Trump Derangement Update: A Conversation With a Sufferer

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I had another long debate with a Trump Derangement victim whom I know well, love and respect. This individual is a lawyer, mostly informed, but, like an amazing number of Americans who should know better, gets most of her news and commentary from MSNow. I have explained that this is bats, is making her biased and therefore stupid, and that her favorite platform has no interest in conveying objective, fair news and cannot, must not, be trusted. I have pointed this out before, though she has a good retort: MSNow reports news that reflects badly on President Trump before almost all other outlets, and way ahead of Fox News. She was the one who pointed me to the unconscionable self-dealing IRS law suit settlement that I first wrote about here. Of course the partisan hacks at MSNow were on that in an instant: if all you care about is potential sticks to bash the President with, you are likely to find them first.

Other revelations from the conversation (yes, I believe my debate partner is typical of the Trump Deranged, except that she is more reasonable and analytical than most of them) :

1. The Trump Deranged are incapable of talking about the Administration without getting furious and shouting. Incapable! My friend almost never shouts, but the yelling commences immediately when the topic gets near the White House. It’s a Pavlovian response.

2. The discussion always ends up on non-substantive outrages. The Kennedy Center. The Ballroom. The reflecting pool. The proposed arch. None of these will be significant in the historical assessment of this Presidency. The Trump Deranged default to these because the smart ones know they are just wrong on the important policy issues, or no longer have metaphorical legs to stand on. They can’t defend illegal immigrants. They no longer have climate change hysteria and fake “science” to fall back on. They know DEI is illegal. They don’t buy the “men with naughty bits who call themselves women should be able to throttle biological women in sports” lie. They can’t defend the Biden dementia cover-up, and they know Kamala Harris was, in James Carville’s immortal words, “like a seventh-string quarterback starting in the Super Bowl.”

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Remember Midway, June 7, 1942

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The five day naval Battle of Midway ended on this date in 1942. Midway has never been celebrated with the verve and reverence it deserves, in great part because the June 6 remembrance of D-Day, a pivotal event in the Allied victory in World War II, has just been celebrated the day before. (Another reason is that there isn’t a really good movie about Midway, though the last one, Midway (2019), with its B-list stars, was better and more historically accurate than the 1976 effort with an all-star cast and a silly romantic sub-plot.) Midway was arguably just as important as D-Day, however.

The Pacific theater of WW II, fought between the Allies and the Empire of Japan, lasted from December 7, 1941 until September 2, 1945, and was longer and bloodier than the European side of the war. On June 4, 1942 when Japanese planes launched bombing raids on the Midway atoll, a group of islands under US control. The US Air Force and Navy had been depleted in the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor: all eight of our battleships were damaged, with two lost completely and the others taken out of commission. As a result, the US had no battleships available to fight in most important naval battle of the war.

Fortunately, US intelligence knew an attack was coming. Japan’s Naval General Operational Code used book ciphers, making it much easier to break than the Germans’ Enigma and Lorenz codes. We had discerned early in 1942 that Japan was planning an attack on Midway. It was commanded by the same man who oversaw Pearl Harbor: Chuichi Nagumo, who was the vice admiral of the Japanese Navy and commander of the Japanese First Air Fleet. His successful attack on Pearl Harbor put him in charge of all his nation’s attacks in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. (He was to honorably kill himself later in the war when the tide turned against Japan.)

At the beginning of the Battle of Midway, the Japanese Army also attempted to invade the Aleutian Islands. Some believe the Aleutian attack was designed to pull U.S. attention away from the more crucial naval battle. Meanwhile, if there had been betting markets in 1942, the Japanese would have been heavy favorites. The U.S. fleet was outnumbered: the Japanese attack used four aircraft carriers, seven battleships, 150 support ships, 248 carrier aircraft and 15 submarines. The US defense consisted of just three aircraft carriers, 50 support ships, 233 carrier aircraft, 127 land-based aircraft on Midway and eight submarines. Meanwhile, Admiral Halsey was sidelined with shingles.

