Research and Scholarship

Ethics Quiz: The Christmas Flash Mob

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A group of about 60 Christmas carolers the the local Cure Church staged a good cheer invasion at a Kansas City, Kansas, Walmart last Sunday. Shoppers and employees stopped to listen and some sang along. Naturally the scene was caught on video, and, predictably, the video “went viral” on social media.

Also predictably, Scrooges were out in force on social media. Reddit patrons were especially hostile. “Not the Bee” was depressed at the reaction, sniffing, “This is Christmas we’re talking about! We used to understand that things were a little more magical and glorious this time of year.”

Well, yes, I am certainly sympathetic, but it was still a disruption in a private business without prior consent, and if anything flies in the face of “diversity” cant, it’s a public demonstration of a particular religion’s beliefs to a captive audience. After all, the group wasn’t singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” One person’s Christmas magic is another’s inappropriate proselytizing.

Your Ethics Alarms Christmastime Ethics Quiz is…

Was the Christmas caroling flash mob ethical?

Musings on Jesse Otero, the Human Broken Window

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jesse Leonardo Otero, 44, has been arrested 90 times for shoplifting in the Bay area of California, most recently this month. He is a drug addict, homeless, and supports himself by shoplifting and selling stolen property, often stealing from the same stores over and over again. He doesn’t discriminate, though, targeting small businesses, big-box stores, or whatever seems convenient at the time. He isn’t just lifting candy bars: when Jesse steals, it’s usually hundreds of dollars of merchandise at a time. Local police and store managers know him by name. The manager of Five Little Monkeys toy store in Albany, California, for example, says she has reported Otero to police more than 20 times. Jesse ranged far and wide in his shopping trips, and is an expert on the BART transit system, which he uses to hit stores at every stop.

Nobody has kept count of the number of days Jesse has spend in jail for his exploits, but it isn’t very many. The usual routine is that police give Otero a citation and release him. Sometimes, as with this month’s arrest, he is arrested and jailed for a short time, then let out of jail free, just like in Monopoly. All of this ridiculous pattern is due to California voters, in their wisdom, passing a law in 2014 that weakened penalties for everything Jesse does, like illicit drug use, vagrancy, petty theft, and shoplifting. Prosecutors now can’t file a felony shoplifting charge unless the items taken top $950 in value.

Multiply Jesse by several hundred (or thousands?) and you can understand why so many stores in California are experiencing ruinous shoplifting. Social justice warriors, advocates of “restorative justice” and those who regard the fact that a disproportionate number of those in prison are black as proof of systemic racism dispute the validity of the “Broken Windows” theory, but California’s experience is one more bit of significant evidence that the theory is sound.

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Now THAT’s Going To Leave A Mark…I Hope!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[I am especially grateful for this story because it gives me a perfect oportunity to post my favorite John Wayne clip, from “McClintock!”]

One of the scholars that Harvard President Claudine Gay ripped off without proper attribution has issued a full-throated condemnation in the Wall Street Journal. Carol Swain, author, researcher and a retired Vanderbilt professor considered one of the pioneers in the field of race in politics and government doesn’t get into the high weeds of Gay’s pathetic performance before Congress on the matter of her campus’s harassment of Jewish students, focusing instead on the other reason the Harvard diversity hire is demonstrably unqualified for her prestigious position. Swain writes in part,

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Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Geena is right.

A survey conducted this week by Harvard-Harris polling found that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe the answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” The stark contrast between our rising generation and the rest of the American population is truly disturbing. As you can see..

…outside of the demographic that has been indoctrinated into an anti-American, victim-obsessed, extreme progressive ideology by exposure to our education system and social media, the U.S. public is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and understands that Hamas represents terrorism and genocide. “These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said, reacting to the poll. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”

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Confirmation Bias Test: The Rasmussen 2020 Voter Fraud Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Trump’s reaction aside, what is a fair, rational, measured way to evaluate the results of the just-relased Rasmussen survey about voter fraud in the 2020 election?

