Around the World

The Entitled Working Mother’s Christmas Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

For some reason I’ve been getting accounts of a lot of overseas ethics controversies of late, like the German hospital patient who shut off her roommate’s oxygen machine because it was “too noisy.” The source of this ethics quiz is the UK, where a frustrated mother argues on a parenting site that it was selfish for a childless colleague to compete with her for a day off on Christmas, because she was a mother.

“Ok I feel terrible about this,” the indignant mom wrote in a thread on UK-based parenting site Mumsnet, as she explained that their manager told the two women to work out their conflict themselves, and let him know their solution. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Britney Griner Trade

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

 Brittney Griner, the  U.S.-hating WNBA star who was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison for violating Russian drug laws charges was traded to the U.S for international arms dealer Viktor Bout, an international criminal who was serving a 25 year sentence. Meanwhile, retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, also imprisoned in Russia and for nearly four years, remains there. He was convicted on espionage charges that the U.S. has called false, which doesn’t mean they are false, of course.

Observations:

  • You knew this was going to be the result, didn’t you? It was as certain as anything in foreign relations could be. Griner is black, a female and a lesbian as well as a sports celebrity who parrots progressive anti-American ideology. Biden might appoint her to the Supreme Court: she ticks all the right boxes.
  • The Biden Administration wasn’t wrong to seek her release. Russia had deliberately throw its metaphorical book at her; bu U.S. standards, her sentence was cruel and unusual. Our government is duty bound to try to rescue its citizens when foreign governments abuse them.
  • In baseball terms, this trade was like a team trading a superstar pitcher to its major divisional rival for a third-string catcher and a bag of stale peanuts. Griner has no national security or diplomatic use whatsoever; her sole value is political, as the Democrats will apparently do anything to pander to the three constituent groups Griner belongs to. Here’s a description of Bout, in contrast:

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Empathy And Compassion Are Ethical Values But This Idiot Deserves Neither

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

…unless, of course, we should have compassion and empathy for unapologetic, self-destructive idiots like Anaya Peterson.

Peterson is a mother of five and—KABOOM!—a law student, but nonetheless thought it would be a good idea to get her eyes tattooed. After all, Australian model Amber Luke tattooed her eyes a vivid blue and only went blind for three weeks! That was good enough for Peterson, whose seven-year-old daughter cautioned her that the procedure was too risky. “What if you go blind?” the kid asked? Oh pshaw, Mom answered; adults know best.

Now it looks as if Mother may go blind after all. “I don’t have 20/20 vision anymore. From a distance, I can’t see features on faces,” Peterson told the media. “If I didn’t have my eyeballs tattooed, I wouldn’t be having this problem. Even today I woke up with more floaters in my eyes. And that is dangerous.” Continue reading →

It Can’t Happen Here…Can It?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I’m seriously considering using Major Clipton (who has the last word after the mind-blowing and bridge blowing finale of “The Bridge on the River Kwai”) exclusively for unethical climate change policy craziness. There is plenty—as in “an outrageous amount” already—with more to come.

The Dutch government is going to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules. These will be forced sales. How will the elimination of the livelihoods of thousands of Dutch families prevent a speculative climate-created cataclysm at some undetermined point in the future, if it would occur at all? Continue reading →

Ethics Leftovers, 11/25/22: Macy’s, Police Brutality, Giving Thanks For Genghis Khan, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I have now seen three gags online using that introduction above. All of them were really mean; one made me laugh out loud, and I was sorely tempted to use it. However to do so would be neither ethical nor in the spirit of the season, so I’ll just encourage readers to use their imaginations.

