“bias makes you stupid”

Why We Can’t Trust Polls, Chapter 6,741…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I saw the NBC poll showing President Biden leading Trump by 3% in a six-way race over the weekend. I thought, “What the hell? This is proof positive that the U.S. public is too stupid to vote, and needs to be put under a conservatorship or something. Had the “Trump is Hitler! AHHHHHHH!” propaganda campaign by Biden, the Democrats and the news media really obliterated the natural implications of facts, like the fact that the President’s mind is falling apart in chunks, and that leaving him in office amounts to surrendering to a Soviet-style shadow collective? As it quickly turned out, no, the demonization campaign probably got Trump shot, but the public as a whole isn’t quite that hopeless.

Oopsie! The network issued a correction yesterday, citing “an error with the original polling documents.” The corrected network’s online article reported that Trump led Biden by 3% in a six-way race including Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Cornel West.

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Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Week and Instant Entry Into the “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame”: CNN Correspondent Jamie Gangel

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

First the quote…

“I do want to say that when I watched the tape there was one thing I found, because of all the heated rhetoric, and that is that after he was hit, former President Trump got up and said ‘fight, fight, fight, fight.’ I think what we’re hearing from people is that’s not the message that we want to be sending right now. We want to damp it down.”

—-Longtime CNN reporter/host/hack Jamie Gangel last night, reacting to the assassination attempt

What an idiot.

Gangel and CNN are catching flack for this truly offensive and classic Trump-Deranged reaction, but whatever it is, it’s not enough.

Someone had just tried to murder him, and what the media-vilified candidate aid in the moments after that close brush with death could not reasonably be held against him even if he had said, say, just to pick random nonsense out of the air, “We beat Medicare!” But what he did say, as I just wrote in the previous post abut his raised fist, was unimpeachable, though if Trump were currently President I’m sure Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters would try to impeach him for it.

Ann Althouse gets it: she wrote this morning, after quoting Trump’s Truth Social message that concluded, “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” that “No one can forget his fist pumping and repetition of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” less than 2 minutes after he “felt the bullet ripping through the skin.” But as his antagonists call for shared love — and an abandonment of fighting — he brings the love into his fight message, merging love and fighting. Notice that he isn’t calling us to fight against any human being — indeed, he calls all Americans to fight on his side.  The enemy is ‘Wickedness’ and ‘Evil’.”

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Trump-Deranged Asshole Media Headline of the Day: The Economic Times

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I had to wrestle with myself about whether to post this first, or the next post.

Here’s the headline from The Economic Times:

“Trump’s Raised Fist: What the gesture means which is widely used by fascists, socialists, and communists”

…yeah, and also Rocky, Norma Rae, the much-lionized protesting American runners at the Olympics on the winner’s platform, baseball players after they have hit game-winning home runs, my Vietnam War protesting fellow students at Harvard,

and, oh, just about everyone in the past few centuries or so who wanted to symbolize defiance, victory, strength and resistance to forces that would abuse and persecute them.

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Ethics Quiz: The Biden Campaign Model

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This one fascinates me the more I think about it.

Above is the model at the Official Biden-Harris Campaign Store advertising the Biden-Harris T-shirt. There are three other models to be seen at the home site: a kind of wimpy male-of-indeterminate-color modeling a “Free on Wednesdays” T-shirt (I don’t know what that means), a butch-looking female model who might be a stand-in for Lia Thomas, and a chunky middle-aged bespectacled guy, also of-some-sort-of-color, holding a “Color-Changing Mug.” This is clearly a DEI campaign site: apparently white models need not apply. But the model above is strikingly unattractive as well as sexually ambiguous. Unless the marketing industry no longer operates according to the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, the idea in advertising is still to connect the product with positive images.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What’s going in here?

I could see the same model being used in a satirical ad put out by the Trump campaign. Is this flagrant virtue signaling? (What’s the virtue?) Pandering to radical feminists? DEI madness? Gross incompetence?

Oh…here are two of the Trump campaign’s models:

Yeccchh.

Hello. This Is Mira! She Used To Be A Successful Hollywood Actress Until Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductible Donation To Defeat This Terrible Disease?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Poor Mira Sorvino. She won an Academy Award once, but her career as an ingenue stalled and she’s 56 now: she’s officially on the celebrity has-been list. But that’s not what makes her epic post below on “X” memorable. It should be studied as a tragic example of what relentless Big Lie propaganda from the mainstream media and progressives, which are pretty much all Sorvino has been exposed to in Hollywood for at least three decades, can do a mind that was once capable of critical thought.

As you will quickly see, the late Paul Sorvino’s daughter is Trump-Deranged to a crippling degree. She’s not stupid, far from it; at least she didn’t used to be. She graduated from Harvard with honors back when Old Ivy was closer to being a respectable institution than today, and didn’t major in “Women’s Studies” or some other wokish area, but East Asian Studies after spending a year abroad learning Mandarin Chinese.

