U.S. Society

Another “Good Illegal Immigrant” Sob Story From the New York Times…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

If I were bloggress Ann Althouse (and how can you be sure I’m not?) I’d begin this post with a quote from the story, like:

“But Perez-Bravo had most of his family and several members of his church at the hearing, and his lawyer said that he was “connected to the city in deep ways.” He regularly cooked for 60 people at church barbecues. He had a son who was about to graduate from high school, a boss who wrote letters testifying to his work ethic, and a pastor who was willing to pay a $1,000 bond on his behalf and risk her house as collateral. “This is a kind family and they help everybody,” the pastor testified. “We’re going to help him.” The judge ruled that he could return home with an ankle monitor until his next court date as long as he stopped using Kluver’s name and Social Security number….”

… Then I’d add a wry and probing observation or two, maybe a pedantic discourse on what “connected to the city” means, and leave it to commenters to analyze the story. I’m tempted to do an Althouse impression here, but I won’t, because I want to be unequivocal.

This situation isn’t as complex and wrenching as the Times reporter tries to make it. An Guadamalan came to the the U.S. illegally, broke the law repeatedly to stay here, and screwed up the life of an American citizen in the process. Finally he was caught, and that’s good. I have no sympathy for noble illegal immigrant the Times weeps for: he got more out of his dishonesty and disrespect for American sovereignty than he deserved.

Instead of the one quote from “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price— Thousands of undocumented workers rely on fraudulent Social Security numbers. One of them belonged to Dan Kluver”, I’ll give you several with this gift link. Note that the Times, of course, uses the still-in vogue cover-phrase for “illegal immigrant.” When I read “undocumented worker,” I know I’m being misled by a biased source with an agenda.

Here are the quotes with some brief reactions from your heartless host:

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Unethical Magazine Cover of the Year: TIME’s Climate Change Fearmongering

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This is dishonest and, of course, unethical. But the Axis news media, of which TIME has been a member for years, will be pushing climate change panic desperately and shamelessly now that cult is losing some power, notably by Bill Gates’s defection, but also because the current President is not sympathetic to the “lets spend billions to solve a problem we aren’t even certain about on policies we don’t even know will solve it, whatever ‘it’ is” climate change hysteria pushed by people who couldn’t explain climate computer model if their children’s lives depended on it (which, come to think of it, they claim they are.)

Meanwhile, this story was published just three days ago. Climate change is one of the most vivid examples of the Left’s current infatuation with the quip, “Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind’s made up.”

WaPo: “Republican Overseeing Alamo Renovation Ousted After ‘Woke’ Social Media Post” Ethics Alarms: “Better Safe Than Sorry.”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I know, I know: Ethics Alarms’ annual “Remember the Alamo!’ posts usually don’t start until February. But an important Alamo story with ethics lessons reaching beyond the legendary Texas battle is in the news, and attention should be paid.

Kate Rogers had been leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick reviewed a copy of her 2023 PhD dissertation on museums affecting history is taught in schools. “Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time,” her dissertation stated. Patrick asked her to resign as CEO of the Alamo Trust based on that sentiment, and Rogers refused. declined. The next day, Patrick publicly called for her resignation. This time, Rogers complied.

This week, Rogers sued, alleging wrongful termination. The theory: forcing her to resign for what she wrote in her dissertation was a violation of her free speech rights. The dissertation wasn’t the whole story, however. On her watch, a social media post from the Alamo Trust had prompted this letter…

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Last Open Forum Before I Sink Into Year-End Regret, Despair and Depression…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Tomorrow is the date President Kennedy was shot, throwing the timeline of American history into chaos, including the destructive Sixties that brought us the deadly seeds of the current cultural conflict, like those spores from outer space in “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

The 23rd in my wedding anniversary, and to be honest, I still am struggling with all of the consequences flowing from my wife’s sudden death on Leap Year 2024.

The next week gives me Thanksgiving, which I will skip, thanks, and then I’m thrust into the Christmas season, which I love, but which now seems lonely and forced and has at least since 2020.

On the plus side, I found that anti-Harvard website, which is a treasure. Check it out here.

Now have yourself a merry little open forum….

This Is Unusual: The Jeffrey Epstein Ethics Train Wreck Is Actually Funny!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

You expected to see one of the train wreck graphics didn’t you? Well, this is a train wreck graphic…

Usually humor is not something Ethics Alarms associates with ethics train wrecks, but the ridiculous bi-partisan Jeffrey Epstein Ethics Train Wreck is already producing a large number of metaphorical appearances by Nelson Muntz…you know, the mocking “Simpsons” character?…

…with more certain to come.  The lesson here, it appears , is “Don’t play Cognitive Dissonance Scale games if you don’t understand the rules!”

