Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

“Why Does Hillary Think Her E-mail Scandal Is So Funny?” And Other Brief Ethics Notes To Get The Week Off To A Depressing Start…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

W dead guns

Most Unethical Grieving Mother Of The Year

A caring  friend of Chanelle Chavis created a GoFundMe account asking for donations to Chavis’ 3-year-old daughter’s Camber’s funeral after the grieving mom told the friend that her daughter had died in an accident.  Later, moved by the plea, a woman gave  Chavis a $5,000 personal check to pay for Camber’s funeral expenses after Channelle exchanged text messages with her.

Nearly a month later, investigators found that the body of Camber Chavis was still in deep freeze at the funeral home, and no arrangements for burial had been made. Oh—this was no boating accident. The little girl had been murdered by her father.

On October 16, Chanelle Chavis pleaded guilty to obtaining money by false pretenses, a misdemeanor, and received a six month suspended sentence.

These cases of conning people into donating money are basically  all the same, but bit by bit, they make our society less kind, less generous, and less trusting. The law may see this is a minor crime, but there is nothing minor about the damage it does to our society.

Sure, We Don’t Need Guns… Continue reading →

Move-On And The Progressive Fondness For Silencing Opponents Rather Than Rebutting Them

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
And what's more democratic than preventing your opposition from speaking?

And what’s more democratic than preventing your opposition from speaking?

As if to prove my recent post about the totalitarian thrust of the recent Democratic candidates’ “debate,” aka socialist infomercial and the disturbing number of Democratic supporters who are falling into lockstep, here come Move-On.Org  and a Hispanic advocacy group to demand that NBC rescind an invitation to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to host the November episode of “Saturday Night Live.”

Of course they are. These are the same people who shouted down Republican or conservative speakers in college, or got their spineless  school administrator to ding any commencement speaker who would challenge the cant they absorbed from their leftist professors. Hillary Clinton was gleefully accepted by her corrupted Democratic supporters as a  SNL guest this month, but having both parties’ frontrunners get  TV exposure on the same prestige venue is what so many progressives hate and fear—an even playing field. Here’s part of the petition on Move-On: Continue reading →

University of California at Berkeley Law’s “Critical Mass” Policy: Segregating Classes In Order To Integrate Them

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments
OK, that's enough of you in THIS section...

OK, that’s enough of you in THIS section…

This is an example of how diversity and affirmative action ideology brings devotees to madness.

In an effort to create a more positive experience for underrepresented-minority students,

The University of California Berkeley School of Law has instituted what it calls  a new “critical mass” policy. As in many law schools, first year students are divided into smaller sections, or “mods,” in which first-year law students take their classes. This year, the administration juggled the composition of the mods to have  more underrepresented-minority students in all but one, in order to create a “critical mass.” To reach critical mass in the other mods,  one mod had to be stripped all of black students. Berkeley Law Dean Sujit Choudhry sent an email to the law school community explaining that the policy is intended to create a more positive experience for underrepresented minorities by grouping them together to create that critical mass.

In setting political districts, this technique is called gerrymandering, and is widely considered racist. Removing all the black students from one section and placing them all in another, super-comfy, all-black section would be called apartheid. Yet this ultra-liberal university has convinced itself that manipulating class composition by race is a benign policy.

Wow.

What else have they convinced themselves of? Let’s see: Continue reading →

Obama’s Avoidance Of Accountability Reaches Previously Unimagined Heights

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Obama shrug

Having encountered this immediately prior to last night’s debate among the Democratic contenders for the 2016 Presidential race, the praise heaped on Barack Obama’s abysmal record, repeated defiance of law and ignorance of basic leadership mandates—never honestly identified as such, of course—approached head-exploding levels of dissonance. It briefly subsided when Jim Webb, answering the question of what the candidates would do differently, so diplomatically delivered damning criticism that I doubt many in the room realized it. He said in part…

[If] there would be a major difference between my administration and the Obama administration, it would be in the use of executive authority…I have a very strong feeling about how our federal system works and how we need to lead and energize the congressional process instead of allowing these divisions to continue to paralyze what we’re doing. So I would lead — working with both parties in the Congress and working through them in the traditional way that our Constitution sets up…

Translation: Under Obama, the Constitution has been violated repeatedly because this President won’t deign to work closely with Congress, and has chosen instead to govern by executive fiat, which is not how the Constitution requires laws to be made.