I was especially tempted after hearing President Biden and the First Lady call into the NBC broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—I wasn’t watching at the time, but someone sent me the video yesterday. First, it was an intrusion into what is supposed to be a completely non-political holiday event  for the President to try to exploit it. If Biden had even attempted to be the unifying leader he claimed to be while campaigning in 2020, I’d give it a pass, but at this point anything he does or says has to be taken as purely partisan, not to mention calculated and managed by his “handlers,” as in puppeteers. The phone call also went as you might expect: there were about 20 seconds of dead air time, which is an eternity on TV, as the Bidens could be faintly heard speaking incomprehensibly while NBC weather reporter Dylan Dreyer, smiling like a zany, went through a classic “Can you hear me? I can’t hear you…” routine. Finally, after Joe told  Dreyer that she was doing a “good job” and giving  credit to her for the good weather—she’s the weather girl, see; I think that bit was old by 1964—the First Couple replied  to Dreyer’s invitation to say something of substance to the audience,

Mrs. Biden: “We just want to say we’re so grateful for the people, for this opportunity, for the health that we have now in America, and Joe, what do you want to say?”

Joe: “I want to say thanks to the firefighters and police officers, first responders. They never take a break.”

Mrs. Biden:  “And God bless our troops for sure.”

Joe:  “And by the way, we’re going to be talking to some of our troops later in the day, both here and abroad. I hope everybody remembers. We remember them every single day. God bless our troops for real.”

1. More Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade ethics.…On the one parade broadcast I did watch for a while, the commentators used the buzz-word “diversity” three times in less than fifteen minutes, explaining at one point that a marching band was wonderful because it was “diverse.” Bands are good when they look and sound good; it shouldn’t matter what colors it is or whether there is a nonbinary flute player. Then I remembered that Macy’s had just dropped the Salvation Army and will no longer allow its Santas and bell-ringers to solicit seasonal charity contributions, because the conservative religious organization isn’t sufficiently all-in with Macy’s political and social pandering mission to “grant funding to advance human rights, racial justice, workforce development and economic opportunity.” This despite last year’s embarrassing attempt by the Army to jump on the Critical Race Theory bandwagon. The government/media/corporate alliance to mandate beliefs and opinions and punish dissenters brooks no deviation.

The last metaphorical straw was when some female pop star I had never seen, heard or heard of before serenaded the viewers with the brain-numbing Christmas song, “What Christmas Means to Me”:

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The Great Stupid, Global Edition: Ethics Observations On The New U.N. Climate Change Fund

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’ve let Major Clipton (from the Ethics Alarms TV and Movie Clips collection, #9 of 27) make the first observation, which is that this is nuts, and that it ought to be obvious to everyone that it’s nuts.

In case you missed it, ” Nearly200 countries concluded two weeks of talks early Sunday in which their main achievement was agreeing to establish a fund that would help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the pollution spewed by wealthy nations that is dangerously heating the planet,” according to the New York Times.

The United States has reportedly “agreed” to contribute a billion dollars to the fund. Well…

1. The U.S. diplomats can’t “agree” to give away a billion dollars. Only Congress can do that. If you want a single reason to be glad the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives while falling on their collective, incompetent faces during the “pink ripple,” this is it. If…and it’s a big if…the new Speaker of the House can keep his troops in line, the U.N.’s Robin Hood Fund should be DOA.

2. The Biden Administration has exploded the National Debt like no other peacetime administration in history, and seems to be under the mistaken belief that taxpayer funds are just cryptocurrency—you, know funny money. The bigger the debt the more interest the U.S. pays on it, and the same regime that has exploded the debt has also created inflation that makes the debt more expensive. In fiscal 2022 alone, the federal government made $475 billion in net interest payments. It was “only” $352 billion the prior year, according to the US Treasury Department. That is more than the government spent on veterans’ benefits and transportation combined. But hey, why not just give away a billion dollars that will be mostly used to line the pockets of the corrupt and incompetent leaders of those “poor, vulnerable countries.”

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Regarding KFC’s Cheesy Chicken Kristallnacht Promotion…In Germany!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Oopsie!

On the anniversary of Kristallnacht (“Reichspogromnacht” in Germany), the Nazi-organized attack on synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in 1938 that marked the beginning of the Holocaust, the German app users of the international restaurant chain KFC received the message above, which translates to “It’s memorial day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!”

