“bias makes you stupid”

“Ick” vs. Ethics: The Nazi Gems Collection

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Once again, we encounter the conundrum of so-called “dirty money.”

In May, the auction house Christie’s sold a collection of jewels and jewelry from the estate of Heidi Horten, an Austrian philanthropist. The auction earned $202 million, establishing the Horten sale as the biggest precious gem sale ever. There was, however, an ethics controversy: all that jewelry had been bought with a fortune amassed by Horten’s husband Helmut, a Nazi who bought up Jewish businesses in forced sales during the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Educational Trust called the May auction a “true insult to victims of the Holocaust.” Yoram Dvash, president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, wrote, “In a time of Holocaust denial and the resurgence of antisemitism around the world, we find it especially appalling that a world-renowned auction house would engage in such a sale.” David Schaecter, president of Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, which represents support groups for victims’ families in the U.S., called the sale “appalling” and said it had perpetuated “a disgraceful pattern of whitewashing Holocaust profiteers.” But Christie’s officials argued that the proceeds of the sale would go to the Heidi Horten Foundation, which supports medical research and a museum containing her art collection. The auction house also pledged to donate some of its own profits arising from the sale to Holocaust research and education.

Since May, however, attacks on the collection, Chistie’s, and the money paid for the jewels at auction have escalated. Christie’s announced this week that a scheduled November sale of more lots of jewelry from the Heidi Horten collection would be canceled, citing the “intense scrutiny” from Jewish organizations and some critics. The Jerusalem Post reported that other Jewish groups had rejected Christie’s donations from the May auction.

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Officials And Leaders Who Conservatives Consider Essential Bulwarks Of Constitutional Government Really Have To Stop Relying On “The King’s Pass”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Take Clarence Thomas for example.

As with Donald Trump, who was the object of much rationalization here yesterday, Justice Thomas apparently is certain that conservative and Republican integrity don’t have the rigor to make him accountable for a truly staggering series of judicial ethics breaches. He is also apparently correct in this assumption.

Justice Thomas finally acknowledged publicly that he should have reported selling real estate at a suspicious profit to billionaire political donor Harlan Crow in 2014, a transaction disclosed by ProPublica earlier this year. The Crow company bought a string of properties for $133,363 from co-owners Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed. Conservative power-player Crow then owned the house where a Supreme Court Justice’s elderly mother was living—hey, no big deal!—and soon contractors began tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. Although a federal disclosure law requires SCOTUS Justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000, Thomas never deigned to mention this convenient and inherently suspicious transaction. You know, that “appearance of impropriety” thingy?

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Snap Out Of It! Trump’s Latest Disqualifying Statement Is Signature Significance—Stop Pretending He Is A Rational Option To Elect President

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Asked by Glenn Beck in an interview “[I]f you’re president again, will you lock people up?”, Donald Trump, the supposed champion of democracy and heroic foe of the Democratic totalitarians, answered, “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.” 

Dingdingdingdingding! This is signature significance, just like his earlier musings about suspending the Constitution. As I wrote earlier this year, “As divided as Americans are, it doesn’t appear that enough of them care about preserving democracy to do anything to preserve it. They only differ on the means by which they are willing to let it collapse.” Electing Donald Trump as President, with his sick “tit for tat,” “Do unto others as they do to you,” “vengeance is mine” approach to ethics magnified by his “the ends justify the means” orientation can’t possible “save” democracy. The most it can do is maximize the chances that the totalitarians we end up with aren’t socialists, anti-white bigots and addicted to toxic woke fantasies. That shouldn’t be good enough. It isn’t good enough, not for this nation. That so many still think it is depresses and frightens me greatly.

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“Gotcha!” Of “Gotcha’s!” The Washington Post Admits That It “Stands By” False Reporting!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Good to know. Thanks, WaPo!

In one of the Jonathan Turley essays discussed here, the increasingly red pilled GW law prof appropriately scored the Washington Post’s partisan hack of hacks, Philip Bump, whose consistently unethical reporting jaunts would be a blight on responsible journalism if responsible journalism was around any more to be blighted. A burst of exorbitant loyalty that the Post will rue moved the paper to rise to Bump’s defense with the ill-advised message to Turley you see above.

I bet Turley was laughing out loud as he loosened his fingers to type a follow-up article for his blog. The Post had handed him one of the great “gotcha‘s!” in “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” history. By saying that it “stood behind” the reporting of their partisan stooge, the Post had endorsed now indisputable examples of biased, partisan, incompetent, irresponsible and dishonest reporting. Turley could now use the full range of his legal talents to prepare a crushing brief to show, not only the depth of Bump’s corruption, but that of the Post’s as well!

And use it them he did.

Washington Post Stands by Philip Bump’s Claims on Lafayette Park, the Hunter Biden Laptop, and Other Controversial Claims is Turley’s gleeful headline. It deserved an exclamation point. The professor reviews Bump’s despicable work on the Lafayette Park kerfuffle, The Hunter Biden Laptop cover-up, the FBI’s Spying on the Trump Campaign, and the Russian Collusion hoax.

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A 12-year-old Boy And His Mother Refuse To Be Bullied By Woke School Administrators And Win

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Notice the racist symbolism in that symbol above? No? That’s because there isn’t any, but never mind: Jayden Rodriguez, a 12-year-old middle-schooler in Colorado Springs, was kicked out of class at The Vanguard School, a local charter school, because he had a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack. Jayden was told he had to remove the patch before he would be admitted to the class again.