He also said he would lead, which he undoubtedly would do. Obama, just two days earlier in his “60 Minutes” interview, demonstrated yet again why he can’t lead. He is incapable of accepting accountability for what he does, and what those under his authority do. Sometimes the utter awfulness of his values, usually because of his narcissism, makes me want to challenge his supporters to defend what is manifestly indefensible.

This is such a time.

Here is the section of the Steve Kroft interview: Continue reading →

JEB! Cheater! Unethical! DISQUALIFIED

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
The plant, overacting...

The plant, overacting…

Donald Trump was speaking  at a Jon Huntsman / The Hill “No Labels” event, a female audience member later identified as Lauren Batchelder posed as a feminist Trump antagonist. You can see the exchange in the video below…

But she was not a typical audience member; she is a paid staffer of a  GOP Senator and a volunteer for the Jeb Bush campaign, as a recent tweet demonstrated.

NH 6

The news media, looking desperately for someone to embarrass Trump, began framing the narrative an a pro-choice audience member who “Trumped Trump.”

A little research, however, showed that Lauren Batchelder is a current staffer for pro-life Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH),  and is currently also working in New Hampshire as a volunteer for the Jeb Bush campiagn.  In other words, she was a plant, she was misrepresenting herself, and this was a contrived cheat to mislead the American people while undermining Trump for the benefit of Jeb Bush.  Batchelder, like any good conspirator, tried to cover up,  deleting her tracks on social media.   The Last Refuge, however, preserved some:

[LinkedIn Profile HERE] [Twitter HERE] [Instagram HERE] [ FaceBook HERE]

The Bush fallback position, not surprisingly, is that she was a rogue staffer, acting on her own. The campaign’s words, however, were more focused on changing the subject. Allie Brandenburger, a spokeswoman for Bush’s campaign, said Batchelder is not a paid staff member ( OK, she’s a volunteer, a distinction without a difference) and attended the convention on her own (or so he claimed), but then immediately tried to change the subject, saying  in an e-mail,  “We can’t help but notice Mr. Trump does seem to be very sensitive about being challenged by women.”

Yes, we understand; That’s why you set this up. This was obviously a talking point, since Tim Miller, Bush’s spokesman, tweeted nearly the exact same thing, saying, “For what its worth, Lauren is not a Jeb staffer but the Jeb staff is amused by how sensitive Donald is to being challenged by women.”

Funny, I’m not amused. At best, Bush, Ayotte and the Republican establishment failed to properly train and supervise a staffer and volunteer sufficiently. More likely, she was given signals, like the IRS was in its illegal sabotage of Tea Party groups, that encouraged her to engage in unethical conduct. Most likely, it was a Nixonian dirty trick by a desperate, flailing, failing candidate. Unless Bush can prove that it was a case of negligent management on his part, and that proof cannot consist of Batchelder falling on her sword, and apologize appropriately to Trump and the public, then we must assume that the worst explanation is the right one.

As before, I consider making Donald Trump appear to be a victim an irresponsible  and incompetent act. As of now, I consider Jeb Bush to be desperate, untrustworthy, and foolish. He has no credibility as a leader, a campaigner, or a potential President.

_________________________

Sources: Washington Post,  Last Refuge

The Worst Aunt Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 83 Comments
(L) Auntie Jenn in her "Loving Aunt" disguise, and (R), my best guess at what she looks like without it...

(L) Auntie Jenn in her “Loving Aunt” disguise, and (R), my best guess at what she looks like without it…

[ WARNING: This story may make your head explode. I’m not sure why mine didn’t; it may because there’s nothing left to blow.]

Jennifer Connell, a 54-year-old human resources manager in Manhattan, is suing her 12-year old nephew, Sean Tarala, in Connecticut for $127,000 in damages for an accident that occurred at his 8th birthday party.

On March 18, 2011, Connell arrived at the Tarala home  to attend Sean’s birthday party. She was greeted with the sight of the excited kid riding his major gift, a red bicycle, around the the yard.  When he spotted Aunt Jennifer, he jumped off his new bike and ran toward her, shouting, “Auntie Jen! Auntie Jen!”

