Psst! Sam Jones! The Idea of Being an “Influencer” Is Not To Influence Stupid People To Be Even More Stupid!

I can already tell: this is going to be a Great Stupid day.

And what better way to start it off than to visit the idiot above,Samantha Jones, also known as @samstrays on Instagram? For some ridiculous reason, the American has over 92,000 followers on social media platforms, where she purports to be a wildlife and hunting enthusiast. Below Sam is shown in an earlier incident, molesting what looks like a giant echidna, though maybe Sam is only two feet tall.

Her current infamy, however, has resulted from the incident shown in the photo under the headline, when she recently, while visiting Australia, snatched a baby wombat from the side of a road and ran to her car with the creature’s furious mother in desperate pursuit. After the “influencer” posted the sequence, it sparked an international incident.

“I caught a baby wombat!” Jones says to the camera. “OK, momma’s right there and she is pissed,” Jones adds, as the animal’s mother runs towards her. Jones then put the wombat down and drove away. The footage, which she shared on Instagram, sparked immediate fury in Australia.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong called out the ‘ugly American,’ saying, “It looked pretty dreadful, didn’t it…I think everyone who would have seen that would have thought, ‘leave the baby wombat alone. Leave it with its mum.’” An online petition calling for her deportation from Australia started amassing signatures, as home affairs minister Tony Burke announced that the conditions of Jones’ visa were being reviewed. Reportedly, Jones has left the country before she could be kicked out, deleting the offending video in the process. The Australian Wildlife Rescue Agency WIRES has weighed in to state that separating a baby wombat from its mother is a crime.

The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, even got involved. “Maybe she might try some other Australian animals,” he said at a press conference, when asked about the incident. “Take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there. Take another animal that can actually fight back rather than stealing a baby wombat from its mother. See how you go there.”

Please, God, don’t let President Trump get involved in this and start a wildlife harassment war. Just have a bunch of birds shower this idiot with droppings, like that scene in “High Anxiety,” or something. Maybe have her social media followers bombarded as well.

Goodbye, Elphie, and Thanks

My sister had to have her beloved Havanese Elphie (short for Elphaba, the character in “Wicked”) euthanized early this morning just after midnight. That’s not Elphie above, but it’s close: I don’t have a picture of her.

I’ve dreaded this day for my little sister almost from the moment she brought Elphie home as a puppy 16 years ago. My sister not only had never owned (or lived with) a dog before; she had been phobic about dogs her entire life, an unfortunate mindset she inherited from my mother. But true to her defiant, determined character, once my sister, divorced after a miserable marriage, knew that both of her children would be moving far away from the D.C. area, she set out to become a dog owner. “I’m not going to come home to an empty house every day,” she told me, “and for once, I want to have someone close who is always happy to see me.”

She researched dogs for a full year (“Dogs 101” on the Animal Planet channel was a crucial resource), ultimately deciding on the Havanese, the Cuban bichon, as the ideal “starter dog.” It was a wise choice, as the breed is small, friendly, devoted to its owner and innately adorable. I was amazed how quickly the little dog made a positive difference in my sister’s life and whole outlook on life. Always insecure and prone to depression, she seemed happy literally for the first time since childhood. Within months my sister went from being a dog owner to a dog nut, learning all the breeds, bonding with the last two dogs Grace and I owned (sweet Rugby and then Spuds), and vastly enlarging her circle of friends by meeting the other dog owners in her neighborhood, and my sister had never had a large number of friends before, and often none at all.

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Sometimes, Though Rarely, Two Wrongs DO Make a Right…

Marco Evaristti’s “art” titled “And Now You Care?” at an art exhibition in Copenhagen consisted of three live piglets confined by two shopping carts on a pile of straw. The artist announced that the animals would be given water but no food until they died. Allowing the piglets to starve to death while on public exhibition was, you see, a powerful commentary on animal cruelty in Denmark, one of the world’s largest pork exporters. Evaristti explained yesterday that he aimed to “wake up the Danish society,” which is insufficiently concerned that tens of thousands of pigs die each day in Denmark because of poor conditions.

Oh, good plan.

Now do child neglect.

The exhibition was set inside a former butcher’s warehouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen. Large paintings of the Danish flag and slaughtered pigs hung on the walls around the doomed little pigs. “Mona Lisa” this wasn’t.

The pigs were expected to live up to five days, but Evaristti said he also would not eat or drink along with them. That makes starving the helpless animals better, apparently. But as the exhibition space was being cleaned—it looked like a pig sty!— over the weekend, members of a Danish animal rights organization stole the piglets. Evaristti, says he does not expect his art to be returned.

Good.

But Why Did They Have To Kill the Dog? [Updated]

[Skip to the end for more details released after the post first went up.]