In an email, a school administrator claimed that the patch was “disruptive to the school environment.” Boy, do I ever remember getting upset over the patches fellow classmates had on their backpacks! This was, of course, an example of woke fascism by a teacher and a school, nothing more or less. Further emails from the school told the student’s mother that “some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate—or even racism.” Oh, well if “some” erroneously associate a historical symbol that had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery or racism as offensive, by all means punish the kid who knows what it really symbolizes. “Some” see the American flag as a symbol of white supremacy, imperialism, and systemic racism. They are welcome to their foolish opinion, but that doesn’t mean they should have the power to stop any sane American from displaying Old Glory.

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Look What Trump Derangement Super-Spreader Rachel Maddow Told Her Credulous Audience…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Remember, as you read this offal, that Maddow is arguably the least villainous of the assorted Marxists, racists and liars employed by MSNBC, and is certainly the smartest.

A New York Times story by reporter Alan Feuer claimed “Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. If either of the two federal trials he is confronting is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether.” Maddow, being a corrupt journalist herself, naturally assumes anonymous sources’ hearsay statements as interpreted by a New York Times propagandist is Gospel truth, even though its impossible to tell if the last part of the section (which Maddow read) is what Trump said, what the sources claims he said, or what Feuer thinks he meant (that would be double hearsay). Never mind: it was good enough for Maddow’s fearmongering purposes, so this was her follow-up analysis…

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The Answer To This Controversy Is Legally And Ethically Obvious And We Shouldn’t Trust Anyone Who Doesn’t Think So

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Americans are losing faith in their schoolteachers,” the Washington Post proclaimed a year ago. Gee, I wonder why…

California’s woke attorney general, Rob Bonta, has filed a lawsuit against Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County to halt the county’s requirement that parents be notified when their child changes pronouns or gender identity, or seeks to use a bathroom assigned to a gender opposite to his or hers. In other words, the legal representative of the California state government wants the state to have the authority to withhold information about a family’s minor children from the parents of those children at the discretion of its agents. This attitude is now rampant in schools around the country, primarily because the education community has been thoroughly politicized and is no longer trustworthy.

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‘….Then They Came For Robert E. Lee’s Horse, And I Did Not Speak Out…’

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Earlier this month, Washington and Lee University, as part of its contrived efforts to keep using the names of two American icons who also were slaveholders while continuing to grovel to the political correctness mob, removed markers erected in memory of Robert E. Lee’s famous horse, Traveller. The steed’s gravestone was removed (he’s buried on the campus), and a commemorative plaque came down as well.

Traveller carried Lee during the Civil War and later, when the ex-general became president of the then-Washington College from 1865 until his death in 1871. Traveller died a few months after his owner. But newly uncovered documents revealed that Traveller was a virulent racist, and worse, kept a stable of enslaved Shetland ponies on the Washington and Lee campus.

Okay, I was kidding about that last part.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Without facts or economics on their side, they [“climate deniers”] flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it. They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism,’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a cult is the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.”

—-Biden Administration “climate envoy” John Kerry, speaking in Scotland after arriving on his private jet that emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than any of the automobiles I have driven or will drive in my lifetime.

Wow. Imagine, people actually voted for this boob to be President. And what a wonderful example of projection: has there ever been any movement that smacked of cultism more than the climate change freak-out? Kerry, whose entire public career has been a sustained war against facts (most people still think he’s Irish, for example), embodies the discredited theory that saying something is true when it isn’t constitutes a fact. Here’s a fact: crippling the U.S. economy to reach climate change policy goals will achieve nothing except hardship and disaster unless a magic formula is developed to force China, India, Russia and developing nations to do the same, and there is no such formula. What is it, then, that we “must do” to save the planet, John? Accept a Democratic Party dictatorship? Put the U.N. in charge of everything and everybody? Put YOU in charge?

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The New York Times Publishes A Feature About Ethics And Doesn’t Mention Ethics Once, Part I [#8 Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

This should be expected, since the Times no longer practices ethics, shows much interests in it, or demonstrates that it understands what ethics is.

In a bizarre feature called “The Virtues of Being Bad,” 16 writers (I never heard of any of them, and I follow such things) wrote confessionals about their “guilty pleasures” of doing bad things, supposedly the only “bad” things they do. (In most cases, I doubt it.) Here is the annoying introduction…

“Mocktails and sunscreen, masking and mindfulness — for those of us who strive to be upright, responsible citizens, the constant reminders of various ways we ought to be good are all around us. They’re almost enough to make you forget the pleasures of being a little bit bad. We asked 16 writers — most of them respectable adults — about the irresponsible, immoral, indulgent things they do. Transgression has the power to teach us something about how we ought to live. But it’s also just … fun?”

I’ll briefly comment on the ethical logic—if any— being displayed in each of the 16 sections, rating the combination of unethical conduct described and rationalizing it in a public form from 0 (not unethical at all) to 5 (very unethical). I won’t mention the authors, because, frankly, I don’t care who they are. Any feature that confounds non-ethical considerations like “fun” with ethical conduct is too subversive and badly reasoned to generate anything but contempt. Along with the ethics score, I’ll also assign a jerk score to each of the authors, again from zero (not a jerk) to 5. Here we go with the first eight; 9-16 will be discussed in Part 2.

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