U.S. Society

From the “NOW You Tell Me?” Files: Another Research “Oopsie!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Here we have another one of these stories that should be waved obnoxiously in anyone’s face who lectures you about blindly “following the science.”

For decades—really as long as I can remember—researchers have been telling us that moderate consumption of alcohol was not just safe but in fact beneficial. This wonderful news was welcomed by those who “needed a drink” after a hard day, or self-medicated with a glass of wine (or good scotch) before bedtime, or who tended to have just a bit more than a moderate amount of alcohol now, then, or frequently, but who’s counting?

Along comes a report from the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, that appeared a week ago in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs published by the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It announced, in essence, “Oopsie! All of us trained scientific researchers made just a teeny mistake in our previous studies on this topic, repeatedly, over and over, and for half a century or more!”

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Verdict: The Democratic Party Is The Party That Cheats

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

But you knew that, didn’t you?

Besides, they are only cheating to protect democracy, and the ends justify any means necessary. Right?

Those strategically labelled news clips above are part of a Harris campaign scheme outed by Axios, which has its moments of real journalism. It revealed that the Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions in Google Search ads making it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, The Independent UK, NPR, Associated Press, USA Today, PBS, CNN, Time and others,including local outlets like North Dakota radio station WDAY Radio are even more openly pro-Harris than they are. The ads include links to articles from the news outlets, but the headlines and supporting text have been altered to read as though the articles support the Harris and the Democrats overtly. An ad that ran alongside an article from The Guardian, for example, links to “VP Harris Fights Abortion Bans – Harris Defends Repro Freedom” and but adds supporting text underneath the headline that reads, “VP Harris is a champion for reproductive freedom and will stop Trump’s abortion bans.”

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Comment of the Day: “The Totalitarian Left’s Reaction To Trump’s Interview With Elon Musk Should Tell Voters All They Need To Know About ‘What’s Going On Here’”

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

I usually don’t elevate to Comment of the Day status comments that illustrate common fallacies and lack of perception. I’ve done it a few times: I know it can seem mean. But Cici’s Comment of the Day so exemplifies the abysmal level of comprehension and critical thought so many of our fellow citizens suffer from, thus making them prime targets of misdirection in this election year, that I felt attention should be paid.

Here was Cici’s comment, one of many she offered, on the post about the foreign and domestic Left arguing that a U.S. Presidential candidate should not be allowed free rein to say whatever he chose to in a discussion with Elon Musk, who owns the platform where the discussion was taking place:

“Third parties decide what you read and hear all the time. And I’m not even arguing for that so I’m not sure where you got that from. I trust that people in charge of these platforms are able to factcheck properly.

I don’t share in your mistrust of “institutions.” I think that leads to people not knowing what’s even true or not. You’re free to disagree with that notion.”

Analysis:

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The Totalitarian Left’s Reaction To Trump’s Interview With Elon Musk Should Tell Voters All They Need To Know About “What’s Going On Here”

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

That’s the interview above. I haven’t had time to listen to it; it doesn’t matter what was said. It’s an unscripted, spontaneous conversation with one of the two major Presidential candidates. No one who understands elections and who believes in democracy should have any objection to it, fear it, or find its existence threatening in any way. And yet…here is the Harris-Walz campaign’s reaction:

Later, we got this:

Is there any way to excuse or justify such reactions? That is a rhetorical question: there is not. Continue reading →

Quickie From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Why You Can’t Trust The Daily Mail…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

See that headline? See the bullet point right under it? I have a hard time believing that illegal immigrants will cost the Bay State 1.8 billion dollars over two years, but 1.8 trillion dollars is like something Joe Biden would say. It’s obviously impossible.

Yet that throbbing typo has been on the web site for two full days. Nobody noticed? Does nobody on the staff read their own website? No readers were sharp enough to pick up on such a flagrant error?

Amazing. My high school newspaper (The Arlington High School Chronicle) was more professional.

Do not trust the Daily Mail.

J.D. Vance Demonstrates the Ethical Remedy For Partisan Media Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

J. D. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday morning TV shows, and neatly demonstrated why he will be an asset to the Republican ticket in the exchange above with CNN’s biased dim bulb Dana Bash.

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Weekend Ethics Update, 8/10/24: Paul Harvey and Other Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That’s a famous segment from Paul Harvey’s radio show, unearthed by Citizens Free Press. It’s fascinating in retrospect and worthy of reflection no matter what your political orientation may be. I place it in the same category as “A Clockwork Orange” and “Network,” commentaries that seemed dystopian and extreme when they first appeared, but that when viewed now are disquietly familiar. The date makes Harvey’s commentary particularly interesting, for 1964 was the cusp of the Sixties, right before its tornado winds blew traditional values and American respect for its institutions into tiny pieces, never again to be assembled quite as securely again.

