Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Remove This Judge!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The Dexter Taylor case raises interesting Second Amendment issues to be sure.

A New York jury found Taylor guilty of second-degree criminal possession of a loaded weapon, four counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, five counts of criminal possession of a firearm, second-degree criminal possession of five or more firearms, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition, violation of certificate of registration, prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Now Taylor, a 52-year-old African-American software engineer, is on Rikers Island waiting to be sentenced. He became interested in gunsmithing as a hobby years ago, but a joint ATF/NYPD task force discovered he was legally buying gun parts from various companies and began investigating him, leading to a SWAT raid and his arrest. His legal team explains his side of the case here.

That’s not the focus of this post, however. This is: during his trial, Judge Abena Darkeh allegedly said at one point, “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” Darkeh was appointed by New York City’s crypto-communist Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.

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The Explanation For Everything That Afflicts Americans of Color Is Systemic Racism, Part II: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A report released last week by Reprieve, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty apparently shows that the lethal injections of convicted murderers are botched more than twice as often as the executions of white convicts. Spinning, the New York Times says, “That finding builds on a wealth of research into racial disparities in how the U.S. judicial system administers the death penalty. The proportion of Black people on death rows is far higher than their share of the population as a whole.”

“We know that there’s racism in the criminal justice system,” said Maya Foa, an executive director of Reprieve. “We know it’s there in the capital punishment system, from who gets arrested, who gets sentenced, all of it. This is, though, the first time that it’s been looked at in the context of the execution itself.”

To start with, they don’t “know” that at all. It is a self-perpetuating theory built on other debatable assumptions, such as believing that the disproportionate number of blacks on Death Row, and in the U.S. prison system generally, is because a disproportionate number of blacks commit crimes that legitimately put them there. Second, how exactly does doing a bad job killing a condemned prisoner show racial bias?

More from the Times:

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American Historians Becoming Woke, Biased, and Corrupt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jack Henneman operates an excellent podcast called “The History of the Americans.” In his latest installment, he varies from his usual format to give us an editorial on the topic of the corruption of American history scholarship. Regular readers here would assume that I would approve, for Ethics Alarms has been deploring the ethics rot among American history academics for many years. Introducing his podcast, Henneman explains that he recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. “I learned a lot,” he writes, “especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become.”

“This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be ‘useable,’ and,” he adds, “why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely.”

The podcaster/historian does an excellent job, and it is work enhanced by his keen understanding of ethics. I listened to the podcast yesterday, and today read the truly nauseating partisan propaganda spewed on Bill Maher’s HBO show by once respectable historian Jon Meacham. Meacham wrote, among other celebrated tomes, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” (I don’t know why I’m promoting this traitor to his profession’s book, except that it is excellent, and he wrote it before he jumped the ethics shark, in 2008). He has since become a partisan Democrat to the point where I would view it as a conflict of interest, and one that he has not been forthcoming in disclosing.

It takes a lot for MSNBC to punish anyone for being unethical, that being one of the far, far left network’s missions, but Meacham was fired as a paid MSNBC contributor after he failed to disclose to the network that he was a Biden speechwriter. Before he was caught playing the role of objective scholarly analyst who was secretly being paid to endorse one party, he had made such obviously slanted claims as asserting on MSNBC that the Clinton impeachment process was wholly partisan, while Trump’s first impeachment was not. That’s not just biased, it’s counter-factual: Clinton’s impeachment had a bi-partisan House vote of 258-176, with 31 Democrats joining the Republicans. No Republican voted for Trump’s first impeachment. This is in the same category of dishonest historical analysis for partisan gain practiced by CNN’s pro-Democratic “Presidential scholar” Michael Beschloss, who just makes stuff up now.

Meacham is always described as a “Pulitzer Prize winning historian,” so it is prudent to recall that Nikole Hannah-Jones also got a Pulitzer for the fake history in her “1619 Project.” But when he’s being a pundit, which is apparently most of the time lately, Meacham just skips the facts as it suits him. He tweeted, for example, in 2019, that Trump’s mean tweets about “the Squad” meant that he “has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist President in American history.”

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring, and, Uh, I think You’re Missing Something Else, Carol…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

For some unfathomable reason, veteran Hollywood producer Carol Baum (that’s her on the right) felt compelled to gratuitously insult the current Hollywood “It” girl, Sydney Sweeney (on the left) in an on stage interview with New York Times film critic Janet Maslin. Baum said, “There’s an actress who everybody loves now: Sydney Sweeney. I don’t get Sydney Sweeney. I was watching on the plane Sydney Sweeney’s movie [‘Anyone but You’] because I wanted to watch it. I wanted to know who she is and why everybody’s talking about her. I watched this unwatchable movie — sorry to people who love this … romantic comedy where they hate each other.”

The adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, added: “I said to my class, ‘Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?’ Nobody had an answer.”

Huh. What could it be? And nobody had an answer! It’s a mystery. What is it about Sydney Sweeney that anyone would possibly find “hot”? Wow. That’s right up there with the “Mary Celeste” and the Lost Colony. Incomprehensible!