When you wonder how it can possibly be that so many people won’t abandon their determination to vote for Joe Biden even as the evidence becomes indisputable that one might as well elect a quahog as President, just reflect upon Mira’s lament below. She was willing to publish this, publicly, even though, to a functioning mind, doing so would be the equivalent of wearing a neon sign flashing, “I am a cabbage.” It’s sad. It’s tragic. But it shows what nearly eight years of being bombarded with lies and fearmongering can do.

I’ll interject periodically, as is my wont. Heeeeeere’s MIRA!

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An “Enemy of the People” Indictment

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Over at PJ Media, conservative writer David Strom provides a vivid overview of just how complicit the mainstream media has been in assisting Democrats and the White House as they deceived the public, both to elect Joe Biden President and protect him from suspicions that he was not able to do his job. “A Short History of the Coverup” should have been published in the New York Times; if that paper were a serious pursuer of ethical journalism and “all the news that’s fit to print,” it would make a thorough investigation of this scandal its top priority. It didn’t and it won’t, however, because that would involve implicating itself.

Strom writes at one point, “We can’t let them off the hook. We need America to face the fact that the media really IS the ‘enemy of the people.’ I hated that phrase in 2020; I think it is 100% true now. I was wrong.” Good for him; at least he admits it. This comment of Trump’s, one of his most important, is regularly used by the “Trump is Hitler” chorus to show that he’s an enemy of democracy. To the contrary: the enemy of democracy’s enemy is democracy’s friend. Ethics Alarms flagged Trump’s undiplomatic remark as spot on immediately, I will point out, patting myself heartily on the back.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Mark Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.”

—–Mark Judge, reflecting on the current Joe Biden cover-up disaster that has implicated the mainstream news media and lowered its already abysmal level of public trust even further

Judge makes a profound point. If reporters, journalists, publishers and editors acknowledged their mistakes, ethical lapses and instances of incompetence, bias, dishonesty or worse, there would be at least some sense that they recognize their deficiencies and are committed to correcting them. Judge writes,

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Stop Making Me Defend George Clooney!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

In a typical ad hominem rant on Truth Social, Donald Trump attacked George Clooney, who recently joined the “Dump Biden” team with an op-ed in the New York Times calling on the President to step aside.

“So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act,” Trump wrote. “He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?….Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television…Movies never really worked for him!!!”

As is so often the case, the former President doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Clooney can legitimately be criticized for his part in deceiving the public about Biden’s disabilities; as Christian Toto recently pointed out, Hollywood power-players—like Clooney—were despicably complicit in hiding Biden’s real condition from the public. However, claiming the Clooney “never came close to making a great movie” is unfair, uninformed and ignorant, and saying that “movies never worked for him” is just silly.

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Here’s the Latest Desperate Rationalization Democrats Are Floating For Why Biden Is Still Fit To Run and Serve…

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Wow, is this stupid. Yet I have started seeing it all over social media, and it’s being posted by previously intelligent friends, Democrats all.

Never mind the fact that most of those on the list are not working (some have very publicly retired) unless you call sitting down for an interview every year or so or “appearing” on a podcast “working.” The main reasons this argument is idiotic are that:

1. The fact that someone else is Joe Biden age and is not senile proves nothing about Joe Biden.

2. These are all entertainers and artists. What is expected and required of entertainers and artists is completely different from what is expected and required of world leaders. There is literally no valid analogy there. None.

3. If Paul McCartney blanks while singing “Yesterday” in a concert, he stops, starts the song again, and there is no harm done. A President whose attention and alertness is absent during a crisis can make an error with terrible consequences for the whole nation, and there is no do-over.

4. The list is cherry-picked. Notable for his absence, among others: Bruce Willis, whose family stopped him from performing because of progressive dementia. Willis is 69.

The Democrats, now in “Try anything! Say anything!” panic mode even beyond what I expected before Biden’s debate collapse, are literally tossing out every deflection and rationalization they can think of, hoping to salvage the votes of as many gullible half-wits as possible. If there is any justice, this dishonest tactic (and the increasingly desperate ones to come) will lose them at least as many votes as it preserves, because they are proving how untrustworthy and Machiavellian they are.

What’s a Petard? These Are Petards….

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A petard is an archaic word for a bomb, before bombs were as big and destructive as they are today. The term “hoist by his own petard” means literally that some idiot blew himself up, kind of like this guy, except that in the classic example the bomb-wielder intends to damage something or someone else. The phrase is used to describe George Will’s condign justice,” meaning that a miscreant has reaped what he has sowed, received his just deserts, and “got what was coming to him,her, or it.”

In the future, when a nubbin asks, “Daddy, what does it mean to be ‘hoist by one’s own petard’?” the most vivid possible answer might be what is happening right now to the corrupt and Machiavellian Democratic Party and its corrupted allies. Exploding or soon to explode petards are everywhere.

An inventory (so far):

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