know Scientific Pronouncements Are Frequently Garbage, So We Also Should Know “The ’60s Parenting Practices We Now Know Were Terrible For Kids’ Brains” Is Mostly Crap…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Being raised in the Sixties, I was naturally curious about the article in Media Feed titled “The ’60s parenting practices we now know were terrible for kids’ brains.” What I discovered, as one usually will with social science essays with an agenda, is carefully cherry-picked research being used to support an author’s already pre-determined position. You know, “Science!”

“Science” has been so thoroughly polluted by the political left to justify its objectives and claim absolute authority for propositions that are far from determined (or determinable) that the public should be conditioned to doubt any claim that begins, as this one does, “This article explores a dozen once-standard practices and uses modern research to explain why they were tough on a child’s developing brain, emotional health, and long-term well-being.” Here is what modern research as revealed in recent years: it can’t be trusted. It can’t be trusted because researchers and scientists can’t be trusted, and interlocutors like Kaitlyn Farley, the gullible (or dishonest) author, don’t know enough about science to interpret studies with appropriate skepticism. (I just checked: Kaitlyn claims to be, among other things, an AI trainer who specializes in “content creation.” That explains a lot about the article.)

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Gee, I Wonder Why People Don’t Think College Is Worth the Time and Money Any More?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Maybe the President’s assault on partisan colleges and universities is having the desired (and necessary) effect.

A new NBC News poll claims that only 33% of American agree that a four-year college degree is “worth the cost.” 63% believe that it’s “not worth the cost” because “people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”

Four per cent don’t know what college is, are too dumb to compose any answer, or answered “Fish!” or something.

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Post Thanksgiving Open Forum [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I’d be interested in anyone’s anecdotes from yesterday about their confrontations over dinner with family on political matters. At the (fantastic) Shirlington Dog Park in Arlington, VA, I chatted with a freind with whom I have never discussed politics (and never will), who said she was spending the holiday alone because she wasn’t speaking to any of her relatives. They feel, she said with a voice dripping with contempt, that “the public should respect an elected President even if he did probably rape a 14-year-old.” Hey! Look at that beautiful Vizsla!

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Thanksgiving Eve Ethics Appetizers

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I’m not celebrating Thanksgiving this year because I can’t stop things I’m not thankful for imposing on my consciousness and making me miserable. “Get these memories out of this room!” says one of three collegial madwomen in a memorable scene from “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” “I won’t have them sitting around staring at me!”

Exactly.

But enough about me. My friends continue to be frightening in their mental deterioration: that cartoon above was just posted by one of them…with a wave of “likes” of course. How much has one’s critical thinking skills been corrupted to think that perspective is anything but woke garbage? The mind boggles.

Meanwhile,

1. Here’s Biden’s paid liar, (the competent one) Jen Psaki, sounding idiotic on a podcast (Who has the time and tolerance to listen to junk like this? I’d rather watch re-runs of “Three’s Company”) attacking current press secretary Karoline Leavitt:

JEN PSAKI: It’s a very good question. Here’s the challenge of that. If I would say Peter Doocy, bless his heart, is not as bad as Benny Johnson.This is the group we’re living in, we’ve got the rank order of options. Is that if the Associated Press and the Washington Post and the New York Times and ABC News say, you know what, we’re walking out of this White House briefing room. That’s the best thing that could ever happen to Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Because that’s what they’re trying to reshape without saying they’re doing it. And in that room, and this is what I find to be so challenging, is the things that are happening behind the scenes that you can’t always see or know unless you’ve lived it. And I think this is true in law firms, in the Department of Justice and places too, is that in that briefing room, the Benny Johnsons of the world are slowly but surely taking over more and more of the questions in the briefing, right?And having a greater and greater presence in these press pools where you have a smaller group of reporters in the Oval Office. And sometimes Trump and a foreign leader will take 45 minutes of questions. And it’s Benny Johnson and little Benny Johnson, whoever that may be.And yes, maybe there’s one or two other real reporters, but the problem is they’re taking up so much real estate. So if all of these other reporters leave, that’s all the real estate. And then you know what we have?We have what the Kremlin press corps is. And that’s the challenge. So if you’re these reporters, I don’t know what the answer is and what you do. There’s still very smart people in there. They’re just getting overtaken in terms of space and real estate by people the White House selects to say things like, Donald Trump looks so good in his workout. What is his workout?That was literally a question one day.

ANGIE “PUMPS” SULLIVAN, CO-HOST: It’s crazy. Yeah. Okay. And one thing. Okay. So I’m going to tell you what a big nerd I am.