First, the Republicans made releasing the “secret files” about long-dead and even longer-disgraced sex-trafficker and pervert Jeffrey Epstein a 2024 campaign issue for idiots. (The national welfare will be neither enhanced nor harmed by anything regarding Epstein at this point, but the matter was a campaign squirrel. The news media, however, as it has an Epstein addiction that began once Bill Clinton seemed out of harm’s way, couldn’t resist. )

Then Trump was elected and appointed a none-too-bright Attorney General (Pam Bondi) and an incendiary FBI chief (Kash Patel) who soon said “Surprise! There are no Epstein files or nothing is in them or something!” This (predictably) inflamed the idiots, particularly Democrat idiots, who decided, “AHA! There must be something that will allow us to smear Trump and derail his second term like we did the first one with the fake Russia collusion investigation!” The idiot voting bloc is, one must admit, unusually large, so the Democratic Party has been using Epstein with some success—aided by their unethical news media, aka. “the news media,” which elevated Epstein files rumor-mongering and “Trump must have something terrible to hide, because he’s terrible” stories ahead of substantive news that the public genuinely needed to know.

Now it became the old Cognitive Dissonance Game…you must know the drill by now. Here’s Dr. Festinger’s invaluable scale showing how we form and maintain our attitudes toward, well, everything:

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Encore! “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was about to write almost the exact same essay I wrote in 2019, but fortunately something deep within what I jokingly called “my brain” prompted me to check the Ethics Alarms archives and now I have an extra 45 minutes or so to spend organizing my sock drawer. Sure enough, I had published the lament before, and prompted by the same stimulus”: a New York Times news item.

Yesterday’s article (gift link!) was was déjà vu too: “MacKenzie Scott Gives $700 Million to Historically Black Colleges.” In 2019, I wrote “The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given more than $500 million to more than 20 historically Black colleges in the past year.” That was bonkers, her current gift is bonkers, but this item in the latest Times article is really  nuts: 

“President Trump has also shown support for historically Black institutions. In his first term, he distributed $250 million in annual funding and cut more than $300 million in federal loans for the schools. In April, through an executive order, he unveiled a new White House job to oversee H.B.C.U.s. But the position currently remains vacant.

“Dr. Gasman, the Rutgers professor, said the Trump administration has sent mixed signals. The president has sought to crack down on diversity programs in education and has complained about the teaching of Black history. The funds for H.B.C.U.s and tribal colleges were announced as the federal government cut programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs and schools with significant Hispanic enrollment.

“They are willing to support Black people in Black institutions, but they are not very comfortable with Black people in white institutions,” Dr. Gasman said.”

That’s deliberately negative spin, but it’s not completely unjust. What the hell? Historically black colleges are the epitome of “good discrimination” in the hypocritical style of DEI. Howard, Harris’s alma mater (Be proud,Howard—you graduated a babbling fool!), got the largest donation from Scott, 80 million bucks. Do you know what the white enrollment at Howard is? Less than 1%! Talk about disparate impact—you know, the EEOC trick that finds invidious discrimination based on statistics alone?

Across all of the HBUCs, there are about 10% white students  and 2% Asians. I thought Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the way to ensure no discrimination based on race, was to not engage in discrimination based on race. This is undeniably discrimination based on race.

The Trump Administration should not be supporting black colleges and universities. If most of our elite colleges are a sham, spending more time on ideological indoctrination than on teaching, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities are worse. By an “in isn’t what it is” PR haze endorsed by the news media (‘Oh! They are historic! That means they are good schools, right?’ Right, just as the historic Biden press secretary Karine Saint-Pierre was “good.” They aren’t good: they have inferior standards for admission, inferior faculties, and their graduates come out with misleading diplomas) the public is led to believe that these are elite institutions too.

Ten years ago, Ethics Alarms played a minor role in saving Virginia’s Sweet Briar college from being closed by a board that decided that an all-women’s college was an anachronism and no longer needed. I argued that there were many good reasons to have all female colleges as an option for women, but none of those good reasons apply to racially segregated schools.

OK, now I am getting into the substance of the essay from six years ago, and I have frittered away some of that saved sock drawer time. Heeere’s Jack!— from 2019….in “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

***

Make no mistake: I know why they are getting a surge in donations: cynical virtue-signalling and mindless George Floyd Freakout tribute. However, like the historically black colleges themselves, the phenomenon of picking now to celebrate segregated education, and mostly inferior education, is self-contradictory. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the “antiracism” movement itself, and the incoherence of the “diversity” chants coming from the Left.

For these colleges are the opposite of diverse. They are, in fact, discriminatory in concept and execution, and to see them “thrive” while activists are demanding literal quotas in other institutions in order to create numerical demographic parity—at least—is a blazing example of how the George Floyd Ethics Train wreck is less a cultural awakening than it is an opportunistic and unethical power play fueled by white guilt and cowardice.