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Never Mind NPR: No One Should Trust the New York Times After Its “Get Trump!” Editorial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Villain? “Bias makes you stupid”? “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”? Unethical Quote of the Month? Oh, let’s start with that one:

“Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”

—-The New York Times editorial board, in yesterday’s biased, manipulative, Trump-Deranged misinformation-fest titled, “Donald Trump and American Justice”

This is no more and no less that a “WE HATE YOU TRUMP! HATE HATE HATE!” statement. As President, Trump never did anything to “deny fairness and due process” to “others.” The claim to the contrary not journalism and it’s not punditry. It is just hurling accusations without support. Yet the Times editorial board never protested when President Obama used his “bully pulpit” to suggest that American citizens were guilty of crimes before they had been tried or even charged, as in the case of George Zimmerman. The editorial provides no examples or evidence to support the statement, because there aren’t any.

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Ethics-DEI-Baseball Dunce: Ja’han Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I know, we’ve been seeing a lot of Sidney Wang lately.

Ja’han Jones is the blogger for Reid Out, the MSNBC race-baiting show (well, one of them) starring Joy Reid. As such, the fact that he has such a bone-headed and biased position regarding diversity is like finding out that water is wet, but it is still surprising to see anyone who can put his shoes on (I’m assuming Ja’Han can) write something as ignorant and idiotic as “The decline of Black players in MLB should be a warning about the war on DEI.”

If DEI proponents keep making arguments this bad, eventually even the dimmest members of the public will figure out that it’s a hustle. (Won’t they? Don’t they have to?) Another rule Ja’Han seems to have missed is “Don’t write about subjects you know nothing about when a lot of your readers do, because they will figure out that you are a fake.”

To summarize one of the worst published screeds I have read in a long time, this supposed “futurist,” journalist and pundit argues that Major League Baseball needs DEI programs to increase the percentage of black baseball players. (Baseball’s number of black players has been declining for a welter of cultural, financial and attitudinal reasons, none of which involve discrimination.) It’s difficult to know where to start a rebuttal of an argument that is only worthy of “What the hell are you talking about?” Might as well just dive right in…

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Ethics Quiz: The Tanked Free Throw

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Unlike most ethics quizzes, I’ve made up my mind about this incident, but I acknowledge that others may feel differently and have good reasons—maybe—to do so. I hate it, however.

The NBA’s LA. Clippers and Chick-fil-A collaborated on a promotion that if a player on an opposing team misses two consecutive free-throw attempts, fans will win a free Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. And thus it was that when Houston Rockets’ Boban Marjanovic went to the free-throw with 4:44 to play in the fourth and final quarter of the Rockets’ game against the Clippers with his team leading 105-97 (not an insuperable margin), he had a twinkle in his eye. He missed his first shot, and the Clipper fans stared cheering—for chicken. Marjanovic looked around, pointed at himself, and bounced his shot off the basket rim. The fans went wild, and Marjanovic seemed to revel in his failure.

Yecchh.

…not that I want to influence you, now.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz on this Patriots Day (in Boston) is…

“Was it ethical or unethical for Marjanovic to tank his free throw so the fans could get a free sandwich?”

Just listen to those idiots in the broadcast booth…

I absolutely think it was unethical; in fact, the NBA and his team should fine and suspend Marjanovic. But this is emblematic of why I detest pro basketball only slightly less passionately than I do the NFL. The sport has no integrity. Regular season games are virtually meaningless. Players literally play about 60% harder during the play-offs: you can see it.

This episode was disgusting, and unethical in more ways than one:

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Conservative Pundit David Burge, a.k.a. “Iowahawk” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Burge’s tweet above was in response to the episode described by ultra-woke UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in the statement below (you can view Chemerinsky’s damning Ethics Alarms dossier here).

Gee what a surprise.

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This Lawyer’s Incredible Ignorance Prompts Me to Propose a New Standard For Disbarment

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s the outspoken, racist, Dunning-Kruger suffering lawyer on “The View,” Sunny Hostin, saying out loud and on national TV that climate change causes eclipses (yes, also earthquakes, but we’ve already heard public figures make fools of themselves on that topic, like here and here…). This was so bad that even Whoopie felt compelled to correct her: Whoopie’s problem is that she’s uneducated, but she’s still easily the smartest lady on “The View,” which admittedly is faint praise.

We could have an entertaining debate over whose statement is more idiotic, Rep. Jackson Lee’s claim that the moon is “mostly gas,” of this head-exploder from Hostin. But that’s not the point of this post.

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tx)

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

When we last looked in on the astoundingly dim-witted, ignorant, unqualified Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee here at Ethics Alarms, she was setting out to violate the Constitution with her brain-dead on arrival (BDOA) Leading Against White Supremacy Act, which has to be read to be believed. A junior high school civics class could use the thing as a final exam: “Please explain why the U.S. Supreme Court would declare this proposed law unconstitutional.” In the same post in which I discussed that monstrosity, Lee’s invention, I wrote of her self-evident intellectual caliber,

She’s a fanatic supporter of reparations for slavery; she’s a knee-jerk race-baiter (any criticism of President Barack Obama, a serial bungler, was racist in her view). She’s one of those not very bright people who speak assertively and defiantly because they are laboring under the delusion that they are intelligent, thus fooling others who aren’t very smart either.

Lee once mixed up Wikileaks and Wikipedia in an interview. She has complained that the naming of storms is racist, because the names are “too white,” but we know that if we gave hurricanes names like “LaShonda” to hurricanes, she’d complain that blacks were being deliberately compared to destructive forces.

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