I woke up this morning to the disheartening news that one of my all-time favorite screen actors, Gene Hackman, had died. He was 95 and had been retired for twenty years, so the news was not exactly shocking. However, the details of what police found in Hackman’s Santa Fe, N.M., home indicate a larger tragedy: along with the actor, police found he wife, Betsy Arakawa and a German Shepherd.

Since the police have stated that there were no signs of “foul play,” meaning that the group did not appear to have been murdered, and that there was no immediate evidence of a murder-suicide scenario, as when actor Gig Young was found dead after murdering his young wife, the scene still strongly hints of a suicide pact. Elderly couples do this here and there; some even think that it is romantic. (James Stewart’s last movie, made-for-TV, was co-starring with Bette Davis as an elderly couple who decide to kill themselves in the interests of avoiding pain, misery and expense.) Mrs. Hackman, Betsy Arakawa, was only 64, but who knows? Maybe she had just been diagnosed with dementia or some other dread disease. Maybe the duel suicides were her idea.

But why kill the dog?

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Ethics Quiz: Mouse in the House

I have caught over 40 mice over the past three years in the humane mouse trap my late wife insisted upon. We used to carry them over to the woods near our home in the trap, and release them as I sang “Born Free.”

But today, for the first time, I woke up to find a terrified baby mouse in the trap on a day when it is freezing (and snowing) outside. I do not want to care for a pet mouse; I have enough to worry about already. I do not want to put the little thing in a position where it is doomed to freeze—the spirit of my wife will start haunting me. I do not want to let it free into the house. It won’t warm up for at least a few more days. Now what?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is there any practical and ethical solution to this dilemma?

Talking Dog Ethics

I must confess that one reason for this post is to entice one of Ethics Alarms’ stars, the perceptive and sharp metaphorical-penned Mrs. Q, into commenting, since she is our resident canine authority (among other things).

The New York Times recently published a feature [Gift link!]about a new fad among dog-owners: multi-colored buttons one can lay out on one’s floor. The buttons can be set to emit the dog-owner’s voice saying a single word like OUTSIDE, WATER, PLAY, FRIEND, AFRAID, WALK, BALL and so on. Dogs learn to step on the buttons to emit the desired word…

Voilà! Talking dogs.

Well, maybe. Researchers disagree whether the dogs are really using the buttons to communicate or just giving a Skinnerian response when they figure out that, for example, pressing a particular button will result in a treat. Dogs using the buttons are all over YouTube and other platforms on the web: that’s Bunny the Sheepadoodle above, who supposedly makes complex remarks and even existential ones, like “DOG WHY?”

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No Wonder Today’s Great Britain Is Choking With Woke Insanity, Censorship and Weeny-ism…

The Hollywood version of the Broadway cult musical “Wicked” appears to be a holiday box office smash. I suppose I’m going to have to see it, though “Wizard of Oz” worship alienated me long ago and how they can justify making a two hour, 45 minute film of just Act I of a three hour musical mystifies me. However, there is something to be learned from the nanny state’s British Board of Film Classifications (BBFC) felt that it had to put out these ridiculous trigger warnings for what is essentially a family movie:

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Ethics Hero: Some Rich Person In Idaho

The holiday-appropriate heart-warming tale is told in this video I can’t embed here. Apparently a wealthy “Secret Santa” is giving $1 million to “deserving people in eastern Idaho,” and the East Idaho News is publicizing the plan with daily surprise visit to the lucky recipient. “Brenda in Blackfoot”is first up. From the News: “She is a single mom with eight adopted children who all have special needs. She works from 4:30 a.m. to approximately 1 p.m. every day to support her children… She has really struggled… In May, they experienced a small house fire, which caused a lot of damage to her home….Googling the repairs for instructions , [Brenda] did all of the repairs herself. Her family also had a flood in their home about six weeks ago….Brenda went through cancer treatment last year as well…”

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How Much More Evidence Will It Require For Climate Change Hysterics To Admit That The Field Is Corrupted By Uncertainty, Dishonesty and Hype?

2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.

The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”

Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”

But wait! There’s more!

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Creative! Funny! But Unethical [Video Fixed]

A video submitted as part of an insurance claim in January appeared to show a brown bear tearing up the interior of a Rolls-Royce.Similar videos involving other cars were turned in to two additional insurers. All together, the three insurance companies collectively paid out over $140,000.

But an investigation called Operation Bear Claw revealed that the attacks were really insurance scams.“Upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume,” the department said in a news release. This bear suit…

Those things at the bottom were used to imitate bear claw marks.

The California Department of Insurance has arrested Ruben Tamrazian, 26; Ararat Chirkinian, 39; and Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, all of Glendale, Calif.; and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, of Los Angeles. They face charges of insurance fraud and conspiracy.