Japan was sure it could neutralize the U.S.’s already weakened US navy and prevent it from interfering with the Rising Sun’s aggression in the Pacific, as Japan was determined to expand its empire. But as Carnak the Magnificent might say, “Wrong, Sushi Breath!” After the four day battle, Japan withdrew from Midway on this date in 1942. The Japanese had lost nearly 300 planes, all four of its aircraft carriers and 3,500 men. Japan did sink a US aircraft carrier, the USS Yorktown, and destroyed many US aircraft and vessels, including a destroyer. Still, there was no dispute over which forces prevailed. Midway was the turning point in the Pacific. After the battle, Japan and the US reversed roles: Japan spent the rest of WWII defending its territories in Pacific as the United States attacked.

Ethics Dunce: Bride-To-Be Rochelle Mindrum

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

When social media over-sharing meets publicity obsession, the result is misbehavior like Rochelle Mindrum’s.

The 29-year-old was expecting her boyfriend Jak Keller to pop the question, and had even gone ring shopping with him. She specified that she wanted the proposal to be done “in nature.” When they took a trip to Georgia together, she figured it must be coming soon. Sure enough, after a hike, on the side of a cliff, Keller set up his phone to take a video. He took Mindrum’s hands in his, got down on one knee, and proposed. But when Mindrum looked down at the ring, she saw that her fiancé had chosen a blue diamond rather than the colorless diamond she’d picked out. And she blurted out her disappointment on camera: “It’s so blue!”

Rochelle accepted, then posted the video on Tik-Tok along with a note that she was disappointed with the color. “I was extremely surprised by the blue diamond,” she says now. “The box it was in was dark blue, so at first I thought it was a reflection of the box. Once it was on my finger though, I was able to see that the diamond was in fact blue.”

The Amityville House has some advice for Jak, her already hen-pecked fiancé:

Unbelievable! This guy tries his best to give his girlfriend the proposal she dreams of, and the thanks he gets is to have her complain about the color of the diamond on TikTok, where it went viral. Why? Because she’s an ungrateful ethics dunce, and viewers were horrified.

It gets worse! Since the video was getting so much attention, “People” magazine, which apparently has nothing better to write about, gave Rachel another platform to bitch from, and sure enough, she did. From the article “Woman Surprised When Boyfriend Got Down on One Knee and Proposed. The Type of Ring He Chose Left Her ‘Shocked’ (Exclusive)”:

“I thought the ring was gorgeous, however, I had always dreamed of my engagement ring being a colorless diamond, so it just didn’t fit my vision,” she explains. “It does not help that my birthstone is aquamarine, so I am used to receiving blue-hued stones.” “It turns out he was trying to get me a higher quality diamond and the website was a little confusing, so he thought the higher quality diamonds all threw off a little blue hue, as the pictures online were a very faint blue,” continues Mindrum. “He was scared to drop the ring, so he never took it out of the box. He only looked at in the box. So he was just as shocked as I was with how blue it was!”

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I Would Say Graham Platner Poses An Integrity Test For Democrats, Except They Have Already Flunked

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The fact that the Democratic Party is rallying around an unequivocal scumbag like Graham Platner is damning. So desperate is our aspiring totalitarian party to pack the Supreme Court, add automatic Democratic states like Puerto Rico and D.C. to the stars on the flag, open the borders and lock up their political opponents that they are willing to betray their duty to the political system not to present untrustworthy candidates to voters. It doesn’t matter that Platner, about to be nominated as a Senate candidate in Maine, is a liar, a Nazi admirer, a serial sexual offender and has no qualifications for office. The Washington Free Beacon explains his current occupation: Platner runs…

“…a boutique hobby farm—whose main function is to supply oysters to a restaurant owned by Platner’s mother…Platner, who receives roughly $4,800 per month in VA disability benefits, did not take a salary from the company last year, though his wife, a schoolteacher, did, according to his personal financial disclosure. The filing lists one entity as paying Platner more than $5,000: the Ironbound Restaurant and Inn, a “casual fine dining restaurant” and “old world luxury” hotel owned by Platner’s mother, which is the primary purchaser of his oysters.”

Wow. Sure sounds Senatorial to me! So it doesn’t matter to Democrats that Platner has no business running for high office. What matters is that he might make it possible for the Democrats to defeat RINO Susan Collins and get a Senate majority. The ends justify the means for this party, always. But if it embraces the likes of Graham Platner, that should tell everyone all they need to know about the 2026 Democratic Party.