PSAKI: We’re all nerds. It’s a safe place.

WELCH: So I get on social media. And then when I would get home after work, I would watch your press conferences when you worked for Biden.

PSAKI: Oh my God. God bless you. Thank you.

SULLIVAN: It’s just to see like, okay, what’s the real story before I got into the meat of it? Because I was like, okay, what’s the White House saying? Because I’m getting all this disruption. And I think that it’s a, you know, it’s precious for the United States to have a representative of the president to come out and talk about policy. You had a stack of books this tall. I couldn’t even believe all the crap you went through. Now I am enraged every time I see Karoline Leavitt who prays before she goes out there and lies her fat ass off. So she goes out there and lies and it’s propaganda after propaganda. Is there no check on that? Like, is there no, like, I guess there’s no law that the press secretary has to be honest, but like when she acts like, I can’t even believe you would insinuate Donald Trump would make money off of the presidency as the Trump watches are going. So is there no like rules or anything? I guess they don’t care about rules, but does that break your heart to see what it’s been turned into?

PSAKI: It does. And I say this as obviously I worked in Democratic politics for 20 something years. I’m not shy about my views, but even for people who like Dana Perino or dare I say even Sean Spicer, I don’t know if I should use him as an example.It’s a very different briefing room now than it was then. Dana Perino is probably a better example of this, right? I disagree with Bush on a bazillion things, right? But you had to go in there and answer questions from the same type of reporters and often the same reporters I had to answer questions from. And this is a part of how the United States is unique as a democracy is that you do have a person who goes out there at the White House and answers questions even on days and believe me, there are some days where before you walk out into the room, you’re like, “oh shit.” There’s no information. That’s not the reporter’s fault. It’s like, there’s nothing I can offer and they’re going to just yell at me for 45 minutes. It’s sad because there aren’t so many people who’ve ever done that job and what it feels like it is diminishing the job. It is diminishing the role of the press secretary, the honor of being in that job, which is speaking on behalf of the United States of America, which sometimes it’s edgy. A lot of times it’s not. Sometimes people think it’s boring, but it’s important and this is really changing what it is and what the expectations are around it. And that is sad for the White House. It’s sad for the institution. It’s sad for anyone who’s had that job. And it really takes it away as something that the American people can rely on as at least a source of information.

Where to start? Of course Jen thinks the Times, the Post and the rest are journalism gold, since they abdicated all journalistic integrity to cover for her White House and her party. Funny that she thinks Leavitt has debased the Paid Liar job when Psaki never criticized her pathetic successor, Karine Jean-Pierre. And needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, for any former Paid Liar to criticize another one for lying isn’t just hypocrisy, it is lying in a position where lying is unethical.

Then there’s the barely coherent Mean Girls banter. How does that illuminate or entertain?

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No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t “Racist”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Long ago, Jimmy Carter led a public embrace of the bonkers fallacy that all cultures are equally admirable and that the United States needed to become more “multi-cultural.” That was a disastrous turn in the American journey, and I am happy to say that I recognized it immediately at the time, along with many others of course. Carter’s fact-free conceit, one of his many disastrous moves in his rotten Presidency, gave us the illegal immigration wave, Spanish language prompts in phone trees, DEI, McDonald clerks who can’t speak understandable English and persistent ethnic underclasses, among other maladies.

Christoper Rufo, in his City Journal entry, “It’s Not “Racist” to Notice Somali Fraud: The recent scandal reveals an uncomfortable truth: different cultures lead to different outcomes,” writes clearly, persuasively and correctly about a truth that American once grasped but increasingly do not thanks to poor education and “it isn’t what it is” propaganda.

He writes in part,

“First, a description of the facts should not be measured as “racist or not racist,” but rather as “true or not true.” And in this case, the truth is that numerous members of a relatively small community participated in a scheme that stole billions in funds. This is a legitimate consideration for American immigration policy, which is organized around nation of origin and, for more than 30 years, has favorably treated Somalis relative to other groups. It is more than fair to ask whether that policy has served the national interest. The fraud story suggests that the answer is “no.”

Second, the fact that Somalis are black is incidental. If Norwegian immigrants were perpetrating fraud at the same alleged scale and had the same employment and income statistics as Somalis, it would be perfectly reasonable to make the same criticism and enact the same policy response. It would not be “racist” against Norwegians to do so.

Further, Somalis have enormously high unemployment rates, and federal law enforcement have long considered Minneapolis’s Little Mogadishu neighborhood a hotspot for terrorism recruitment. We should condemn that behavior without regard to skin color.

