U.S. Society

CNN Hasn’t Fired Don Lemon For Being Dishonest, Incompetent, Arrogant, Biased And Drunk. Will Lemon Being Stupidly Sexist Be Any Different?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

What an idiot. But we knew that. I’m sure CNN even knew that, but Don is cute, black and gay, so he routinely gets a special version of “The King’s Pass” (Rationalization #11). Nonetheless, his latest outburst is special, even for Don, who suffers from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Apparently Don associates a woman’s “prime” with her child-bearing years, which is the height of sexism: women are primarily breeders, right, Don? The same sources Lemon is evidently besotted with designate the male “prime” at around 19-years-old, if you measure men by erections and their level of arousal.

Can you imagine what Don and the CNN “Get Trump!” posse would have said if Trump told Hillary Clinton in 2016 that she had left her prime—as a woman—behind in her forties? Actually, Lemon’s argument sounds like something Trump might say. He has always been a sexist, but he’s not so much of a compulsive sexist to say something that stupid about women on TV.

We also learned how Don educates himself. It’s on the internet, so it must be true! “Don’t kill the messenger!”

Wow. Continue reading →

The State Dept.’s Online News Blacklist: Unconstitutional And Sinister, But The MSM Doesn’t Care, And The Public Is Too Ignorant To Object

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

That’s quite an ironic masthead, as you will soon see.

Reason Magazine reports:

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a British organization that evaluates news outlets’ susceptibility to disinformation. The ultimate aim is to persuade online advertisers to blacklist dangerous publications and websites.

One such publication, according to GDI’s extremely dubious criteria, is Reason.

GDI’s recent report on disinformation notes that the organization exists to help “advertisers and the ad tech industry in assessing the reputational and brand risk when advertising with online media outlets and to help them avoid financially supporting disinformation online.”

The U.S. government evidently values this work; in fact, the State Department subsidizes it. The National Endowment for Democracy—a nonprofit that has received $330 million in taxpayer dollars from the State Department—contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI’s budget, according to an investigation by The Washington Examiner‘s Gabe Kaminsky.

The other publications on the US government supported blacklist, which lists the 10 “riskiest online news outlets,”are the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The Federalist, Newsmax, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative.

No viewpoint discrimination there!

Continue reading →

RETRACTED!: “5 Ethics Observations On The Woke Student’s Stanford Admission Essay”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m retracting this post, for several reasons. First, it is old, really old, and the source that led me to it for some reason posted it as recent. It does appear to be true, despite the April 1 date on the tweet. Second, some of my points are not valid if the episode was not recent.

This has happened to me a few times before, usually when I’m in a rush, like today. For the second time this week, I had to get my wife to the emergency room, this time at 4:00 am. That’s no excuse: it’s my problem, not yours, and my obligations to my readers don’t change regardless of extenuating circumstances.

My thanks go to sharp-eyed Curmie, who pointed out the error.

Oh—I checked: Ziad Ahmad is real, he’s still an extreme progressive, and he didn’t go to Stanford after all. He graduated from Yale.

The post is below for posterity’s sake.

***

“When it comes to college essays, one teen is showing that a short but powerful message may be the path to success,” gushes NBC News. “Short but powerful”? I ‘d call the stunt by Ziad Ahmed, a teenager from Princeton, New Jersey, something a bit different from that.

In response to a question on his Stanford college application asking “What matters to you, and why?” the teen wrote “#BlackLivesMatter” 100 times. Ahmed then received an acceptance letter from the prestigious California school and is bragging about his successful gambit on social media.

Observations:

1. Assuming that Ahmed would not have been admitted (even if he had solved the mysteries of cold fusion in his spare time) had he written “Make America Great Again” a hundred times in answer to the same question, this incident proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Stanford is using political preferences to cull its applications. That’s not a stunning revelation, but we now know that the school isn’t even trying for “diversity” of thought, opinion or world view. And, of course, Stanford’s bias is almost certainly the rule, not the exception.

2. “It was important to me that the admissions officers literally hear my impatience for justice and the significance of this issue,” Ahmed told NBC News. “The hashtag conveys my frustration with the failure of judicial system to protect the black community from violence, systemic inequity, and political disenfranchisement.” Oh. But the question didn’t ask him to express his impatience, however, or how “significant” he thinks the phony revelation expressed by the BLM mantra is.  The logic expressed by Ahmed’s statement to NBC shows a serious lack of critical thought, remarkable arrogance even for a teen, and his acceptance of propaganda as fact. So does his “answer” to the Stanford application query.

Yeah, I guess Stanford is right: he’s perfect for its student body. Continue reading →

A Popeye: Today’s Grandstanding After The Michigan State Shooting [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This exploitation of the tragedy is as predictable as it is dishonest and irresponsible:

  • The shooter, who was nuts, had a prior criminal conviction and should not have been able to acquire a firearm. So again, as in so many of these episodes, it wasn’t the law that was the problem, it was the human and organizational incompetence in enforcing the law.
  • President Biden, in his mastery of fatuousness and ability to issue empty pronouncements, said that these kinds of events “happen too often.” Gee, Joe, what would be “just often enough”? Are there any tragedies that only happen the right number of times? A guy in a U-Haul truck just ran amuck in New York City, running down pedestrians. That’s never happened before—was once “too much”? Should we have back-ground checks on truck rentals?
  • Some Michigan House member—it doesn’t matter which, I’m sure her demagoguery is fungible—said she was furious that law-makers couldn’t or wouldn’t “do something” to prevent such shootings. Do something. Every time, the same stock, meaningless demand. When pressed on what “something” would be, the answer is inevitably something that would violate the Second Amendment, a law that is already on the books, or “something” that wouldn’t have stopped the shooting that prompted the rant.
  • The NBC newscaster I was listening to concluded from the fact that the shooter couldn’t legally own a gun that the problem was “too many guns.” She did not enlighten us about how, short of armed gun confiscation, “too many” could  be whittled down to “just enough.” [I checked: It was Rep. Elissa Slotkin.]