The New York Times this week quoted several women who suggested Platner engaged in domestic abuse. Huh! I’m so old I can remember when Democrats got rid of a sitting Democratic Senator because #MeToo was the rage. One long-time Platner squeeze told the Times that Platner knew his now-covered tattoo was a Nazi symbol, telling the outlet that Platner referred to the tattoo as “my Totenkopf.” Wait: I thought it was Republicans who were the Nazis. This is so confusing…

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Confronting My Biases, #29: Absurd Fake Eyelashes

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This is really a “two-fer,” as in “two-for-one.” Here’s the bonus bias:

I visited the gloomy medical office in which I get my monthly blood analysis—I think I’ve mentioned here that the only decoration in the waiting room is a photograph of gravestones. This time I learned that the sad, monosyllabic tech who had manned the office alone for years finally had hired an assistant, and it would be she who would be sticking a needle in that prominent vein in my right arm.

As I went into the blood-letting area, I greeted her, said hello, introduced myself, cheerfully said that I was looking forward to her expertise, and basically tried to be cordial and friendly to a new acquaintance. The youngish African American woman wouldn’t answer, smile, or look me in the face; she just grimly went about her business. She did it well, too: I barely felt the needle, which is more than I can say for her boss’s performance at least 50% of the time.

However, I resent the sullen freeze-out conduct from service providers, clerks and those in similar jobs, and maybe this is my bigoted imagination, but I seem to get this treatment from young black women more often than not. It is the result of poor training, poor manners, and a rotten attitude. My current house guest, who is much younger than I, says this is a Gen Z thing, “pretending to be autistic.” I don’t care what it is: it makes life and society less pleasant, and there is no excuse for it. In the past, there have been instances where I have forced the issue and confronted such jerks, but I sure wasn’t going to try that approach with a woman about to plunge a needle into me.

Now on to the main bias…

The rude tech also was wearing the longest, thickest, fakest looking false eyelashes I have ever seen in my life. I’ve been checking the web about this phenomenon: it’s apparently part of current “black culture,” so no white person is supposed to question it, because to do so is racist. Whatever. We are doing black women no favors by being afraid to point out that this werewolf look is unprofessional, unattractive, makes women of any race look like not just hookers, but cheap hookers, and is a career handicap.

True, a tech in a back office can dress up in a mushroom suit if she wants, but I wouldn’t hire any woman wearing those lashes for a job requiring her to represent me and my company, even if the woman had the charisma of Gladys Knight. My instant reaction to a woman in eyelashes that would make Bambi self-conscious is to assume that she is not too bright, has bad taste, is inclined to blindly follow fads, and therefore untrustworthy. My conclusions about establishments that hire such woman are also uncomplimentary.

Yes, it’s a bias, just like my bias against young black men a while back who wore their pants slightly above their knees. And, as in that ridiculous case, the bias is absolutely justified.

The Obligatory June 6 Re-Post: “An Ethics Alarms D-Day Mission”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

navy-memorial-normandy

D-Day was always a big deal in the Marshall household back in Arlington, Massachusetts. My war hero father always reminded me that he was supposed to be an observer during the invasion, watching and noting what was happening while not carrying a weapon. Hand grenade shrapnel mangled his foot shortly before they hit the beaches, so Dad ended up in an army hospital, getting out just in time to cram his reconstructed foot into a boots and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. He told me that I probably owed my existence to the fact that he wasn’t part of D-Day.

I first posted this essay on Veteran’s Day several years ago, and I re-posted it on the anniversary of D-Day in 2021. In 2024, I promised to re-post the essay every June 6th, and then being the disorganized, ADD jerk that regular readers here know I am, I whiffed the very next year.

This is a remarkable story, and I do not understand why it is so seldom told that I never learned about it until 2009 (which, ironically, is when my father died). Of course, based on the historical literacy I have been seeing in the past three generations, a depressing number of American citizens don’t know what D-Day was—you know, our big victory after the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor while Woodrow Wilson was President.

***

After all these many years of reading about and watching movies and TV shows about D-Day, June 6, 1944,  I discovered how the US Navy saved the invasion and maybe the world after stumbling upon a 2009 documentary on the Smithsonian channel.