The underlying question—which, until now, Americans have been loath to address directly—is that of different behaviors and outcomes between different groups. Americans tend to avoid this question, rely on euphemisms, and let these distinctions remain implied rather than spoken aloud. Yet it seems increasingly untenable to maintain this Anglo-American courtesy when the Left has spent decades insisting that we conceptualize our national life in terms of group identity.

The reality is that different groups have different cultural characteristics. The national culture of Somalia is different from the national culture of Norway. Somalis and Norwegians therefore tend to think differently, behave differently, and organize themselves differently, which leads to different group outcomes. Norwegians in Minnesota behave similarly to Norwegians in Norway; Somalis in Minnesota behave similarly to Somalis in Somalia. Many cultural patterns from Somalia—particularly clan networks, informal economies, and distrust of state institutions—travel with the diaspora and have shown up in Minnesota as well. In the absence of strong assimilation pressures, the fraud networks aren’t so surprising; they reflect the extension of Somali institutional norms into a new environment with weak enforcement and poorly designed incentives.

The beauty of America is that we had a system that thoughtfully balanced individual and group considerations. We recognized that all men, whatever their background, have a natural right to life, liberty, property, and equal treatment under the law. We also recognized that group averages can be a basis for judgment—especially in immigration, where they can help determine which potential immigrant groups are most suitable and advantageous for America.

Well, bingo. Continue reading →

CNN’s Outright “It Isn’t What It Is” Propaganda To Support The Democratic Party’s “Affordablity” Scam (Or “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias”)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Hundreds of people sent it in, but nobody sent it to Ethics Alarms. Come one, you guys, I’m depending on you!

That clip above, in which CNN’s supposed stat guru Harry Enten deliberately (or impossibly incompetently) misinterprets a Fox News poll about what proportion of Americans think prices are higher than a year ago for various consumer products as showing how much prices have risen for those products. Nobody in the segment pointed the error out. Nobody screamed from off-camera. There has been no CNN correction or retraction.

Enten, in his usual hyperactive mode, said, “I mean, your costs are up vs a year ago!” and begins underlining to the products and reads the percentages aloud, implying costs are up by that much. Then he says, “The bottom line is this: Americans feel prices are rising in every single part of their lives”—implying that they “feel” it because just look at how much those prices are rising!—“rising ever higher and they just don’t feel like, Kate Balduan, that they can catch a break.” Well, how could they? Just look at those percentages!

Are Americans so clueless that they would believe this nonsense? Apparently the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the news media (“the Axis of Unethical Conduct” ) think so, or they wouldn’t try to get away with it every day, all over the news media. The Biden administration goofs its way into a period of 9% inflation, prices soar, the rate of inflation comes down dramatically in the Trump Administration but the same party responsible for raising the prices uses the inevitable fact that they aren’t coming down (prices as a whole never come down, they just go up more slowly) as proof that the current administration is failing. Yes, Trump shares some blame for this by saying that he would bring prices down during his campaign. He was being his usual careless talk self and meant (I guess) that he would bring some prices down, but as usual his habitual hyperbole got him into trouble. That error does not excuse lies like Enten’s, however.

If CNN was a real practitioner of journalism, which it is not (I don’t think there is a single trustworthy news organization anywhere today), Enten would have used the Fox News poll the way it was explained on Fox: to show the large gap between the reality of U.S. prices and the public perception of it, in part because of Axis lies. To take one obvious example, gasoline is down from a year ago and anyone who drives a car knows it. But Enten implied that the cost of gas is up “54%”!

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Unethical Quote of the Week: “Good Illegal Immigrant”Rahel Negassi

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told him. “The only thing I’ve done is that I am Eritrean.”

—-Illegal Eritrean immigrant Rahel Negassito to her son, in the latest “Feel badly for illegal immigrants who finally get what they deserve” feature by the New York Times.

Rahel looks smug and defiant in the photo, as indeed she is. She did nothing wrong, but the (revoltingly) sympathetic story of her problems relocating to Canada from the U.S., where she has been residing illegally for 20 years, reports that she got into the country by

  • “…paying a smuggler who eventually got her to Britain, where she bought a fake British passport” to get her into the U.S.
  • …getting caught by ICE when the passport was recognized as fake
  • …being released after her application as a refugee was rejected, as a “paroled undocumented migrant.” 
  • ….living with her citizen sister for 20 years, counting on America’s slack and, for most of the period, law-ignoring immigration process to protect her.

Then as the story tells us, cruel Donald Trump was elected and set out to fulfill his campaign promise to clear as many illegal immigrants out of the U.S. as possible. A gift link is here.

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