Harvey was a proud conservative, of course: many of his beliefs today are considered Cro-Magnon. He was not responsible for the video, which engages in several cheap shots; the gay couple from “Modern Family,” for example, don’t deserve their appearance here: it was a loving same sex marriage between two kind men who were loving parents (and the least strange characters in the show). Nevertheless, Harvey was prescient in many ways, unfortunately for all of us.

1. How do PolitFact’s partisan hacks look at themselves in the mirror? The most biased and dishonest of all the factchecking organizations—and that’s quite a distinction—was at it again this week as it joined the effort to pretend Kamala Harris isn’t what she is.

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Authentic Frontier Gibberish of the Month: IOC President Thomas Bach

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“We have said from the very beginning. If someone is presenting us scientifically a solid system how to identify men and women who were the first ones to do it? We do not like this uncertainty. We do not like it for the overall situation. We do not like it for nobody. So we would be more than pleased to look into it. But what is not possible … is someone saying ‘this is not a woman’ by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign.”

Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? This is the caliber of intellect and clarity of thought those leading the Olympic Games are able to display when explanations are in order. No wonder we get…oh, heck, why bother?

For some reason his statement reminded me of “Green Eggs and Ham.” “I do not like you, Sam-I-Am. I do not like green eggs and ham.” Personally, I don’t like, or trust, officials who can’t make more sense than this, and more grammatically, behind a microphone.

So Democrats Are Really Trying To Elect A President By Not Letting Voters Know Who She Is and What She Believes. Democracy! Some Observations…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I had already decided to open this Saturday’s Ethics Games with a post on this topic when I read this section in NYT left-wing columnist Nate Cohn’s (gleeful?) column this morning about a Times-Sienna poll that has Kamala Harris suddenly topping Trump in several “battleground states” where he has been leading Biden. Cohn wrote,

…One way to think about her position is that she has become something like a “generic” Democrat. This might sound like an insult, but it’s really not. In fact, nothing is more coveted. An unnamed generic candidate — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican — almost always fares better in the polls than named candidates, who are inevitably burdened by all the imperfections voters learn about in the process of a campaign.

Isn’t that wonderful? Cohn clearly thinks so. He also explains that in earlier polls an “anyone but Trump” hypothetical generic candidate beat the former President by 10 points in these same states. Harris now leads Trump by five, meaning only half of the “anyone but Trump” voters have no clue who Kamala Harris is….but hey, that might just be enough! So the Democratic Party, in its fervor to save democracy, are going to try to keep it that way.

Can you guess why Abe is at the top of this post? I bet you can!

I resolved to discuss this early yesterday, when the same Kamala surrogate—I had never seen him before, but he was a youngish black man and appropriately glib—was making the rounds of the news networks (even Fox News) arguing that Harris never has to agree to be interviewed and answer questions without a script or a teleprompter, and there isn’t anything wrong with that. After all, he argued while several talking heads expressed exasperation (notably Harris Faulkner on Fox and S.E. Cupp on CNN), the public doesn’t need spontaneous answers to learn what they need to know. Kamala Harris doesn’t do as well off script (Ya think?), so why should she agree to present herself in less than the best light?

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You Think I’m Too Tough On Ethics Alarms Commenters? Ann Althouse Says, “Hold My Beer!” I Say, “Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sorry, this is petty, I know, but I can’t let this pass.

Here’s Althouse today: Presenting “We’re Having the Wrong Argument Over the Olympic Boxers/Questions about unfair advantage won’t just go away.” by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic for discussion, the retired law professor/blogress writes, “Please read the whole thing before commenting and restrict comments to the issue framed in the article, which I am not going to attempt to summarize. If you don’t know what 5ARD is, please don’t comment.”

Then it turned out that the article was behind a paywall, and you have to give The Atlantic a credit card to get your free trial subscription. “Oh, that’s a problem! Sorry,” says Althouse.

This garners (Ann hates the word “garner”) Althouse the second “Bite Me!” award of 2024. Ethics Alarms introduced the “Bite Me!” in 2023. It’s a distinction reserved for either an individual whose “response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness is to say, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs,” or as used several times in the course of 2023, the author of unethical conduct that demands the response, “Bite me!”

Ann falls in the second category.