Seattle

Seattle’s Self-Inflicted Police Chief Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t understand this at all. Even for Seattle, the current controversy over the ex-chief of police is nuts.

The city’s far left Mayor Katie Wilson is under fire for the city’s botched handling of the Bite of Seattle mass shooting, which saw seven people shot with three dying. A toddler was among those wounded. Seattle Police issued a brief report to the public shortly after the shooting, urging everyone to stay away from the area, but nothing more for five hours, when a press conference was called. The city’s emergency alert system wasn’t activated, though this is exactly the kind of situation it was designed for.

Meanwhile, Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town, as he is remarkably frequently. He was at a police convention in Dallas; since March, he’s also attended police gatherings in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. Barnes doesn’t reside in Seattle full time, you see. He lives part-time in Chicago, where his family is. Over the last six months, Barnes has been out of town for about seven weeks, including four trips to Chicago.

When he got back to his place of employment, Barnes got in the face of a reporter who dared to ask him whether reports were accurate that Barnes planned to be away from Seattle until mid-August, and whether his travel schedule might be a bit problematic. Barnes stepped into his questioner and said, “I don’t have to tell you where I go…,” before a city employee pulled the chief away from the reporter and out of the room. At another news conference, Barnes denied that he frequently travels or is routinely absent from the city, and said that he doesn’t travel as much as he would like to. He really said that.

Subsequently Mayor Wilson announced that Barnes had “resigned.” Incredibly, the Seattle City Council was troubled by that. City Councilman Bob Kettle said working with Barnes was going well—yeah, it all seemed to be going swimmingly!—and that firing him would just increase the city’s feeling of insecurity. Barnes lasted a year, and the city has had four police chiefs in just two and a half years.

Wait, let’s back up a bit. Why would any major city—Seattle is one, or at least used to be until it was engulfed by The Great Stupid—hire a police chief who wasn’t prepared to reside full time in that city, or at least nearby? Unless the individual was some kind of miracle worker, it makes no sense. Based on his biography Barnes is an anti-policing police advocate, a social justice warrior, and, of course, he’s black:

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Fire The Teacher And School Board, Pull Out All The Students, Raze The Building And Sow The Grounds With Salt…But First, GET OUT!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Ugh. Here is another one of those “conservative stories” that so far the progressive media has ignored. I can’t find any non-conservative reports, but it appear to be real. A tenth-grade teacher of “Ethnic Studies World History” at Chief Sealth International High School (Could there be a description that screams “Woke mania!” any more shrilly?) failed a student on a class quiz called “Understanding Gender vs. Sex” because he wrote that only women can become pregnant as an answer to one question and and that only men have penises on another.

According to local radio 770 KTTH, some of the questions on the quiz focused involved personal pronoun use (“When someone uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, what does that mean about their gender identity?”) and stereotypes. (“True/false: Transgender people are gay”). Question 4 asked for a true or false response to the statement, “All men have penises.” The student chose “true” because 99.9% of the time it is true. The teacher marked it incorrect. Question 7 was another true or false question, “Only women can get pregnant.” Again, The same student marked this statement “true” as well. The teacher believes that men can get pregnant, though 99.999999999999999999999+ men throughout history and currently could not and can not.

The child’s mother is perplexed, reportedly telling the Jason Rantz Show on the radio station that her complaints have gone unanswered, and that her son says he has been called “fucked and racist” and “a product of the patriarchy” by teachers in the school.

Continue reading →

The First Thing We Do, Let’s Fire All The Principals…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Oh, there are many things that need to happen in the wake of Seattle’s Lincoln High School’s leadership demonstrating that it doesn’t comprehend that government-supported racial segregation is illegal and that openly favoring black students is exactly as contrary to core democratic, Constitutional and American values as openly favoring white students. First, however, we need to fire the smiling, racist, woke-poisoned, incompetent fools above.

Here is what they allowed to be published to students and parents:

Our student leaders in our Black Student Union (BSU), Latino Student Union (LSU), and Asian Student Union (ASU) have been hard at working planning our upcoming Multicultural Week March 13th-17th…On Friday of Multicultural Week, students and staff of color and/or those who identify with any group represented by BSU/LSU/ASU are invited for a lunch potluck.

In other words, white and Jews stay away. These alleged education professionals saw nothing wrong with that, directly in contradiction of Brown v. Board of Education though it was. No ethics alarms sounded, because those alarms are as dead  as Thurgood Marshall in these products of the thoroughly rotted culture currently metastasizing in the state of Washington. Continue reading →

The Great Stupid And Seattle Transit

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

In Michael Crichton’s”The Lost World,” a “Jurassic Park” follow-up not to be confused with the “Jurassic Park” film sequel of the same name and not one of the writer’s best, there is an interesting discussion of how some species of dinosaurs may have caused their own eventual extinction by developing toxic habits, like not caring for their young. It was the first thing I thought of when I read about the ridiculous transit system crisis in Seattle.

