Around the World

From India, the Case of the Ethical Burglars

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I am at a loss as to how to categorize this strange story, as Mallory’s outburst above suggests.

Thieves broke into the opulent home of celebrated Bollywood film director M. Manikandan, escaping with gold, silver and cash. A few days later, however, someone left a small plastic bag outside the mansion’s gates. It was carefully fastened shut, and contained an object wrapped in a white handkerchief. Upon unwrapping it, the director discovered a medal he had won in 2021 for one of his acclaimed films. Accompanying the prestigious award was a handwritten note from the burglars (in Tamil, one of India’s many regional languages). “Sir, please forgive us,” the note read. “Your hard work belongs to you alone.”

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“It Wasn’t Our Fault! That Bad Robot Did It!”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Hey, Canada Air! Can you say, “accountability?” How about “responsibility”? Sure you can.

Jake Moffat needed to fly from Vancouver to Toronto to deal with the death of his grandmother. Before he bought the tickets for his flights, he checked to se whether Air Canada had a bereavement policy, and the company’s website AI assistant told him he was in luck (after telling him it was sorry for his loss, of course.) Those little mechanical devils are so lifelike!

The virtual employee explained that if he purchased a regular priced ticket, he would have up to 90 days to claim the bereavement discount. Its exact words were:”If you need to travel immediately or have already traveled and would like to submit your ticket for a reduced bereavement rate, kindly do so within 90 days of the date your ticket was issued by completing our Ticket Refund Application form.” So Moffatt booked a one-way ticket to Toronto to attend the funeral, and after the family’s activities a full-price passage back to Vancouver. Somewhere along the line he also spoke to a human being who is an Air Canada representative—at least she claimed to be a human being— confirmed that Air Canada had a bereavement discount. He felt secure, between the facts he had obtained from the helpful bot and the non-bot, that he would eventually pay only $380 for the round trip after he got the substantial refund on the $1600 non-bereavement tickets he had purchased.

After Granny was safely sent to her reward, Jake submitted documentation for the refund. Surprise! Air Canada doesn’t have a reimbursement policy for bereavement flights. You either buy the discounted tickets to begin with, or you pay the regular fare. The chatbot invented the discount policy, just like these things make up court cases. A small claims adjudicator in British Columbia then enters the story, because the annoyed and grieving traveler sought the promised discount from the airline.

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Ethics Hero: Lya Battle, “Our Lady of the Strays”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Hammond, as every fan of Michael Crichton, “Jurassic Park” and dinosaurs knows, built an aspirational cloned dinosaur park on a Costa Rican island, and thanks to chaos theory and “Newman,” it turned out to be a deadly disaster. But the InGen founder wasn’t too far off; he just chose the wrong species. In Costa Rica’s Central Valley and its surrounding highlands, a woman named Lya Battle has been presiding over a farm inherited from her dog-loving father (who shot her mother, but that’s another story) known locally as Territorio de Zaguates (“kingdom of strays”). She and her staff take care of, feed and love nearly 1000 stray dogs, which Costa Rica, like most non-affluent countries has far more of than it does pet dogs. (There are an estimated one million strays.) Lya boasts that she knows the name of every one of them on her farm. Here’s another photo:

Netflix featured the Lya and the Territorio in the second episode of its series “Dogs;” National Geographic has featured her story, and I learned about the amazing dog haven from an old episode of Jack Hanna’s nature series.

Lya’s Territorio takes responsibility for spaying and neutering every new dog arrival. It operates like a typical shelter, providing food and medical attention, except that the dogs run free. The most stunning scene is when all 900-plus dogs “go for a walk,” with staff leading them into the hills and forests in a noisy, barking pack.

You can get a sense of what this is like from this video…

Unethical Quote of the Month: Illegal Immigration Activist Pedro Rios

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 “It represents denial, represents exclusion and is pushing people away.”

