Law & Law Enforcement

The UK’s Frightening Warning On Cultural Pollution From Assimilation-Adverse Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

There are some cultures and some immigrants, refugees and illegal aliens that a nation has good reason to avoid letting into its territory. Islamic culture and Muslims are a blazing example. Europe and the UK are learning this hard lesson—that cultural diversity is only a boon if a nation’s traditional culture is nurtured and protected—too late. It remains to be seen if the U.S. will.

The flashing neon sign that the Mad Left will pooh-pooh, shrug off, deny or refuse to acknowledge? This:

Nearly 70 dog breeds in the UK could be banned under proposed new legislation on the sham theory that they are “unhealthy.” A new 10-point checklist of “extreme” physical characteristics will decide which dogs will suffer from health problems due to certain physical characteristics. The excuses for banning the breeds include “mottled coloration,” “excessive” skin folds (like English bulldogs), “fat faces” (like pit bulls and mastiffs), “temperament,” bulging outward-turning eyes (pugs), drooping eyelids, being low to the ground (like Queen Elizabeth’s Corgis) and more.

Don’t kid yourself and believe that this assault on freedom and family has anything to do with canine health. This an assault on dogs by Muslims, who believe that dogs are “unclean,” as Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian Muslim New Yorker and activist, said in a recent social media post. This led Representative Randy Fine (R-Fla.) to reply, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” In response to that, Congressional Democrats are demanding that Fine be censured, because, after all, tearing down American culture is part of the current party’s mission.

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Ethics Dunce: Trump’s Justice Department

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Trump administration last week proposed a rule that would shield Department of Justice lawyers from independent ethics investigations and bar discipline from the states and the District of Columbia. My legal ethics lawyer association’s listserv virtually melted down over it. Almost all of the association’s members are Trump Deranged, but in this case they had just cause to flip out.

The proposed rule would violate a federal law known as the McDade Amendment, which holds government lawyers are still subject to the ethics rules of the states in which they practice, “to the same extent and in the same manner” as every other lawyer licensed in the state. In addition to that, the proposed rule makes no sense: the state bars giveth licenses to practice law, and they obviously can taketh them away.

The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) came into being as a compromise measure long ago when politically motivated state bar ethics boards were applying different standards to government lawyers based on partisan interpretations of the ethics rules. OPR has never been as zealous in enforcing ethical standards as local bar associations, and the bars aren’t particularly zealous either. The D.C. bar has had several high-profile spats with OPR over the years, insisting, and rightly so, that it shouldn’t be required to ratify an OPR hall pass for unethical conduct.

I assume, and hope, that the clearly impractical rule change is DOA, and like so many other proposals and floated options from the Trump Administration, it is more of a negotiating ploy than a serious proposal. The truth is that virtually all of the bar associations are dominated by progressives and Democrats, and consider a lawyer being willing to work for the Trump Administration as strong evidence of inherently unethical character. It is also true, as I have discovered to my horror over the past year, that many of the bar associations are untrustworthy and corrupt. This was revealed to me in part when the D.C. bar, whose legal ethics CLE I had been prominently and successfully teaching for three decades, fired me after I tried to open a legal ethics can of worms—the bar’s unique non-lawyer partner option—that would reveal a gross and wriggling failure on the bar’s part to police its members, resulting in nation-wide fraud and harm to tort victims.

A New York Times op-ed about the unethical proposed rule deceptively (and risibly) asserts,

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AI Robocall Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This has to be illegal. If it isn’t, it is certainly unethical.

I got a call this morning with a caller ID that stated it was from a hospital. If I say “hello” and there is an odd pause, usually followed by a telltale <click> and voice saying “Hello?” I hang up immediately. because it’s a robocall. This time, however, there was no click, and a clear, unaccented, assertive voice called out, “Hello!” I was curious, so I responded,”What do you want?” “We’ve been trying to reach you,” the cheerful young woman said. “Have you been made aware of Medicare cash paybacks?” THEN I hung up. I know an AI bot when I hear one.