If you recall the way the story is told in “The Longest Day” and other accounts, US troops were pinned down by horrific fire from the German defenses on Omaha beach until Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum in the movie) rallied them to move forward, and by persistence his infantry troops ultimately broke through. Yet it was US destroyers off the Normandy shore that turned the tide of the battle at Omaha, an element that isn’t shown in “The Longest Day” (or “Saving Private Ryan”) at all.

Though it was not part of the plan, the captains of the Navy destroyers decided to come in to within 800 yards of the beach and use their big guns at (for them) point blank range to pound the German artillery, machine gun nests and sharpshooters. The barrage essentially wiped them out, allowing Cota’s troops to get up and over without being slaughtered. I’ve never seen that explained or depicted in any film, and according to the Smithsonian’s video, apparently it is a vital feature of the battle that had been inexplicably neglected. No monument to the US Navy commemorating its contributions on 6/6/44 was erected at Normandy until 2009.

Here’s the relevant part of account from the  Naval History website on “Operation Neptune,” the Navy counterpart to Operation Overlord:

Continue reading →

I Played My Lawyer Card Today, and I Shouldn’t Have To

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

My father once told me that everyone should have a law degree to protect them from being cheated or scammed by other lawyers. He also said law school was the best way to be trained in rhetoric and logic as well as societal ethics, since the schools had abdicated those fields. As someone who seldom practiced law, Dad proved his claim that a law degree qualifies someone for lost of non legal jobs; for better or worse, people assume that lawyers are competent at management, negotiation, governing, and problem-solving. My experience has been the same as my father’s: I’ve been hired for lots of jobs requiring non-legal skills because I’m a lawyer.

This depressing episode, however, validated my father’s original endorsement of a law degree.

A couple of weeks ago, the News Mix channel on Direct TV suddenly disappeared. It was weird: first the message said I wasn’t subscribed, then it flipped to the message I get from the MLB channel when a Red Sox-Orioles game is blacked out, except instead of mentioning a baseball game, it said “News Mix” couldn’t be found, then said it was searching for another channel that had that “game.”

So I took a deep breath, knowing the horrors I would soon face, and called customer service. First the woman I finally reached after fighting with an AI bot gaslighted me and pretended that I was doing something wrong, because, she said, the channel was really there. Then she “checked” and said I wasn’t subscribed to the channel, which I knew was untrue: I have regularly checked it every morning to see how Fox News, CNN, MSNOW and BBC America were spinning the same stories, and what news each is deliberately ignoring or lying about. Channel 71 or 200 gave me access to those four stations and two weather channels. It’s part of my package. And it was gone. “Poof!”

After arguing with the agent, who had an indecipherable accent, she transferred me to a supervisor, who suspiciously sounded like the same person—could she have been pretending to be her own supervisor? But her clone was clearly smarter and spoke a bit clearer and slower. But this supervisor also tried to deny anything was wrong. After I argued with her for a while, she said, and I’m not kidding, “OK, I’m going to be honest with you: I received a complaint about NewsMix right before this call.”

OH! NOW you’re going to be honest and not pretend I’m making this up? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Asshole.

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Oh Great: Another Car Has Been Added To The Karmelo Anthony Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms first mentioned the Karmelo Anthony case a year ago in the context of how completely screwed up woke Minnesota has become. Anthony, a teen who allegedly stabbed an unarmed white student to death at a school track meet, is the beneficiary of a GoFundMe effort that raised a large sum of money. Many conservative pundits wrote that this was a black backlash against a racist white woman who had attracted large donations to support her when a black man posted a video on social media that caught her in the act of calling him a “nigger.” I wrote in part,

“Anthony, who is black, is accused of stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, who was white, to death during a rain delay at their high school track meet. Anthony has not faced trial yet and claims that he in innocent by reason of self-defense. The online fundraising campaign on his behalf has raised over a half-million dollars. The clear difference between that and [the racist white woman’s] ill-gotten booty: Anthony hasn’t been found guilty of anything yet, and raising money for his defense is not, as some are claiming, the same as rewarding him for murdering a white kid. The accused teen’s family is the object of this fundraising campaign, and it is not inherently endorsing a black kid murdering a white kid to show sympathy for his family with a contribution.”