Oh-oh.

It shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, that the city that encouraged woke support for the destructive George Floyd riots in 2020 has adopted other unethical policies that make the Left’s anointed feel good even though the policies can’t possible work and constitute irresponsible leaps onto ruinous slippery slopes. 

The Seattle light rail public transit system has no turnstiles: passengers are supposed to  buy a ticket or tap their pre-paid card. It’s an honor system, but in woke Seattle, the ideal purpose of government is to for almost everything, so 70%—Seventy per cent!!—of the riders are freeloaders. This means that fares cover just 5% of the system’s operating costs. 40% was the minimum Sound Transit set as a requirement.

All public transit systems lose money (though they are approved after estimates that routinely overstate likely ridership), but they will help us avoid death by climate change, see, so they are essential and wonderful per se. However, if a city just lets riders cheat, such systems cause wider problems in the social contract.

(Do we really have to keep explaining this?)

Seattle’s Sound Transit stopped even minimal enforcement of fare requirements after a study revealed that blacks were disproportionately getting fined. Ah HA! The system was racist then! How far a jump is it to apply the same logic to other laws? It is how San Francisco. ended up legalizing shop-lifting.

I’m sorry: my tone is snarkier than usual this morning. But this is all so infuriating. And unethical. And stupid. Continue reading →

“Systemic Racism” Update

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I need a graphic for “The Great Stupid,” but until I get one, that clip above from Ed Wood’s masterpiece, “Plan Nine From Outer Space,” will have to do. I have to check back and find out which generous reader sent me this after I asked if there was a “Stupid, stupid!” equivalent of the “Madness! Madness!” clip from “Bridge Over The River Kwai.” That’s the immortal Dudley Manlove uttering those words, by the way. And that was his real name!

Update: Commenter Wallphone found the “Plan Nine” clip, and has my enduring gratitude.

Here are some especially annoying recent developments on the incoherent “systemic racism” front.

1. Philonase Floyd, the brother of the late, great,George Floyd, said, following the sentencing of Derek Chauvin, “I just want to reiterate: not just black lives matter, all lives matter.” Strangely, he was not immediately condemned as a racist or racially insensitive and forced to apologize like so many others who were hounded mercilessly for saying “all lives matter.” Of course, the explanation is that Floyd’s skin shade gives him license to say “all lives matter.”

I only want to know the rules, that’s all. That seems like a reasonable request. But the systemic racism scam is truly Calvinball.The rules are made up and changed according to whatever is expedient at the time. Incidentally, there is a politician named Calvin Ball who is the county executive of Howard County, Maryland. Guess his party and race. [Hint: He’s allowed to say “All lives matter.”]

2. There has to be some designation for the cowards and enablers of rising totalitarianism that accurately describes sniveling traitors to democracy like Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson, the directors of Capitol Hill Pride in Seattle. I was considering the “Winston Smith Award,” but that seems unfair to Orwell’s tragic hero.

The two sent a letter to the Seattle Human Rights Commission that said,

“It has come to our attention that an event called ‘Take B(l)ack Pride’ at the Jimi Hendrix public park June 26th is charging Whites only admission as reparations. We consider this reverse discrimination in its worse form and we feel we are being attacked for not supporting due to disparaging and hostile e-mails. We will never charge admission over the color of a person’s skin and we resent being attacked for standing in those values.”

Continue reading →

From The Great Stupid: Ethics Dunce Michael Dempster, Brewer, Bigot [Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Seattle-based brewer, Michael Dempster owns Mirage Brewery. In June, Mirage launched a brew  called “Choosey Lover.”  Dempster directed that every  can include a stamp that reads “ACAB means all cops.”

ACAB  is a very old anti-police acronym meaning “all cops are bastards.”

Dempster told KIRO 7 TV,

I used the markings because I stand against institutional racism, of which modern policing is a militarized arm…It’s not about individual police officers, it’s about a system. But I think to the casual observer, it seems like an attack on individual police officers, all cops.

Ah! So you’re a bigoted idiot, then! Thanks for the clarification! You say “all cops,” but you don’t mean all cops, though you acknowledge that the “casual observer,” meaning someone who can read and understand English, might think that by “all cops” you mean “all cops,” when you really just mean “the system.”

In short, you’re an idiot. Good to know. Continue reading →

Censorship, Indoctrination And Intimidation Watch, Part I [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Not my meme, but it fits!

Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley has been on what for him qualifies as a rampage lately, condemning efforts from the Left  to intimidate and punish anyone who isn’t in lockstep with its current agenda. Those nay-sayers are  racists and hate-mongers, you see.