Call Me Strict, But I Think A Director Smearing Feces On A Ballet Critic’s Face For A Negative Review Warrants A Bit More Than A Suspension

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This kind of conduct by an employee doesn’t require an investigation. Nobody needs to know why he did it. A responsible employer whose employee engages in this crime against any individual—yes. even a critic—has to fire him for cause, immediately and without hesitation.

The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the Hannover state opera house’s ballet director Marco Goecke—that’s him above, looking like the son of the sinister Nazi whose head melts in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”— confronted its dance critic, Wiebke Huester, during the intermission of a premiere. Goecke, was furious over a nasty review she wrote of a production he staged at The Hague, and accused her of being responsible for people canceling their season tickets. Then he took dog excrement out of a paper bag he had brought for the occasion and smeared the woman’s face with the guck as she screamed. Huester has filed a criminal complaint.

On its website, the opera house said Huester’s “personal integrity” was violated “in an unspeakable way.” I wonder who came up with those weasel words. It added that the opera house had officially apologized to her. After all, the post said, Goecke’s “impulsive reaction” violated the ground rules of the theater and that “he caused massive damage to the Hannover State Opera and State Ballet.”

So…..?

So, it said, he is being suspended and banned from the opera house until further notice,though the lunatic will be given an opportunity to apologize “comprehensively” and explain himself to theater management “before further steps are announced.” Continue reading →

The NFL’s Offensive And Divisive “Black National Anthem” Pander [Revised and Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Just because I wasn’t watching the showcase for the nation’s most unethical professional sports league doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. The NFL truly is a blot on American culture, and its nauseating use of the so-called “black national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” is one more piece of evidence.

The NFL started its practice of using the song as a counterpoint to THE National Anthem, the Star Spangled Banner in 2021, in craven grovelling to the George Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter, as well as sop to the NFL’s National Anthem protesters like Colin Kaepernick. It was a disgraceful suck-up to the large majority of black players in the league, and if 2021  were the only instance of it, the stunt could be forgiven. But now the song has been presented before three straight Super Bowls, and that means we are stuck with it forever, just like baseball is stuck with “God Bless America,” the redundant Irving Berlin song that stadiums started sticking into the Seventh Inning Stretch as a show of unity after the attacks of 9/11. But “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is even more beyond ending, and you know why as well as I do. Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Larry Tribe

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

  • No, it doesn’t look like that at all.
  • An extensive and expensive investigation held by anti-Trump-biased lawyers found otherwise, and
  • This kind of claim regarding a stolen election has been called “baseless” by the mainstream media and Democrats as a virtual mantra for more than two years, and is routinely categorized as “misinformation.”
  • Tribe, as a law professor, is presumed to know what evidence is, but there is no “evidence” of what Tribe claims, and the Mueller Report specifically stated so, as painful as it must have been.

Tribe’s reputation-scarring delusions, however, are confirmation for the Trump Deranged, who think, for example, this meme by Occupy Democrats is profound: Continue reading →

An Integrity Test For Senator Romney

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well played, Tulsi!

Let’s see if Mitt has the integrity and character to apologize. If so, he had better do it soon. Will he? I’m guessing that he will eat the metaphorical crow.

Comment Of The Day: Unethical Quote Of The Week: Former Head Of Twitter’s Office of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In this Comment of the Day, made yesterday by veteran EA commenter Glenn Logan, he alerts us to an arguably even scarier statement at the Twitter censorship hearings yesterday, pointing to Jonathan Turley’s horrified (the professor is always horrified in a restrained fashion, unlike me) reaction to both the statement and the Democratic approval of it. The entire day of testimony justifies the appearance of Geena above, and she was only warning about a single man gradually turning into a giant fly. We are watching our nation mutating into a repressive, totalitarian society that restrains and punishes independent thought.

How many of your friends would vote for the likes of  Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury (D., NM), whose response to the creepy statement Glenn writes about was “Exactly”? Or with former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s statement that he pledged to regulate the platform’s content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation” and would  “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard”?

For all his weirdness, hypocrisy and Trumpish trolling, Elon Musk performed one of the most important acts in defense of democracy and America’s future in recent memory.

Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote Of The Week: Former Head Of Twitter’s Office of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth.”

***

Jack wrote: Roth literally said that Twitter believed you have to destroy free speech in order to save it—and he didn’t even realize how Orwellian that is.

Indeed, but what really freaks me out (and only slightly hyperbolically) was the testimony of his fellow Twit, former Twitter executive Anika Coliler Navaroli at a House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, which is analyzed by Jonathan Turley on his blog:

Navaroli said in response to a question from a Democratic member:

“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

Continue reading →

Open Forum! Get Ready to Rumble…

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

“Conspiracy” is back up and free on Amazon Prime. That’s the excellent and disturbing dramatic recreation of the Third Reich’s powerhouse meeting, under the direction of Heydrich (with Eichmann taking notes), to determine what to do to eliminate the millions of Jews Germany now had imprisoned. (That link takes you to the EA post about it from 2021. A quote from Heydrich (Kenneth Branaugh), reading an actual document from Hitler’s high command, struck me differently than it did the first time I saw the film, thanks to  the creepy testimony of former Twitter censors before Congress yesterday:

“In order to control events, it is necessary to control opinion.”

Never mind me (or Heydrich): please discuss what you want to discuss.