The problem is, most people over the age of about 40 do not. This one was good, the best I’ve heard yet. Way back in 2015, Ars Technica wrote about the then-new use of interactive robocalls, but that was before the AI revolution. Last night I had been watching a new streaming series starring Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis in which a character is addicted to conversing with an AI version of her dead wife. These fake people are improving at a logorhythmic rate, and in about a week the non-humans calling me will be undetectable. That doesn’t mean they will be the same as real callers, which means neglecting to announce to an individual that the voice on the other end of the line is AI-generated is fraud, dishonest, a lie, and, of course, unethical.

There needs to be a tough law or regulation against this practice. Now.

The Classic Ethics Problem That Isn’t As Hard As Everyone Thinks It Is…

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

I’ve been hearing and reading debates about the old (1884) criminal case The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens since law school, and I must say, I’m a bit sick of it.

A wealthy lawyer from Australia purchased bought a yacht named the Mignonette and hired a Captain Dudley to sail it to him it from England. Dudley and his three crew members encountered a violent a storm off the coast of Africa, and the Mignonette was swamped. Its captain and crew escaped in a lifeboat with minimal provisions. After more than three weeks adrift, the captain decided that all of them would die of hunger and thirst unless extreme measures were taken, so he took them. He decided that cabin boy Richard Parker, a 17-year-old orphan, should be slaughtered and eaten. The captain’s reasoning: Parker was already delirious from drinking seawater, so he was deemed the weakest and least likely to survive anyway. The three men killed to boy, collected his blood in a bailer and drank it, then removed his heart and liver and ate them.

It worked! They were rescued in time, just a few days later in fact. Dudley and the First Mate Edwin Stephens were also prosecuted and found guilty of murder, a result that was considered revolutionary, since resorting to cannibalism in such dire circumstances was considered a normal course of action, “the custom of the sea.” In the U.S. at the time, the courts widely accepted the “necessity doctrine,” which excuses some illegal acts if they are performed in good faith to prevent a greater harm.

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Ethics Hero: Laura Hughes

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The widow of high school teacher Jason Hughes, 40, who died during a student prank gone horribly wrong in Gainesville, Georgia, is demonstrating how some human beings can overcome anger, bitterness and the emotional need for retribution, choosing compassion and empathy instead.

Around 11 p.m. on March 6, Jordan Wallace, Elijah Tate Owens, Aiden Hucks, Ana Katherine Luque and Ariana Cruz, all 18-years-old, toilet-papered trees outside the Hughes’ home, a continuation of their school’s tradition of such pranks during exam week. As the group piled into two vehicles to flee, Jason Hughes ran out of his home to confront the teens, but tripped and fell into the road. Wallace, who had already begun speeding away in a pickup truck, accidentally ran over the prone teacher. The teens left their vehicles to render aid, but Hughes perished in the incident.

All five teens were charged with criminal trespassing and littering on private property; Wallace has has been charged with first degree murder as well as reckless driving.

Laura Hughes, who is also a teacher, is pleading with authorities to drop the criminal charges. “We ask that you continue to pray for our family and also for the students involved in the accident along with their families,” she said in a statement to reporters. “Please join us in extending grace and mercy to them as Christ has done for us…This is a terrible tragedy, and our family is determined to prevent a separate tragedy from occurring, ruining the lives of these students.”

The late father of two (above, next to his wife) wasn’t trying to angrily confront the pranksters but “was excited and waiting to catch them in the act,” Laura told the New York Times. Insisting that her husband was not pursuing the students to reprimand them but rather to express comradery with their innocently-intended prank. Hughes said that criminal punishment “would be counter to Jason’s lifelong dedication of investing in the lives of these children.”

