Around the World

Warning to Democrats: Beware the Cognitive Dissonance Scale! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s fun watching CNN talking heads cover the events in the Middle East looking as if they are dying of some kind of painful abdominal parasite because they have to say positive things about President Trump. The only time I have seen them look more miserable was on election night last November. Every time these hacks play the moving footage of Israeli families reacting to seeing their loved ones again after being released from Hamas’s tunnels, their expressions look more appropriate for someone who has just watched a beheading than a joyous reunion.

None of them are mentioning the effect today will have on the Democratic Party’s desperate (and stupid) shutdown gambit, but they should. For President Trump is rising into positive territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale. When that happens, it will necessarily push those things that he opposes down the scale, for that’s how cognitive dissonance works. Except for the hopelessly Trump Deranged, the members of the public who are inclined to be sympathetic to the Democrats in the shutdown will be less so the more the President rises, even though the Hamas-Israel deal he brokered is completely unrelated to it.

The politics of the shutdown are ultimately a PR battle, and the more popular Trump is, the worse the Democrats’ prospects of winning it becomes. The Trump-Hate/ Israel Hate town meeting CNN is about to host featuring AOC and Bernie Sanders could not be timed more horribly for Democrats, foes of Trump, and anti-Israel activists.

True, foreign policy triumphs usually create only temporary bumps in Presidential popularity. Remember that the first Iraq war pushed George H.W. Bush into the 90s for a while. President Trump’s approval will start to fall again, but Democrats were already losing the PR battle over the shutdown. Trump’s big day can only make the situation worse. They ignore the cognitive dissonance scale at their peril.

Addendum: WordPress tells me that this post should have a “Joe Biden” tag. That’s smoking gun evidence that WordPress is tainted with Axis bias: the Left’s current myth-making, along with “Antifa? What Antifa?” is that Biden deserves any credit for the Gaza breakthrough at all.

Trump Derangement, Canadian Style

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Andrew Coyne of the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote and had published this Trump-hate screed, and, naturally, it was re-posted and widely liked and loved by my many Trump Deranged Facebook Friends. It has everything: bias, spin, fantasy, Axis talking points swallowed whole, hysteria, fearmongering and hatehatehate.

And no, the thing is not worth fisking. All one can do is shake one’s head. You might want to review the “Big Lies of the Resistance,” which were mostly compiled during the first Trump administration. Are they all here?

Read on…

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Ethics Dunces: The UN General Assembly Members Who Walked Out On Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Address

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This one is easy, or I hope it is. I shouldn’t have to go into much detail about how most of the United Nations disgraced itself today, even by the lowered standards of its recent bottom-of-the-metaphorical-barrel ethical incoherence, by walking out of the hall just before Netanyahu began his speech.

Delegates didn’t walk out on Fidel Castro, who betrayed his nation and enslaved it after promising to be Cuba’s liberator. They didn’t walk out on Nikita Khrushchev, who was a significant architect of The Great Purge under Stalin that murdered between 700,000 and 1.2 million people. The United Nations has defended, supported and honored dozens of depots, dictators and mass killers, but its members chose the freely elected leader of the only democracy in the perpetually violent and messed-up Middle East—which the U.N. is primarily responsible for messing up in the first place—to show such symbolic contempt, disrespect and stupidity. As Netanyahu said in the clear and persuasive speech that followed this insult, the gesture supported terrorism, giving Hamas reason to believe the horrific sneak terrorist attack in 2023 was a diplomatic success, in addition to killing innocent Jews, the Palestinian national pastime.

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Sunrise Open Forum & a Few Topics To Consider [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

I’m in Richmond, preparing to do a 3 hour legal ethics CLE seminar for one of my last remaining live presentation clients since the stupid Wuhan virus lockdown ruined my business, along with oh, so much else. (Thanks, CDC! Thanks, teachers! Thanks, Democrats! Thanks, “science.” Thanks, fear-mongering news media! Assholes….) I barely have time to wake up after a long drive in the wee hours last night from Alexandria, so I’m going to have to rely on you, dear readers, to keep things lively while I am otherwise occupied.