The front page article in the New York Times today is so full of head-banging-on-the-wall moments I ran out of head before I ran out of wall. Here are some…

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Just Reminding Ethics Alarms Bashers That We Had The Pandemic Cons and Hysteria Sniffed Out From The Start…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

To this day, I have refused to refer to “Covid” except in settings where I feared being misunderstood. Ethics Alarms announced long, long ago that the official designation of the pandemic virus was designed to obscure reality, which was that the world-wide disaster was entirely China’s fault, and attention should be paid. It also was part of the Axis plan to continue to paint Donald Trump as a racist. It has been the Wuhan Virus here from the beginning, and always shall be thus.

Ethics Alarms also, with the assistance of many of the blog’s five commenters, notably Michael Ejercito, immediately ruled the closing down of the schools, commerce, recreation, worship and more as unethical, incompetent, irresponsible and dishonest, along with the organized fear-mongering by the news media, notably the New York Times. We were right about that, too, and unlike other situations where the site took a stand with a fair amount of uncertainty, on this one I was relatively certain from the beginning.

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Once Again, An AI Bot Doesn’t Know What It’s Talking About, This Time Regarding U.S. Presidents

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I wish Ann Althouse would stop publishing her conversations with Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot. Is she on Elon’s payroll? Yesterday, the quirky retired progressive law prof turned blogger was writing about the Netflix series “Death by Lightning” based on the excellent  “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President,” which EA discussed several years ago. (The books main character, James Garfield, is one of my favorite Presidents, as is the man who succeeded him after he was assassinated, his VP Chester A. Arthur.)

Noting that Garfield was a reluctant Presidential nominee, Ann decided to once again ask Grok’s opinion, as she has been doing almost daily for months now. “I’m interested in the Presidents who have not wanted to be President, who have felt bad about winning. I asked Grok to list them in the order of how much they did not want to have to do it.” Well, I wouldn’t have had to ask that, and Althouse, by publishing Grok’s ill-informed and sloppily reasoned answer, has made her readers less informed than they already are. Here was Grok’s terrible answer:

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Ethics Quiz, Housekeeping Division: Ban or No Ban?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

In the middle of an already lively and substantive discussion on this recent post, an occasional, undistinguished commenter added this to an already snarky entry:

“I also love how this blog comment section is essentially the same 5 people talking to themselves. Remember tgt and Charles? Ah those were the days. Now Old Bill responds to himself.”

Since the comment was what I often refer to, being baseball obsessed, as a hanging curve-ball right over the plate (For the sadly baseball ignorant, that means a stupid statement too inviting to resist knocking out of the park), I performed a quick survey of the readers who had issued substantive comments over the past two days and listed them, eventually reaching a count of over 20, and ended my retort with,

“DAMN! You’re right! Just 5 commenters! And they can’t count, either…”

Note that I chose irony rather than invective. My first instinct was to write, “You can bite me, asshole. That’s a lie, and an unfair swipe at both a respected veteran commenter here and my project.”

However, since that exchange, I have become more annoyed by it by the hour. If I had just waited a day for my quick survey, the count of regular commenters would have swelled to over 30: I had forgotten Arthur in Maine, Gamereg, Ohwhatfunitis, Humble Talent, Heres Johnny, and more. In fact, after doing some checking into the archives, Ethics Alarms has never had a more erudite, serious, engaged and enlightening group of regular commenters. It is perhaps what I am most proud of after starting the blog 16 years ago.

So the commenter was not merely stating a falsehood—that she could have disproved as easily as I did—just to be nasty. She also was gratuitously insulting a specific commenter while denigrating the other serious (unlike her) participants here.

Looking back over her dossier, this commenter’s main themes are that 1) she doesn’t like the blog but reads it anyway, and 2) she dislikes the President intensely. Most of her participation consists of jumping in to agree with any other criticism of me or a post, or “sealioning.” A tone of condescension is unmistakable in most of her comments, but as her snark above shows, she is a long time lurker. tgt hasn’t shown up here since the Obama Administration, and Charles Green self-banned more than eight years ago. She first graced us with her open presence in March of this year.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is..

Should I ban this jerk?

One other detail that is tending me to vote “yes.” My response made her look like a fool, and the honorable and respectable thing to do then would have been to reply with, if not an apology, at least an “Okay, you got me!” She’s been silent. 

From The Annals Of Doing The Right Things For The Wrong Reasons: Trump Drops MTG. (Good!)

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Let’s skip, for the nonce, the fact that it is disturbing that we have a President who issues statements that read like the have been written by a character out of “Mean Girls.” (We knew that.) And that he never should have endorsed an unqualified, not-to-bright, emotionally unstable zealot like Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor-Greene in the first place. Or that he should have jettisoned his ill-considered support for Greene many times earlier, when she emitted one of her many earth-shatteringly stupid remarks even by Trump standards.

What matters is that he has finally condemned her, she deserves to be condemned, she needs not to be in a position of power or influence because she is a human “loose cannon on deck” that cannot be trusted, and any words or action that bring us closer to seeing her out of elected office is manifestly to be applauded, regardless of the motivations behind it.

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