In the next message, KFC apologized for the “system error.” It was not the system’s fault, however, but the fault of the humans who put the task of sending out automated promotional messages entirely in the metaphorical hands of a machine, without human oversight. No human being, especially in Germany, would come up with the idea of celebrating a tragedy on the scale of Kristallnacht with a “cheesy chicken” promotion. What happened was that the system was programed to send out a promotion coordinated with every holiday and memorial on the calendar, and nobody bothered to make sure that such promotions would be appropriate for all of them.

Quick! Somebody check with KFC Japan to see if a fried chicken promotion is scheduled to commemorate the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima!

Fortunately, this episode of technology incompetence was only embarrassing and offensive. The next example of humans carelessly entrusting tasks and decisions to computers may not be so easy to fix. Technology is a monster if it is not tamed, trained, watched carefully and used with meticulous care. Not only that, the harm it can do if employed recklessly or cavalierly, or if supervised by those without the foresight and judgment to do so competently, is the stuff of science fiction horror movies. This is a cautionary tale, and attention must be paid.

If enough people pay attention and heed the lesson, KFC may have performed a great service in its incompetence.

That is a big if, however.

An Ethics Alarms Quote Verification Special Report: “Jacques Brel And ‘The Color Of Goose Shit’”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Guest post by Thomas D. Fuller

[Some background is in order before getting to Tom’s essay. Twice in recent days Ethics Alarms has cited the quote, attributed to the late Belgian singer, song-writer, actor and philos0pher Jacques Brel,  “If you leave it to them they will crochet the world the color of goose shit.” I had referenced the quote before, and Ethics Alarms has a category called “The Jacques Brel” reserved for those officious, censorious, miserable people who seem determined to leech all of the joy out of life. After the latest reference, esteemed commenter Arthur in Maine wrote me off-site to ask for the source of the quote, since he couldn’t find it. Indeed, when I Googled the quote, the only source listed was…me. Ethics Alarms. Now I feared that I was passing along “misinformation.” Can’t have that! 

I have the good fortune to have friend of over 50 years, Tom Fuller, who is a dedicated, one might even say “fanatic,” quotation investigator. He was a credited researcher for the superb “Yale Book of Quotations,” and has commented on Ethics Alarms regarding other quotes mentioned here occasionally. I asked him to do that voodoo that he do so well on the alleged Brel quote, which he remembered from the same source where I first heard it, the Sixties revue “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” Tom generously agreed.

As an aside, I’ve been trying to persuade Tom to launch a blog on the fascinating topic of quotes, and if you enjoy his essay as much as I do, please encourage him.

I’ll have some additional observations after the post.]

***

Introduction

One of the most memorable lines in the 1968 musical revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris – indeed, it is often the only line that sticks in viewers’ minds – is:

“Jacques Brel says, ‘If you leave it to them they will crochet the world the color of goose shit.’”

Jacques Brel (Belgian songwriter and actor, 1929-1978) wrote the music and lyrics to all the songs in this piece, but the “book” (and therefore, apparently, this line) was written by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman.  The line in question appears in the script between the songs “Bachelor’s Dance” and “Timid Frieda”, but does not seem to relate directly to the lyrics or sense of either song.  (See here.)

The question is:  Did Jacques Brel really say this, and if so, where?

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Modern Art Ethics: Amusing Evidence That Abstract Art Is The Con Game You Always Thought It Was

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

“New York City I,” a painting by acclaimed Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian that is composed of interlacing red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes, has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display in 1941. The painting was first exhibited at New York’s MoMA in 1945, and has hung at the art collection of the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf since 1980. An art historian has found, embarrassingly enough, that it has been displayed wrong all this time. but warned it could disintegrate if it was hung the right side up now.

When curator Susanne Meyer-Büser started researching the museum’s new show on the Dutch avant garde artist earlier this year, she realized the work was intended to be turned 180 degrees. Since it is supposed to suggest the New York City skyline, she explained, ““the thickening of the grid should be at the top, like a dark sky. Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realized it was very obvious. I am 100% certain the picture is the wrong way around.”

Very obvious! Just not obvious enough, apparently, for any of the experts in the field to realize that a “masterpiece” wasn’t what they thought it was.

I’m curious: would the experts have been able to figure out that this painting….

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