One thing to look forward to:EA will launch a new regular column authored by our alien philosopher, Extradimensional Cephalopod! We have had two other attempts at a regular column to inject diverse (ooo, that word!) ideas and opinions here beyond the guest posts and Comments of the Day, both evaporating for various reasons, in the case of the most recent contributor, incipient insanity. “Curmie’s” Trump Derangement proceeds apace: in his latest post, he declares that “There is no such thing as free speech if a state employee can be fired for saying something someone in power finds distasteful.” This is nonsense, as the Curmie I knew would have quickly pointed out. “Distasteful” is a deliberately and deceitfully vague term: any 12-year-old could probably imagine dozens of “distasteful” comments that a government employer could justifiably decide are intolerable from an employee. The courts agree, you know.

In other news, France and other U.S. allies decided to make terrorism great again, rewarding Hamas for its October 7 attack on Israel by “recognizing” the non-existent Palestinian state. President Trump correctly excoriated those nations at the U.N.

Meanwhile, in more important news, Major League Baseball announced that the new robo-strike calling system will indeed be instituted next season. It’s about damn time. In the game I listened to on the way to Richmond (Boston defeated Toronto, 4-1), the announcers admitted that the home plate umpire was missing calls all through the game. “Well, that pitch was well off the plate, but that’s how he’s been calling strikes all night!” Boy am I sick of that.

Finally, a “The Unabomber was right” note. My new Apple smartphone wouldn’t allow me to set an alarm for this morning as insurance against the hotel skipping my wake-up call until I signed up for its “health app,” which took 8 screens, and ended up telling me that I shouldn’t get up when I wanted to.

Well, wish me luck. I have about 150 Virginia lawyers to make ethical this morning, only 14 of them in person. %$#@!& lockdown….

Added: Oh, I forgot: Disney relented and let Jimmy Kimmel back on the air last night. Oh, so what? If ABC wants to have a late night show hosted by a not-too-bright, occasionally funny, progressive scold lose money, that’s their choice. The President should shut up about it; he just gives Kimmel significance and attention that his meager talent doesn’t justify. And threatening ABC for its broadcast content is beyond stupid, as well as unconstitutional. Trump’s thin skin regarding criticism is a serious weakness, but as with the others, he appears incapable of ameliorating it.

The Hyundai Raid: Parallel Universes

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Here is how Fox News reported on the massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia:

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the arrest of 475 illegal migrants during a major immigration enforcement raid on Thursday at a Hyundai electric car battery factory in Georgia. 

HSI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Steven Schrank noted that while the raid was at a Hyundai facility, not all the migrants worked for the parent company. Some worked for subcontractors at the site.

“We are sending a clear and unequivocal message that those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy and violate federal laws will be held accountable,” Schrank said during a news conference on Friday.

Here is how the New York Times reported the same story (Gift link!):

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Unethical Quote of the Week, Ethics Dunce, Incompetent Elected Official, “It Isn’t What It Is” Lie of the Year, and General All-Around Asshole: Rep Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“There’s a free speech crisis in America today. But there’s no free speech crisis in Britain.”

 —Maryland Democratic Rep. Jaime Raskin, proving for all time that he is a shameless partisan whom Marylanders should hang their heads in shame for inflicting on Congress and their fellow Americans.

Raskin really said that. No, I’m not kidding, he really did. He did! I’m not making it up!

The rapid government attack on free speech in Great Britain, where it has never been particularly strong, has been the subject of great concern among civil libertarians in the UK and here, for very good reasons. As Matt Taibbi, the red-pilled former Rolling Stone pundit recently wrote, “The arrest of Graham Linehan for his tweets is one of many examples that show [Great Britain] should not be treated as a free one.” (You can read about the Linehan scandal here.) Indeed. British citizens are being punished for peacefully protesting, for petitioning the government, for critical social media posts, and even for displaying the British flag. Yet Raskin says that there is no free speech crisis. His idea of a free speech crisis is CBS being forced to pay the piper after engaging in election interference to try to get an idiot elected President of the United States. Meanwhile, here in the good ‘ol USA, thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the gradual exposure of censorious Leftist colleges and universities, and the demise of Biden’s proto- fascist Justice Department, free speech is healthier than it has been in quite a while.