First degree murder sounds like extreme over-charging by authorities. The entire episode is a blazing example of the caprices of moral luck. I agree that the students’ punishment should be left to the school if Laura Hughes doesn’t want to press charges. Ethics tells us that it is time to mitigate the damage, not to make the damage worse.

Welcome To Unethical Rationalization 31A, “The Hypocrite’s Balm,” or “Any Port in a Storm!”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This is the first new rationalization added to the rationalizations list in a long time, though I have at least two others I have been pondering for a while. Rationalization #31 A, however hit me like Pete Buttigieg’s imaginary maul when a respected legal ethicist wrote on the listserv for the Association of Professional Liability Lawyers today that “Lefties” like him were suddenly embracing state’s rights in response to the need to “resist” President Trump, and attempted to justify this reversal by shrugging, “Any port in a storm!”

And there it was. I could hardly believe that wasn’t on the list already, but it wasn’t. I assigned “The Hypocrite’s Balm” as a sub-rationalization to the infamous #31, The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now.” I also could have placed it under #25. The Coercion Myth: “I have no choice!,” but it is distinct from both.

#31 stands for brutal Utilitarianism, “the ends justify the means.” #25 is the whine of someone who is too cowardly to make the kind of tough ethical choice that has unpleasant non-ethical consequences. But “Any port in a storm” is the motto of activists who decide that their minds are made up, facts and logic no longer appeal to them, and they are willing to ally themselves with beliefs, organizations, individuals and missions that they have previously reviled in order to avoid admitting they may have been wrong, or that they should reassess their position based on new information, experience, or the metaphorical ice water of reality being thrown in their faces.

Rationalization #31 A describes the warped, desperate and destructive mindset of the Axis of Unethical Conduct today along with the Trump Deranged. So obsessed are they with their hatred of Donald Trump and the fact that he has at least temporarily derailed the Mad Left’s march to single party, nanny state, multicultural, anti-American DEI dominance that they are willing to anchor themselves in “ports” sane liberals would have avoided like ebola in the recent past.

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The Founders Agree: Of Course Operation Epic Fury Is Legal

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Rod Martin is a conservative pundit; he also, unlike most pundits, has actually accomplished things in his life other than producing hot air. He was the founder and CEO of Martin Capital and helped start PayPal, and can justly call himself a futurist and tech entrepreneur. Now he writes a substack when the spirit moves him, and he just authored a marvelous Shut-Up-You-Don’t-Know-What-You’re Talking-About historical review for the Axis knee-jerks and my Trump Deranged Facebook Friends (and, I suspect, yours) who are calling the President’s action in Iran “illegal.”

They should be embarrassed, but won’t be; I am embarrassed. As someone who prides himself on being informed reagarding American Presidential history, I knew Trump’s latest FAFO move was supported by precedent, but only looked as far back as Barack Obama’s administration, more for its ethics estoppel value to all of the President’s current critics who were silent as Obama bombed Libya without Congressional authorization and gleefully droned-to-death American citizens abroad because he deemed them a threat to the Republic.

I’m a moron. There is a much stronger case to be made, indeed an irrefutable one, that President Trump was well within his powers and the boundaries of the Constitution. As I read Martin’s essay, once again, as has been happening frequently of late, the image of my beloved but diabolical Jack Russell Terrier Dickens came to mind, madly shaking something in my face to prove a point. I’m Dickens, and the Trump Deranged are my face.

Martin begins by pointing out that the base of the Iwo Jima Memorial, just a few miles from my home, contains more than a giant iconic statue depicting a critical moment in World War II. It also includes a list of America’s foreign conflicts. “Many are declared wars or battles in them; many are not,” he writes. “But one sticks out in my mind during the current debate over the constitutionality of Donald Trump’s military actions: the French Naval War of 1798-1800, more commonly known as “the Undeclared Naval War with France.”