Turley is always labeled a “liberal professor” by the conservative media, and once that would have been an accurate description. He, however, has remained true to his ideals while his party (he is, or was, a Democrat) and its allies moved sharply in the direction of leftist totalitarianism. Dissent on the Left or opposing the Left is no longer countenanced in most universities, in news organizations,  even in business and non-profit organizations. When Turley made legal mincemeat out of the Democratic argument for impeachment, students at American University tried to get him fired.

Turley believes in academic freedom to the extreme, as well as the First Amendment, of course, and he is properly alarmed to see professors (and others) facing institutional hostility or worse because of non-conforming views. I’ll discuss some of his recent targets in Part 2.

He  hasn’t covered this story so far. Continue reading →

Nah, There Are No Race-Obsessed Anarchists Running Seattle!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The progressive revolutionaries’ latest gaslighting exercise and eye-rolling “Oh, pshaw!” is that there really are no anarchists pulling the strings in the Great Northwest—you know, like the protests are “mostly peaceful,” except for the occasional Molotov cocktail and lasers aimed at the eyeballs of those trying to keep the peace. Coincidentally, Christofer Rufu, one of the excellent writers at City-Journal, has revealed that frightening documents had been leaked to him from the King County Executive’s office (that’s Seattle). He writes,

Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights has developed a “race and social justice” curriculum for all 10,000 city employees. I’ve obtained new documents from the city’s segregated “whites-only” trainings, which induct white employees into the cult of critical race theory….I’ve received a trove of leaked documents from within the King County Executive’s Office claiming that the justice system is a “white supremacist institution” that must be dismantled. It’s explosive…The document begins by claiming that the justice system is built of a foundation of “racism,” “white fragility,” and “white supremacist culture.” They say that whites have a “need to control” and have designed “social conditions” to “oppress People of Color”…Next, they claim that the jails are designed as “a system of oppression based on race and built to maintain white supremacy.” The plan to permanently shut down the jails is centered on the obligation to “isolate race” and “examine the presence and role of whiteness.”…Next, the government defines “white culture” as one that focuses on the corrupt and racist values of “individuality,” “meritocracy,” “linearity,” “progress,” “objectivity,” and “the written word”…n the attached glossary, the officials claim that whites uphold “the U.S. white supremacy system,” “oppress People of Color,” and have “unearned power and privileges associated with having white skin,” which they call “Whiteism.”

Interesting. Reminds me of the Smithsonian’s “Whiteness” chart. Continue reading →

Monday Ethics Cool-Down, 7/27/2020: Lots of Stuff Hanging Around The Runway

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I have a long night of work ahead of me, so I don’t know what time it is.

Or care.

1. Res ipsa loquitur.  Oopsie! “Health company apologizes for falsely telling 600,000 US military members they were infected with coronavirus”

Tricare apologized for a poorly worded email that implied the recipient had  been infected with the Wuhan virus.

I guess the writer was a Rutgers English major.

On the bright side, it is better to get a false positive than a false negative.

2. Schadenfreude Alert! Seattle radio host  Paul Gallant  mocked President Donald Trump last month for suggesting Seattle’s riots were violent. Then, last night, the “mostly peaceful” demonstrations got his Starbucks. HIS STARBUCKS!!!

“I feel like I need to buy a firearm, because clearly this is going to keep happening. Enough is enough,” Gallant he added.

It was enough a long time ago, you pathetic jerk.

3.  Boy, when you can’t even trust the sports reporters…ESPN tweeted a video over the weekend of players from the WNBA’s New York Liberty and the Seattle Storm leaving the court, and wrote, “As the national anthem was played, the @nyliberty and @seattlestorm walked off the floor as part of the social justice initiative.” For this display, the women were roundly criticized.

Then ESPN tweeted  “Correction: Players left the court before the national anthem was played, not during.” That’s what I call a material mistake.

Nevertheless, at last checking,  the original misleading tweet is still up.

4. This is presumably justifiable because all cops in New Jersey are racists, as proven by the fact that a non-racist cop in Minneapolis killed a black man.  Kevin Trejo, 21, of Westwood, New Jersey has been arrested for  spitting into the coffee of a police officer at Starbucks.  Police have evidence  that Trejo had done this repeatedly with officers.  Trejo claims to have only done it just once. Oh! Well that’s OK, then!

Question 1: Is this a violent offense?

Question 2: Why would any police officer chance ordering a beverage at Starbucks? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Police Chief’s Letter

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of The Week:

Now what?

In considering your response, consider the exigencies of the situation. Who has a duty to act? What can the police do?  Was the police leadership obligated to send such a letter, or will it do more harm than good? Doesn’t the letter essentially invite “mostly peaceful” demonstrators to take over the streets?

If lives are threatened, is it ethical for police to defy the cities prohibition on crowd control? What should concerned citizens do?  Should they organize private security forces? Continue reading →