Government & Politics

Ethics Observations On The 2024 Presidential Election Spin

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The facts: As of this date, Trump has about a 1.5% edge in the popular vote, and a decisive win, 312 to 226 over Harris in the Electoral College. By any analysis, it was a very close election. A single percentage point of votes flipping would have given Harris the popular vote lead, though her winning the Electoral College would have required pinpoint distribution of those votes.

What is a fair and ethical interpretation of this? Who’s lying, spinning, exaggerating or telling it like it is?

1. Today stories came out about Harris’s staff saying that internal polls showed her behind Trump from the start, and that they knew everything would have to break right for her to win. This in part is the campaign ducking responsibility: if Harris lost by only 1.5%, obviously she could have won. They are saying, absurdly, “It wasn’t our fault, the deck was stacked against us!” Harris ran a terrible campaign, and still came close. If she had run a better campaign, and got better advice (that she paid dearly for) that 1.5% would have been within reach. If she had competently answered a soft-ball question she got on “The View,” for heaven’s sake, that might have been enough. Or if she had agreed to the interview with Joe Rogan (and not fallen flat on her face, which is a big if). If she had not chosen The Knucklehead as her running mate. Any of these might have allowed Harris to prevail despite everything else.

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‘Nah, There’s No Deep State!’ Res Ipsa Loquitur At The State Dept. Proves Otherwise

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Among the many dishonest arguments that have been flying around in the mainstream media, that is, the Democratic Party’s “Get Trump!” propaganda arm, is that the efforts of the incoming administration to clear government bureaucracies of untrustworthy lifetime workers is inherently sinister. After all, we are told, these are virtuous, experienced, ethical and non-partisan specialists in their fields who show their patriotism by working for every President with equal verve, cooperation and the determination to follow the will of the people. That’s a lie, and the previous Trump administration showed us (and Trump of course) how much of a lie it is.

Nonetheless, the news media continues to advance the myth. Why? Because they want an entrenched progressive Deep State to undermine conservative policies and Republican Presidents, especially Trump. That’s why.

We have Representative Darrell Issa to thank for blowing a whistle on recent flagrant evidence of the Deep State at, appropriately enough, the State Department.

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Why American Journalism Is Ethically Clueless And Doomed In One Rant….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I wish I could find a video of Axios CEO Jim VandeHei‘s embarrassing rant at the recent National Press Club gala that wasn’t tricked up like this one, but it’s sufficient to make the point. Naturally, Axios called the thing “inspired” and the assembled hack propagandists at the Press Club applauded like seals. He passionately defended “fearless reporting,” meaning with no fear of accountability. “Everything we do is under fire!” he warned. Yes. That’s because what you do so often is destructive, reckless, incompetent and biased. It should be under fire.

“I hate this damn debate about,‘ Oh, we don’t need the media,’ he said last week night as VanderHei and co-founder Mike Allen accepted the Fourth Estate Award for “lifetime achievement.” “It’s not true!”

Let me explain, Jim: we don’t need the unethical, arrogant media we’re currently stuck with, which is untrustworthy and dangerous. “But at the core of that is maybe transparency, maybe a free press, maybe the ability to do your job without worrying about going to jail, maybe the ability to sit in a war zone and tell people what’s actually happening!” Oh, bite me.

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Paging Moral Luck! Paging Moral Luck!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Judge S. Kato Crews, a progressive appointee by President Biden to the U.S. District Court in Colorado, refused to allow an injunction against the San Jose State women’s volleyball team from including a biologically male “transwoman” (above) to compete with the team in a women’s volleyball conference tournament this week. He ruled that appellate and Supreme Court precedents clearly establish that the protections of Title IX and the 14th Amendment apply to transgender individuals.

A key factor in the decision seems to be that the plaintiffs, which are the other colleges in San Jose State’s conference, a current co-captain of the San Jose team, other former players and the recently-suspended assistant coach, should have filed the suit earlier. The conference’s transgender participation policy has been in effect since 2022 and four conference opponents and one non-conference opponent forfeited games against San Jose State beginning in September.

“The rush to litigate these complex issues now over a mandatory injunction,” Crews ruled, “places too a heavy burden on the defendants”—the Mountain West Conference and its commissioner, two administrators at San Jose State, the school’s head volleyball coach and the board of trustees of the California State University System. That’s a reasonable judicial call under most circumstances, but the judge and the entire pro-trans movement in the U.S. is now at the mercy of moral luck. That is the annoying life reality that random occurrences out of the control of decision-makers have a way of retroactively defining a decision as either prudent and wise or reckless and wrong. Crews’ decision neatly tees up the perfect conditions for moral luck to settle the trans athletes in women’s sports controversy

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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!

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