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The Axis, the Trump-Deranged and the Anti-American Americans Beclowning Themselves During the Iran Misson, 6:48 AM-6:48 PM, EST…

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Me: Not really. All that matters to these tiresome crazies is that President Trump is doing it, so it must be bad. That was a 6:48 AM post. The Axis only got worse, as the Left threw a tantrum over its failed ideology being exposed once again as the weak, foolish sham it is…

Me: Not soon enough. Carter allowed Iran to commit an act of war by kidnapping the U.S. Embassy personnel and holding them for ransom. For all these years, the Democratic Party has been the weenie party, making the world a more dangerous place. Now it is furious because the U.S. is finally using its power as it should have all along. There has to be “a big kid on the block,” or the world goes to Hell, and the Big Kid had better be the one nation that aspires to seek freedom and ethics.

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On The State of the Union Message

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I haven’t done this before and may never do it again, but I found conservative podcaster Vice Dao’s assessment of Trump’s State of the Union Addresses pretty much spot-on, so I’m posting a lengthy section from his podcast.

Was last night a tipping point, a moment that history will show suddenly made the previous victims of the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s Big Lies, propaganda and acceptance of Trump Derangement as a justifiable attitude toward the elected President of the United States of America slap their collective foreheads at last exclaiming, “Wait, what have I been thinking? The Democratic Party is nuts! How can anyone in their right mind support such anti-American crackpots?” Time will tell. As Dao says, Democrats and the Axis media seem to be whistling past the graveyard now, giving the agreed-upon line that ‘yeah, Trump pleased his racist base because that’s who was watching, but State of the Unions never have any lasting impact, and that means this one won’t.‘

They hope. I wouldn’t be so sure of that, and they probably aren’t so sure themselves. Sure, Trump loaded up his speech with his usual hyperbole, fudged statistics and claims that this or that was the best, the greatest, the most wonderful ever, giving the New York Times and the rest plenty of opportunity to “factcheck” the speech and call Trump a liar. (The Times really and truly published a “factcheck” of Trump’s speech before he made it, apparently oblivious to how biased and unfair that looked.) Nobody is going to remember any of the usual drivel, which is indeed standard SOTU blather. What they will remember, because unless Republicans are even more incompetent than I already think they are, the GOP won’t let anyone forget it, is the two anti-American “Squad” members, Representatives Omar (who has said that she cares about Somalians more than Americans) and Tlaib (who is a Palestinian, anti-Semitic mole) screaming at the President from the sidelines, wearing “Fuck ICE” pins. The public will remember that not one Democrat had the sense to avoid falling into Trump’s well-laid trap, refusing to stand when he asked for an impromptu vote on whether they agreed that the duty of the government was to protect citizens rather than illegal immigrants.

“One of the great things about the State of the Union,” he said, “is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their representatives really believe. Tonight, I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration in reaffirming a fundamental principle. If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

No Democrats among those who chose not to boycott the event—how unifying of them!–stood. The entire Republican contingent stood and cheered. “With one maneuver,” conceded the Times today, “Mr. Trump divided the room, asking viewers to see the two camps as he saw them: There were the Good Americans and there were those willing to jeopardize the country’s security.”

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From “Non-Partisan” Pro Publica, a Lie and a Misrepresentation in a “Good Illegal Immmigrant” Story.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

ProPublica is certainly full of itself.

“ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” it crows. “We dig deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account.” The reality is that whatever meaning “independent’ carries in that statement, it is deceitful. The companion word is supposed to be “objective.” Pro Publican only cares about Republican abuses of power, although it will occasionally tweak a Democrat to maintain the illusion of fairness. It is another Democratic Party ally, like CREW, Media Matters and (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), which has an Ethics Alarms dossier longer than my arm, that poses as non-partisan so its constant attacks on one side of the political spectrum are trusted by the inattentive and gullible.

Today it treats its readers to another “good illegal immigrant” story. The dishonest headline: Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases.

This is a lie. It suggest that legal immigrants and citizens of the U.S. may be deported based on child care violations. Here is the story behind the headline:

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