The headline is “One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit They Cheated in 2020 Election.” The findings, in brief:

1. “More than 20% of voters who used mail-in ballots in 2020 admit they participated in at least one form of election fraud.”

2. “21% of Likely U.S. voters who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election say they filled out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child, while 78% say they didn’t.”

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Magic Ethics: Making Sexism Appear Out Of Nothing!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I was not a bit surprised to learn that only around 8% of professional magicians are women, as yesterday’s New York Times feature informed me. Magic was one of my main hobbies well into high school, and I even put on a few magic shows. (I still have a trunk full of magic apparatus under my bed.) It was clear early on that while boys were suckers for magic tricks, girls were mostly bored by them. It is one of those pursuits like fast cars, baseball, ventriloquism, juggling, playing soldier, and poker that somehow tend to be hot-wired into male genes while being mostly absent from the females of the species. I don’t know why, and I don’t care why, frankly.

But that’s not the message the Times wants to convey. Focusing on a few female professional magicians (one of whom is performing because her late husband, Harry Blackstone, Jr, did), it tells us that the dearth of female wand-wavers is due to “sexism, wardrobe limitations and the enduring stereotype that women best serve as the audience’s distraction.”

Yes, it’s the disparate impact fallacy again. “I think for many years, no one really thought of the need for women to be the magician,” Gay Blackstone told the Times. “But now, as we’re coming up with different roles and different things we want to be doing, then there’s no reason why women can’t be just as great as men.”

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A New Zenith For The Great Stupid! Now We’re Told To Use A Roman Emperor’s “Preferred Pronouns”…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hello! My name is Elagabalus, and my pronouns are She, Her, and “Nutcase”…

Boy, every time I think The Great Stupid has peaked, something like this arrives…

The North Hertfordshire Museum has decreed that the 3rd-century AD Roman emperor Elagabalus should be referred to as “she” to be sensitive to his pronoun preferences.

The museum in Hitchin, England owns a coin minted during the reign of Elagabalus and includes it in LGBT-themed displays. (Don’t ask me why a museum has LGBT-themed displays). Because the Roman historian Cassius Di wrote that Elagabalus was “termed wife, mistress and queen, ” told one lover, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady,” and allegedly inquired about how he could be outfitted with female charms, the museum is persuaded that he would consider himself “transgender” in 2023. (As well as really, really dead.) Prior to this Great Stupid brainstorm by the museum, historians have assumed that Dio was just smearing the predecessor of his patron, Emperor Severus Alexander, who gained power after the mad Elagabalus, was assassinated.

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Yes, “Free Speech Is In Trouble,” But Let’s Be Clear About Why And Who’s Responsible

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“538” founder and exile Nate Silver is now opining on substack and doing very well, thank-you, but he still is an infuriatingly biased progressive pretending to be objective. His topic in “Free Speech Is In Trouble” is the 2024 (?) college free speech rankings from a College Pulse/ FIRE survey of over 55,000 undergraduates across a wide range of colleges and universities. The results are pretty clear and ambiguous: most self-identified progressive students don’t believe in free speech and want those who don’t conform to woke ideology silenced or intimidated. This poses a serious threat to the culture and democracy.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But Nate, being Nate, repeatedly buries the lede and distracts from that conclusion. Oh, he says it, sort of, many times, but it’s always stated in an equivocal manner bordering on deceitful.

At the top, Silver says, “And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.”

Not “especially” on the Left, Nate: on the Left—you know, your team. He says, as a summary of the results,”College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with. ” Why state a generality that isn’t true? It isn’t “college students,” it’s progressive, woke students who have little commitment to free speech. “But this looks like a major generational shift from when college campuses were hotbeds of advocacy for free speech, particularly on the left,” he says a bit later. It’s not a generational shift, it’s an ideological shift and a values shift, on the Left.