After Raskin made his fatuous statement in the House hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation,” was held to discuss EU and U.K. censorship, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) quickly made the obvious rebuttal: “The gentleman alleges there’s no free speech in America under Donald Trump while his staff member holds up countless articles criticizing the Trump administration.”

The Organization That Will Help You Kill Yourself for $20,000…What a Deal! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“People” magazine is carrying the depressing story of Maureen Slough, (above), an Irish woman, 58, who told her family she was going on vacation to Lithuania with a friend. However, she confided to two friends that she would really be traveling alone to Switzerland, where a non-profit there would help her to kill herself.

And that’s what she did, after paying the organization, Pegasos, in Liestal, Switzerland, £15,000 (a bit more than 20,000 U.S. dollars) for the assistance.

A brief digression: Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and had been since 1942. It isn’t euthanasia which is illegal but often isn’t punished here in the U.S. and elsewhere: the patients kill themselves with prescribed drugs, and doctors aren’t involved beyond writing a legal prescription. (Writing a prescription for a drug that the doctor knows the patient will use to commit suicide is, in my view, a violation of medical ethics.)

Maureen’s adult daughter received a text message on WhatsApp from Pegasos informing her that her mother had died. That was nice of them. “What was worse was not only did I get the text on WhatsApp, they had advised me that her ashes would be posted to me in 6-8 weeks,” she said. “In that very moment, because I was alone, I just sat there with the baby and cried… I just felt like my world ended.”

Later, Slough’s ashes arrived.

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Ethics Hero: Maluma

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here I am, with almost a dozen important ethics issues languishing thanks to my (I hope) temporary incapacity, picking the least consequential of them all to begin EA’s blogging day. Go figure.

Colombian rapper Maluma (whom I had never heard of before) halted his Mexico City concert to admonish an audience member who had brought a baby, presumably hers, to the event. He was in the middle of a song, in fact, when he noticed the infant in the audience and called out the woman.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to bring a 1-year-old baby to a concert where the decibels are this fucking high?” he asked. “That baby doesn’t even know what it’s doing here! Next time, protect their ears or something. For real. It’s heavy. It’s your responsibility.”

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It’s Time To Concede That The NYT Is Just A Partisan Propaganda Organ and Little Else

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Above is a Times front page in which the paper piled on to the international criticism of Israel in the Left’s “Think of the Children!” effort to blame Jews for the consequences of the war Hamas started and refuses to end.

“Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition,” the original caption to the photo said. Evil Israel is starving innocent children to death! Then, five days after the story was published, on July 29, the Times issued an editor’s note (buried at the bottom of the article) as well as a brief statement on its communications social media page that corrected its story, writing that it “had learned” that the child had underlying medical issues that affected his muscle development. Otherwise it did not retract any part of the feature, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” including its now especially dubious claim that the child was suffering from malnutrition due to food shortages.

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[My leg is still killing me, I hope not literally, and sitting at my desk is excruciating, but I have to post this, truncated though it may be.]

The President should not cave to the “Think of the Children!” lobby that wants the United States to send aid to a rogue, terrorist state that is also the enemy of a just combatant the U.S. is supporting. It seems that he is. That is asinine and cowardly.

If children are starving in Gaza, the Gazans, and specifically Hamas, are responsible. Not Israel. Not the United States. The mission in warfare is to win the war, and one does not win a war by making warfare less unpleasant for the enemy. Frankly, it astounds me that I, or anyone, should have to make this point.

The last time the United States won a war (I do not count Grenada) was World War II. The Pentagon did not allow the publication of photographs of dead babies and malnourished Japanese and German children for exactly the reason we are seeing now, and have seen many times since 1945. War is ugly, and winning a war requires acts that in any other context are rightly regarded as immoral and unethical. This what a professional military is for: it (theoretically) doesn’t become sentimental about the necessities of warfare.

[Footnote: This was one of my late father’s objections to “Saving Private Ryan.” He said it was an insult to George Marshall and a deliberate effort to confuse the public to claim that the General would feel obligated to reduce the sacrifice of any single family while his army’s mission was to win a war.]

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