—“Migrant advocate” Pedro Rios, complaining that the devices recently installed on top of a wall at the U.S.-Mexican border are “inhumane.”

As the Texas Ranger (weakly, unfortunately) portrayed by Glenn Campbell in the John Wayne “True Grit” says at one point, “I don’t understand this conversation at all.”

And neither do I. If someone can explain to me how the whole concept behind Friendship Park at the US-Mexico border makes any sense when it spawns the kind of wacko protest enunciated by Mr. Rios, please do.

Until I saw this story, I was happily unaware of Freedom Park’.’s existance. Here’s the description of the place from the “Friends of Freedom Park” website:

“Friendship Park is a binational park located at the western end of the US-Mexico border. For generations people have gathered here to meet up with friends and family “across the line.” While this historic location remains fully open and joyously well-utilized in Mexico, the U.S. side is marred by a system of double walls erected by the Department of Homeland Security.  Since 2008, San Diego Border Patrol officials have severely restricted public access in the United States. In February 2020 they completely closed the Park to the public in the United States.  At present they have made no commitment to its re-opening.”

Of course not! It shouldn’t re-open, because the thing was always an open invitation to Mexicans to illegally enter the country. Right now, people on the Mexican side can only communicate with those on the American side by touching fingers through the fence and speaking. It would be nice if citizens of both countries could meet unrestricted in a neutral zone, but the Mexicans can’t be trusted not to abuse the park to sneak into the U.S. Betrayal of trust has consequences.

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Trump’s NATO Comments and the Contrived “Axis” Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC, the collective leftist and antiTrump allies consisting of “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media, certainly had themselves a pounce orgy when Trump said over the weekend that he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to protect a NATO nation that didn’t contribute its fair share of defense funds to the alliance.

“You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign event. “Hundreds of billions of dollars came into NATO, and that’s why they have money.” He also claimed that he told NATO members this when he was in office. This was the part that really caused Trump’s foes (and some of his supporters) apoplexy:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

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Here’s a New Way For a Public School Teacher to Be Unethical!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Mario Perron, a middle school teacher at Westwood Junior High School in Saint-Lazare, Canada, has apparently been secretly selling his students’ art projects on the web for his own profit. A pupil stumbled across the teacher’s website with listings for drawings created by the student and fellow classmates in class, and reported the discovery to the school, according to CTV News. The usual investigation is ongoing, but how else would class art projects end up on line being sold for as much as $100? Here, for example, are some of the student drawings being sold on mugs…

Wow. People will buy anything online. The drawings also are being offered on T-shirts and phone cases.

The father of the student who made the discovery told reporters, “I’m extremely disgusted with [the teacher]. It’s extremely, you know, it’s unbelievable…Is this teacher asking for certain types of projects to be done to be able to sell them? Is he asking for these types of portraits to be done so it meets the market?…I’m not impressed with the school, or the school board.”

Perron’s LinkedIn profile says he has been a full-time teacher at Westwood Junior since September 2019 His profile also promotes his personal website, 1-mario-perron.pixels.com, which is where he offered his students’ artwork for sale without their permission or knowledge.

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Pointer: JutGory

From the “Rules Are Rules” Files: The Matchstick Eiffel Tower

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

47-year-old Richard Plaud of France spent the past eight years assembling a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks in order to become the Guinness Book of Records record-holder in that cherished category, “World’s Tallest Eiffel Tower Model Made Out of Matchsticks.”

Aside: How many parts of that sentence justify a “What? For God’s sake, why, and who cares?” Why is there a published record for matchstick models of anything? Does the Guinness Book of Records include records for matchstick Chrysler Buildings, Pentagons, Statues of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridges? Big Ben, the London Eye? What’s special about the Eiffel Tower? Why should holding an obscure record in a book few people read or care about matter to anyone except pathetic losers desperate to give meaning to their empty lives? How shallow must a man be to devote eight years to assembling something with no utility whatsoever other than to win him mention in that silly tome?