Connell testified that “all of a sudden he was there in the air, I had to catch him and we tumbled onto the ground. I remember him shouting, ‘Auntie Jen I love you,’ and there he was flying at me.” Connell said she her wrist was hurt, but she didn’t mention it because “It was his birthday party and I didn’t want to upset him.” Now, however, though he has always been “very loving, sensitive,” toward her, Connell believes he should be held accountable for her injury. Continue reading →

Facebook Grammar, Lincoln Chafee, USA Today, and Confirmation Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments
The smartest supporters of all!

He has the smartest supporters of all!

USA Today once was a mediocre newspaper that had one virtue: it was convenient for travelers, and sadly more useful for following non-locale news development than all but a handful of city publications. Now it isn’t a newspaper at all, but some hybrid monstrosity that is laid out like a website, has articles too short to be complete or helpful, and a product pandering to those with small vocabularies and attention spans that have been destroyed by the internet. But it’s often free, so on my latest (horrible, miserable, disaster-filled) seminar tour around Virginia, I had the pleasure of opening an edition and seeing what immediately struck me as the kind of feature no respectable journalistic enterprise would tolerate.

USA Today political writer Paul Singer thought newsworthy a ridiculous exercise that could only have sprung from a toxic mix of bias and silliness. It’s objective: let’s either prove that Republicans and conservatives are dumber than their Democrat, liberal counterparts, or prove that an accepted way of measuring intelligence is inaccurate for the purpose, because it doesn’t prove that Republicans are morons, and we all know they are. The feature was called “Democrats crush Republicans in grammar; Chafee on top.”

This is yet another self-rebutting exercise, as proven by the headline. Lincoln Chafee is a well-established boob, as they will tell you, if you ask, in his home base of Rhode Island. The man announced his Presidential run citing his primary cause as getting the U.S. to adopt the metric system. This immediately places him in the long and amusing line of wacko candidates, including…

Homer Aubrey Tomlinson, who was a New York City preacher that ran for the presidency under the banner of the Theocratic Party in five elections, from 1952 until his death in 1968. He wanted to replace taxation with tithing and promised to create a new cabinet post: Secretary of Righteousness. Later, Tomlinson declared himself King of the World and staged coronation ceremonies in 101 different countries, in which he appeared wearing a gold-plated crown, an inflatable globe and a folding chair as his throne. And…

California congressman John G. Schmitz, who was the American Independent Party candidate for president in 1972. He was expelled from the John Birch Society for “extremism,” which sort of says it all. Schmitz also endorsed the return of segregated schools, and later announced that he was rooting for a military coup. Mary Kay Letourneau is his daughter. Then there is…

HRM Caesar St. Augustine de Buonaparte, who is running now as The Absolute Dictator Party’s candidate. He says that all the major politicians are “niggers” and so is everyone else “because we all die on our death bed and watch our offspring fight over our money.” He pledges to replace any government employee who does not have an IQ of at least 150.

So if Chafee has the followers with the most facility with the language, what does it tell us about the usefulness of that factor in assessing, well, anything? It tells me that this was an inquiry designed to embarrass Republicans that failed, but USA Today decided to publish it anyway with big color graphics using up about half a page in a paper that typically has only a couple of pages as substance.

The stunt was the brainchild of some Marketing flack at Grammarly, a writing app that thought it might increase the number of people who ever heard of it from five to nineteen. According to a Grammarly release, using the app on the websites of presidential candidates’ Facebook pages showed that Democratic commenters made an average of 4.2 mistakes per 100 words compared to 8.7 mistakes for supporters of Republican candidates. The Democratic supporters also showed a larger vocabulary, using on average 300 unique words per 1,000 words, while Republicans used only 245. Here was the methodology:

We began by taking a large sample of Facebook comments containing at least fifteen words from each candidate’s official page between April, 2015 and August, 2015. Next, we created a set of guidelines to help limit (as much as possible) the subjectivity of categorizing the comments as positive or negative. Since the point of the study was to analyze the writing of each candidate’s supporters, we considered only obviously positive or neutral comments. Obviously negative or critical comments, as well as ambiguous or borderline negative comments, were disqualified.

We then randomly selected at least 180 of these positive and neutral comments (~6,000 words) to analyze for each candidate. Using Grammarly, we identified the errors in the comments, which were then verified and tallied by a team of live proofreaders. For the purposes of this study, we counted only black-and-white mistakes such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement. We ignored stylistic variations such as the use of common slang words, serial comma usage, and the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.

