Government & Politics

A Show Of Hands, Now: Who’s Shocked That A “Technology Misinformation” Expert Used A.I. Generated Fake Information?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

geewhatasurprise. But as Mastercard would say, this story is priceless.

Professor Jeff Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, and his faculty biography states that he is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology.” Apparently he knows the subject very well: Hancock submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation in Minnesota that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology in support of a candidate (or to discredit one) in an election. Republican state Rep. Mary Franson is challenging the law in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment (which, of course, it is). But Democrats don’t like the First Amendment. Surely you know that by now.

But I digress…

Continue reading →

Unethical Cartoon of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is one of the times I miss our once-frequent cartoonist commenters, the apparently retired King Kool and the now completely Trump Deranged Ampersand. What a snotty, insulting, arrogant and stupid cartoon that is. I’m not sure where it cane from: my guess would be The New Yorker.

Just because the unethical assertion that voting for Donald Trump (or against the spectacularly awful Kamala Harris, the totalitarianism, censorship and anti-Semitism-supporting party she represented or the incompetent Biden administration) means you are deplorable, “garbage,” a racist, a sexist or a fascist comes in a cartoon doesn’t mitigate the vile nature of the statement. I’m sure the cartoon will be defended by the claim that it is mocking people like the speaker in the drawing.

Sure.

Whoa! “The View” Has Had To Issue 36 “Legal Notes” So Far This Year

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The imposition of “legal notes” on “The View’s” panel of bigots, incompetents, liars and fools received a lot of attention last week because there were four of them, as ABC’s lawyers were quick to force clarifications on potentially defamatory statements by Sunny Hostin and the rest of the coven. Because I don’t watch the show ( because anyone who does is risking permanent brain damage or a stroke), I assumed this was a new development. The indispensable Axis media watchdog Media Research Center, which monitors this leftist clown act so I don’t have to, reports that in fact Whoopi’s gang has had to read 36 such disclaimers so far in 2024.

The ladies of “The View” seem to think this is funny. It’s not. The fact that so much of what they bleat on this daily show, which is, incredibly, categorized as a news program on ABC, has to be corrected in real time lest the network be subject to law suits is indisputable evidence that the cast is incompetent, lazy and vicious, and that ABC is irresponsible to allow them to remain on the air.

Condign justice may be coming Disney’s way: ABC News is being sued by Trump over on-air comments made on “Good Morning America” by co-host (and Clinton-allied hack) George Stephanopoulos when he kept asking Rep. Nancy Mace to comment on how Trump had been “found liable for rape.” Trump was not found liable for rape in the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll even after New York stacked the legal deck against him as part of the Democrats’ lawfare strategy. ABC’s lawyers have so far failed to get the lawsuit dismissed and it is entering the deposition phase.

Asks PJ Media columnist Rick Moran regarding “The View” panel, “Is it that they feel so entitled that the truth shouldn’t matter, or are they so stupid they think that just because they believe something, it must be so?”

I’m pretty sure the answer is “Both.”

A Bit More DEI Among Trump’s Cabinet and Agency Picks Would Have Been Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

…as in prudent, responsible, respectful, and competent.

President-elect Trump’s best mouthpiece, Rep. Byron Donalds, essentially humina-humina-ed the question on CNN about whether Al Sharpton’s criticism of the nomination and appointments so far emanating from Mar-A Largo was valid. Certainly Sharpton’s rationale isn’t valid: that Trump “owes” black voters more African American cabinet members, but the presence of just a single black nominee among the many selections, that being former NFL player Scott Turner nominated last week be Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is at very least unwise. Turner was part of Trump’s executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council; now he steps into the job held last time by Dr. Ben Carson. No, I don’t think there is any chance Turner will be rejected by the Senate.

It certainly looks like Trump has designated HUD as the slot for tokens: Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who revealed himself during the 2016 debates to be an idiot savant, had no qualifications for HUD other than his skin color. Turner is more qualified, but still: if Trump wanted to ensure that the “Trump is racist” trope continues unabated, he could hardly have pursued a course that would have supported it more vividly. There are certainly a lot of nominations and appointments “of color,” but in the United States, for obvious reasons, blacks are in a special category.

Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: The Trump-Deranged Harris Voters Are The Most Infantile Losers In US. Political History

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

There’s really no contest. EA has discussed the whining celebrities like Ellen DeGeneris who have abandoned their native country and the most remarkable democracy in world history because their favorite candidate—a spectacularly poor one—lost. We have discussed Rob Reiner, committing himself to a rest home because he can’t handle a competitive political process. We have talked about the social media hysteria and the progressives isolating themselves at BlueSky, a platform that censors conservatives. I have written about the people who are announcing on Facebook that if you voted for Trump, you are a racist and a fascist and not worthy of their friendship any more. But there is more…

Continue reading →

How Much More Evidence Will It Require For Climate Change Hysterics To Admit That The Field Is Corrupted By Uncertainty, Dishonesty and Hype?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.

The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”

Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”

But wait! There’s more!

Continue reading →

Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Ann Althouse gets the pointer for finding this: Giles Coren of the London Times wrote in “I take Jaguar’s woeful woke rebrand personally/From heritage British cars to classroom lessons, there’s always one demographic under attack — the middle classes” …

“And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy? Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…. The ads stand for NOTHING…. They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s ‘joy.’ It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right.”

Bingo! What a perfect analogy: they should show the Jaguar silliness on talking head shows every time a progressive propagandist says Trump won because of sexism and racism, or because the voters are stupid. Would anyone smart buy a Jaguar based on that ad? (EA posted on it last week.)