Back to poor Richard: after he completed his project, he discovered that even though his model, at 7.19 meters, is easily taller than the current record holder for matchstick Eiffel Towers, the 6.53-meter-tall model built by Toufic Daher in 2009, his opus was ineligible for the honor. Why, you ask? 

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Stop Making Me Defend Tucker Carlson!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m reasonable sure I have made my ethical assessment of Tucker Carlson clear for years now: he’s an opportunist, he’s a demagogue, he’s ambitious and it is impossible to determine what he really believes. He’s also glib and articulate, and I could not care less what he advocates or opposes, since he makes such calculations based on ratings and their perceived usefulness in giving him fame and power.

However, lately Carlson is taking flack because he is in Russia, apparently preparing to interview Vladimir Putin. The criticism is across the partisan and ideological spectrum. The Left, predictably, detests Carlson and would criticize anything he did. But conservatives are attacking him too. Bill Kristol, the NeverTrump director of Defending Democracy Together, said sarcastically, “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital on CNN that Carlson is “either remarkably stupid or consciously evil.” “He’s not stupid,” replied CNN’s John Harwood. Adam Kinzinger, who along with Liz Cheney served as one of the only two Republicans on the House select committee that turned the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot into an extended “Get Trump!” kangaroo court, pronounced Carlson “a traitor”.

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Unethical Headline of the Week: The LA Times

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“How throwing soup at the Mona Lisa can help fight climate change”

You can read this opinion piece if you want, but the headline accurately conveys all you need to know by itself, I hope. The author, an associate professor of environmental studies at USC (so you know the quality of critical thinking and ethical analysis they are teaching there), essentially is making an argument for terrorism, because sometimes it works.

“Objections to acts of climate activism such as the latest food fight at the Louvre are understandable but might miss the point. Protesters’ perceived madness is indeed method,” Shannon Gibson writes. And the method is attracting attention to a cause by disruptive, selfish and destructive acts having no relationship to the goals of the activists. In some respects, violent acts of terrorism are easier to rationalize: at least those seeking a Palestinian state are directing their “method” at those with some direct relationship to the entity the terrorist blame for their plight. Throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” or the Mona Lisa has no such relevance.

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Nick Kristof’s Moral Preening Over Gaza

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof seems like a good man, a decent human being. He reminds me of many of the dedicated liberals I went to law school and college with, always gathering signatures to ban the bomb, end a war, fight pollution, cure cancer, save whales, get universal employment…you know the list. These are the people who tear up when they hear “Imagine.” They were classic liberals before the ethics rot of progressivism, and that’s Kristof too.

Today he issued a characteristic Kristof primal scream about the carnage in Gaza, and if there was ever a “Think of the children!” lament, this is it.

It is the fourth such column by Kristof since the Hamas attack, having earlier submitted “I’m Crying for All the Victims That Are Going to Suffer”, “We Are Overpaying the Price for a Sin We Didn’t Commit“, “We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Try to Protect Israel’s Children.” The beating and bleeding heart of “What Can We Possibly Say to the Children of Gaza?” or, in another format, We Can’t Justify This Much Suffering, is in these sentences…

Over the years, I’ve covered many bloody wars and written scathingly about how governments in Russia, Sudan and Syria recklessly bombed civilians. This time, it’s different… as a taxpayer, I’m helping to pay for the bombs.

Gaza is also different from Syria and Ukraine, of course, in that Israel did not start this war. Instead, Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape. Any government would have struck back, and Hamas maximized the suffering of civilians by using them as human shields.

Yet military response is not a binary choice; it exists on a continuum. Israel, traumatized by the attack it suffered, elected to retaliate with 2,000-pound bombs, destroy entire neighborhoods and allow only a trickle of aid into the territory, which is now teetering on the brink of famine. The upshot is that this does not feel like a war on Hamas but rather a war on Gazans.

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