Finally, we calculated the average number of mistakes per one hundred words by dividing the total word count of the comments by the total number of mistakes for each candidate.

There are many problems with this, of course, the primary one being “Who cares?,” followed by “How do you know that the same commenters aren’t writing on the walls of multiple candidates?” “Isn’t this another classist, pro-coastal, elitist exercise?” “Since when is Facebook spelling and grammar an accepted measure of anything?” “How about finding out how many supporters of each candidate read USA Today, or worse, trust it?”

Now there’s an intelligence test.

Why would people waste their time writing on campaign Facebook pages, when almost none of the candidates actually look at them? How do we know the smartest Democratic supporters waste their time on Facebook, while only the dumbest Republican supporters use is? But never mind all the problems with the methodology: Grammarly is a lousy app and doesn’t work. Continue reading →

A Halloween Costume Shuts Down A School

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Gas mask

Colorado’s Pueblo County High School went into lockdown for almost two hours because students and teachers freaked out over a female student wearing a trench coat and gas mask as a Halloween costume.The student was searched by authorities and not found to be  carrying any weapons, and told staff at the school that her outfit was a Halloween costume, admittedly a bit early.

Alarmed students told teachers, teachers and administrators dragged the girl into the office to be interrogated.  District 70 Superintendent Ed Smith said, “They reported immediately to a teacher what was happening…we could react quickly because of those students. When being questioned, the student said it was nothing more than a Halloween prank, but again, because of the world we live in now, we take all those kinds of things very seriously.”

Believe it or not, a SWAT team was called in and swept the school to ensure it was safe, because terrorists always signal their intent by wearing gas masks and trench coats.

The student is  facing expulsion.

Rueful observations: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Mediaite’s Tommie Christopher Locks Up The Dishonest Spin Of The Year Award In Defense of Calling Ben Carson A Coon”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rocket-Raccoon-in-Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-international-trailer

johnburger2013 piled on after my take-down of Tommie Christopher’s epic attempt to spin the unspinnable racist tweet by  University of Pennsylvania religious studies professor Anthea Butler, who wrote regarding Ben Carson. “If only there was a ‘coon of the year’ award …”  His post went well beyond mine, was more exacting, analytical and funnier than my effort, and had Comment of the Day written all over it. I wrote that I was going to withhold the republication only because Christopher doesn’t deserve that much ink, but I received multiple protests from readers, so I am reversing myself. It is a terrific comment, but you really have to read Christopher’s screed to understand how terrific. Do that first, here.

Now read jb2013’s Comment of the Day on the post, Mediaite’s Tommie Christopher Locks Up The Dishonest Spin Of The Year Award In Defense of Calling Ben Carson A “Coon”:

I am going believe that everything Tommie Christopher wrote in his Mediaite column was tongue-in-cheek. I simply refuse to believe that someone can be that obtuse, that devoid of critical thought, and that blinded by self-delusion. Maybe it was a slow column day and he figured he would write something so far off the mark just to see how many people would . . . Oh, forget it. I can’t do it! I lost my roll of duct tape. I fear I will lose my security deposit when my landlord sees all of that cranial debris all over the walls and ceiling.

I do think that Tommie should have his computer privileges revoked, though, because he has utterly forfeited his right to write by writing stupid things under the guise of sophistication. He concludes his missive with this little gem:

“It’s a free country, though, so if you want to be offended by what Professor Butler said, go ahead. Just be offended by what she actually said, not what you imagine she said, and just know that no matter how many times she tweets the word ‘coon,’ it’s still racist when white people say it.”

Erm . . . Um . . . Tommie? Isn’t that what Dr. Ben Carson said about NASCAR fans proudly displaying the Stars and Bars? Superficially, Dr. Carson said they should fly it if they want if they’re on private property. Dr. Carson also said it was offensive, just as offensive as the Swastika. Nuance, Tommie. Nuance.

As you know, Tommie, words have meanings, and context does matters. When someone strings a bunch of words together, they are called sentences. Sentences strung together are called paragraphs. Paragraphs strung together form . . . oh, you get the picture, right?