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The New York Times Legal Expert Doesn’t Understand The Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Well that’s a kick in the head! Actually, the expert in question is Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court reporter for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and once a regular participant in those Sunday Morning network “round tables” when a talk show wanted to pretend it had a balanced and non-partisan array. Greenhouse is a strongly left-biased Democrat legal analyst, often a dishonest one, and her latest column for the Times proves again that it is propaganda and woke advocacy, not legal enlightenment, that she serves.

Once again, I wish “A Friend,” formerly our resident Times apologist, was still allowed here so I could read his tortured defense of the paper for printing this sinister crap.

Do read “Will the Supreme Court Toss Out a Gun Law Meant to Protect Women?” I wouldn’t bother to quote it if the Times didn’t make you pay for the privilege of rolling your eyes, but I will, a bit. The headline says it all, though, and by “all” I mean anti-rights, anti-due process totalitarian cant. You know, Democratic Party/progressive/ “Do Something!” stuff.

If the Constitution contains an enumerated right in its Bill of Rights, the fact that a law directly violating that right may, in the eyes of some, have some beneficial effects is irrelevant unless there is a massive, existential justification for an exception. Otherwise, the law is unconstitutional. Current progressives and Democrats don’t believe that, or rather, object to the principle. The believe that if speech “hurts” someone by making them feel bad, expresses taboo opinions or makes a sanctified group member feel “unsafe,” laws blocking or punishing that speech shouldn’t be seen as a First Amendment violation, though, in fact, they are. If the right to a fair trial has to be ignored to make sure that a cop whose knee inadvertently triggered nationwide riots and DEI craziness ends up in prison for life, well, reasons the Left, you gotta break some eggs to make a metaphorical omelette, the eggs being the Bill of Rights.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, following SCOTUS’s long-delayed and essential 2022 ruling in Bruen that the Second Amendment means what it says and is about the human right to bear arms and not militias, declared a federal law unconstitutional that prohibited a person subject to a court-issued restraining order for domestic violence from owning a gun. It was and is obviously the right decision except to anti-gun zealots who believe in pre-crime laws, red flag laws, and anything along the slippery slope to outright Second Amendment repeal. The Supreme Court is obviously going to uphold the Fifth Circuit, because its ruling was correct. The only question is whether any of the three far-left ladies on the Court will have the integrity to follow the law. I have some hope for Justice Kagan.

But to read Greenhouse, one would think, and by “one” I mean a typical American who doesn’t read SCOTUS opinions, couldn’t name five of the first ten Amendments and doesn’t comprehend what the Supreme Court’s job is, that the fact that an invalid law has good intentions should be sufficient reason to let it stand. (I doubt the law at issue even had good intentions.)

What the law allows in domestic abuse restraining orders is for judges to issue them solely on the testimony of the complainant, and that act will ban an individual from exercising his right to bear arms. Evidentiary standards are minimal; judges are inclined to grant requests for restraining orders because if there is violence against a complainant after the judge finds no cause—moral luck lurks! —the judge is going to be crucified. The other party doesn’t have a right to be present at the hearing, so the result of the law struck down would be that individuals could lose a core enumerated right without due process of law, based solely on the word of an adverse party.

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So: When Does The Supreme Court Get Its Apology From The Dobbs Hysterics?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Statistics based on research by the Guttmacher Institute seem to indicate that legal abortions increased slightly in the United States in the first six months of 2023 compared with 2020. The assumption is that states with more permissive abortion laws absorbed patients traveling from states with more restrictive laws, and access to abortion pills increased.

Thus the feminist and progressive narrative that Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year created a “Handmaiden’s Tale” hellscape where women were compelled to give birth to children they did not want was, as those inclined to be rational realized, inflammatory propaganda designed to support unhinged attacks on the six Justices in the Dobbs majority. The lie also proved to be a useful Democratic Party election weapon.

As Justice Alito stated clearly in his opinion, the ruling over-turning Roe v. Wade was not a pro- or anti-abortion ruling, but a necessary decision to uphold core Constitutional principles while striking down a badly reasoned precedent. The Constitution does not include a right to abortion, and the Founders would have been horrified at the very thought. Nor is abortion a proper matter for a national law, other than a Constitutional amendment.

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