Meanwhile, the meme-makers and parodists have been having a ball mocking the thing, while Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover, has described criticism of its incompetent marketing campaign as “vile hatred and intolerance,” saying that its message has been lost in “a blaze of intolerance.” Sounds exactly like Rob Reiner, The View, and all of my bitter Facebook friends, doesn’t he? Jaguar is a corporate hypocrite as well: it has been pointed out that most obvious transsexual model in the ad was cut out of the version showing in the Middle East.

For your early Sunday viewing pleasure, here are a couple of the parodies I could embed. (There’s another one where a rampaging jaguar attacks the models.) But the real ad is funnier than any parody, especially when one considers that its makers thought it would sell luxury cars.

“Clayton Lockett Is Dead, Right? Then 1) Good! and 2) His Execution Wasn’t ‘Botched'”: The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Demonstrators in Washington rally against the death penalty outside the Supreme Court building Oct. 13, 2021. (CNS photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters)

Following this introduction is an EA post from ten years ago about a “botched” execution. The issue has come around again: The always woke online tabloid The Guardian is caterwauling over another messy execution, this time in Alabama. “The only lesson from this grim sequence of events is that when states use human beings as guinea pigs for lethal experiments, they are bound to suffer, whether at the point of a needle or behind a mask,” Matt Wells, deputy director of the human rights group Reprieve US, is quoted as saying. OK, they suffer. I have no sympathy for them. Killing human beings is hard, and murderers like Clayton Lockett and Carey Dale Grayson are at fault for making society kill them. There are ways of killing the condemned that involve no suffering at all, and I don’t know what we don’t make use of them except that they are a bit spectacular. In India, they used to execute people by training an elephant to step on their heads and smash them like a grape. I don’t understand why states have to be fooling around with methods as baroque as nitrogen poisoning.

The Guardian also includes the obligatory anti-capital punishment statement from the daughter of the victim. “Murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop,” Jodi Haley, who was 12 when her mother was killed, told reporters. “No one should have the right to take a person’s possibilities, days, and life.” Well, Jodi, you have been indoctrinated to your disadvantage and society’s best interests. Nobody has the right to make me pay to keep them alive when they have violated the conditions of the social compact, and when allowing them to live devalues the lives of others while requiring lesser punishments for other terrible crimes.

I was going to reprint the post below substituting Grayson for Lockett, but that isn’t necessary. Everything below applies to the Alabama execution as well.

____________________

Capital punishment foes have no shame, and (I know I am a broken record on this, and it cheers me no more than it pleases you), the knee-jerk journalists who have been squarely in their camp for decades refuse to illuminate their constant hypocrisy. In Connecticut, for example, holding that putting to death the monstrous perpetrators of the Petit home invasion was “immoral,” anti-death penalty advocates argued that the extended time it took to handle appeals made the death penalty more expensive than life imprisonment—an added expense for which the advocates themselves are accountable.

A similar dynamic is at work in the aftermath of the execution of convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.Witnesses to his execution by lethal injection said Lockett convulsed and writhed on the gurney, sat up and started to speak before officials blocked the witnesses’ view by pulling a curtain. Apparently his vein “blew,” and instead of killing him efficiently,  the new, three-drug “cocktail” arrived at as the means of execution in Oklahoma after extensive study and litigation failed to work as advertised.  Why was there an excessively complex system involving multiple drugs used in this execution? It was the result of cumulative efforts by anti-death penalty zealots to make sure the process was above all, “humane.” Of course, the more complicated a process is, the more moving parts it has, the more likely it is to fail.

Continue reading →

Critics Say Trump Is Only Appointing Those Who Are Reliably Loyal To Him. Damn Right, and Here’s Why…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Representative Barry Loudermilk  chairs the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight, and released a report this week showing that the Department of Defense Inspector General was part of a coverup of the Department of Defense’s intentional choice to delay the deployment of the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The DOD IG concealed the extent and cause of the delay in order to protect Department of Defense and Pentagon leadership, the report found, and did not candidly evaluate the actions of senior officials including Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, who failed to relay deployment orders to Major General William Walker, the Commander of the DC National Guard on January 6.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: 17 Democratic Senators

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

To be specific: Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Tina Smith (D-MN), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), Rafael Warnock (D-GA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT).

Yikes, what a rogues gallery! This unethical group voted for three resolutions submitted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) seeking to block transfers of crucial weaponry to Israel. Their logic is the same as the Hamas-supporting student protestor who harassed Jewish students on campuses across the country, as well as the anti-Semites who dominate the United Nations. let’s listen to the career-long ethics dunce, Senator Durbin. “This war must end,” Durbin said in a statement after the vote. “Israel’s strategy of deadly attacks on and near civilian populations must end as well. The United States should not be sending arms and ammunition that continue to take the lives of innocent people. It is time for real humanitarian aid to reach the Palestinian people. I will stand by Israel, but I will not support the devastation of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”

Palestinians are no more innocent of the terrorist attacks against Israel than the citizens of Germany and Japan were of the war-mongering of their governments. The war being fought by Israel “must end” when that nation is no longer a target for genocide by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. It is astounding that the same party whose President is risking World War III by escalating the Ukrainian conflict is pressuring a loyal ally and a true democracy (the Ukrainian government is still a somewhat shaky republic) to forgo a just and necessary war in the interest of its survival.

No Republicans voted for the resolutions, and even the Biden White House, like a stopped clock, was right this time: “Disapproving arms purchases for Israel at this moment would … put wind in the sails of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas at the worst possible moment,” it told the Democratic Senate contingent.