Now, let’s think about “coon”. Setting aside the short cut for raccoon, what did the illustrious Professor mean to convey when she wrote her incomplete thought? She wrote, “If only there was a ‘coon of the year’ award …” Maybe I am naive, but I don’t think she meant ” . . . Ben Carson could tell NASCAR to hold the ceremony, as long as it’s a majority of people in the area who want to give out the award, and it was on private property.” Nah. She said exactly what she meant. It is a simple syllogism (that’s a fancy word for argument, Tommie – look it up). This may be a bit over your head, Tommie, but the statement she made is commonly referred to as “modus ponens”, which posits (meaning, states) “that if one thing is true, then another will be. It then states that the first is true. The conclusion is that the second thing is true”. It is commonly referred to as

“If A, then B. A; therefore, B”… Simple, no?

So, let’s try it out, shall we Tommie?

A: If only there were a “Coon of the Year” Award.
B: Then Dr;. Carson would win it.

See, Tommie? It’s really not that hard to figure what she meant.

But, Tommie, if we are going to extend or imply meanings or unwritten nuances into Prof. Butler’s comment as you suggest, then she could have meant just about anything. For example, she could have meant “. . . then apple pie is tasty”. But, that destroys the simplicity of the syllogism. Moreover, if we are going to imply non-racial connotations (meanings, Tommie), then perhaps we should extend the same courtesy to Dr. Carson. That seems reasonable to me. Consequently, I think Dr. Carson probably meant that free citizens, living in a free and ordered society exercising their own liberties, should not be waylaid by government censorship. He did not endorse that flag’s meaning, any more than the good Professor Butler did (according to your post) when she uttered her little gold nugget. If Prof. Butler did not mean to denigrate Dr. Carson by saying he should win the “Coon of the Year” Award, then Carson did not intend to promote racism by encouraging NASCAR fans to fly that stupid flag. See what I did there, Tommie? I used your argument to imply nuance in Dr. Carson’s comments. Neat, huh?

As aside, Tommie, if you are going to link to a website for support that “coon” is not a derogatory word, then perhaps you should actually read the site – it may come as a shock that the site declares what the common meaning of the word is and, oddly, tracks use of the word to marginalize blacks. Oh,and, next time, spare us the self-righteous moral indignation about only whites can be racists and are incapable of being outraged by black racism. It’s insulting.

Tommie, I know you meant well. You really did. But, sometimes, people say and write indefensible things and, no matter how hard you tie yourself into a pretzel, you just can’t save them from the consequences of their actions. Prof. Butler used a racially charged statement to insult Dr. Carson, who is a black pediatric neurosurgeon from John Hopkins University, lest we forget. Perhaps she should have called him an “Uncle Tom” for good measure, but I guess that wouldn’t be racially charged, either. Right? You are a fool, Tommie.

Yoga Class Discrimination Based On Race: It’s Benign Because Gay, Non-White Progressives Are Doing It!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

 

Yoga

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”—I wonder how George Orwell missed “Segregation is Integration”? Maybe because that was too obviously ridiculous even for Big Brother to pull off….or so he thought.

Apparently yoga and meditation studios in multiple locales in the U.S. are running “no whites allowed” classes in the interests, say the operators, of making Eastern self-help disciplines more accessible to “people of color” [ I detest this phrase, but I’m quoting] by excluding people of less valued color—that is, whites. The New York Times just published an uncritical profile of such a place in Oakland, by a reporter who shrugged off the fact that she was refused in her request to attend a class because she was too little “of color.” Incredibly, the Times reporter just accepts the Bizarro World logic and utter hypocrisy fed to her as if it makes as much sense as “freedom is slavery” makes to poor Winston after his brain cells have been scrambled by the threat of rats eating his face.

“Specific classes at the center bar white or straight people — in order to be inclusive of some, they exclude others. Those who run the center say that the practice ultimately makes the center community more diverse…Brenda Salgado, the director of the center, said that as part of its diversity efforts, the center has four different sitting groups that meet weekly. “An L.G.B.T.Q.I. sitting group, one for people of color, a Friday open sit, open to everyone — those can fluctuate between 50 or 100, Ms. Salgado said. “We also have the Every Body Every Mind group, for people with disabilities and chronic illness.”

For all but the “open sits,” the expectation is that only people who identify with the target group will attend. (I learned as much when my request to attend People of Color Yoga was turned down.) And for open sits, organizers use a Web application to ensure that white people do not crowd out others. When the spots allotted for white people fill up, registration is capped to save spots for others.”

Oh, naturally: quotas too! Continue reading →