This ethics train wreck is still running. Anthony’s trial is finally getting started, and, naturally, the usual race-hustlers and victim-mongers are already claiming that the young man is another victim of racism by evil whites. Protesters were out in front of the courthouse chanting “Self-defense is not a crime!” They have no idea whether Karmelo has a legitimate self-defense case, but he’s black, so that’s all they need to know that he’s being framed by the racist justice system.

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Friday Open Forum, or “Help Me Find More Bananas Ethics Stories!”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

On my birthday (also known as “Finding Jack’s father dead in his chair day”) in 2025, I began a post thusly…

“I missed this pre-Great Stupid story in 2019, when it was a harbinger of stupid things to come, and missed it again this year, when it was back in the news a few days ago. It wasn’t too long ago that Fred and Pennagain reliably alerted me to ethics stories around the web that I otherwise might have missed. A few of you do send me story ideas regularly, but something like this shouldn’t slip through the cracks.”

“This” was a recurring story about various reactions to absurdist artist Maurizio Cattelan taping a banana to a wall at an art show in 2019 and calling it “Comedian.” In 2019, performance artist David Datuna ripped the banana off the wall and ate it, so Cattalan just taped another banana to another wall. I missed that one and in 2024 was urging readers to keep my EA runway full. I am doing so again. I can’t find every rich ethics story out there all by myself. I still welcome guest post submissions too.

The story in 2024 was that a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Justin Sun bought the silly artwork for $6.2 million at auction and, in front of cameras, ate the banana as a gesture of conspicuous consumption to show how rich he was. Well, “Comedians” sparked another stupid incident last month: The Pompidou-Metz museum in Paris announced that it had filed a criminal complaint for theft against the unknown art-lover (or banana-lover) who took down the most recent banana to be featured in “Comedians” and ate it.

The museum also announced that it had replaced the banana.

Now it’s your turn again to write about more trenchant ethics events like that one, or more sophisticated issue that may lack appeal.

Stop Making Me Defend Debbie Wasserman Schultz!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ick, yuck, pooey! In the EA “Stop making me defend…” series, there has never been a subject more revolting than Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). She’s noted in past posts for her unethical quotes, her multiple scandals (here, too), her ignorant speech patterns (also here) and her lies. She was the main miscreant in Hillary Clinton’s rigged Presidential nomination in 2016. The only reason I haven’t focused on this awful, unethical woman lately is that the Democrats have so many younger recruits who are as bad as she is or worse.

However, the one thing I will never criticize DWS for is her color.

Other Democrats, however, are not so forgiving.

After Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation last month creating a new congressional map in Florida, Rep. Wasserman Schultz decided not to run for re-election in her altered 22nd Congressional District, where she lives and where the voters are apparently morons since they have voted for this ethics-free creep for 11terms. Instead, Wasserman Schultz opted to run in the now more Democratic-leaning 20th District. Ah, but that district has long elected black members of Congress. So, true to their party’s baked-in racism, black leaders and candidates in the 20th are furious that a white bitch is daring to encroach on their domain.

“I would not have expected the call would come from inside the house,” said Elijah Manley, a teacher and activist who was the first candidate to enter the primary race for the district’s seat. “I didn’t think a white Democrat would be the one to take away a black seat.” Rapper Luther “Luke” Campbell, also running for the seat, said, “If her strategy is to come in because there are multiple Black candidates and hope we ‘split the vote’ … that’s the same old playbook — divide and conquer.” “At a time when aggressive redistricting has already weakened minority voting strength across Florida, the preservation of Black political representation is not optional,” the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida said in a statement. “It is essential.”

I keep trying to imagine a political party throwing a fit on the grounds that a black candidate is daring to run for a “white” seat. That would be seen, correctly, as racism straight up. But Democrats have programmed their black supporters to embrace “good racism” while maintaining that all blacks are cookie-cutter clones who will think and behave as their color demands, rather than as objective and patriotic Americans seeking what is the right course for all.

I would vote for a block of cheese over Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but black Democrats opposing her based on her race shows how warped, corrupted and bigoted their party has become.