U.S. Society

Comment Of The Day: “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The key question is: “Will any mainstream media pundit have the courage to make the points esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Sarah B makes below, in her Comment of the Day to the post, “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”?

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So I’m going to say something that , at first glance, may sound pretty unethical here, but let me defend it first, before telling me that I’m going all in on Rationalizations. That being said, my TL,DR is “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I do think that it is fair to argue that, for the most part, the people of Lahaina had it coming. This fire was the rather predictable consequence of years of bad judgement and voting practices. First, the sugar cane farming dissolution into non-native dry grassland came because “we couldn’t possibly grow sugar cane there, it was too insensitive to the natives”. Then they didn’t make any reasonable plans to replace the farms with native plants that could handle both the wetter times and the drier times, but instead just let the farms grow over, which led to imported grass and other vegetation taking root off of spreading seeds. This worked out for a bit when things were wet, but these grasses are unable to handle the drier times. That led to a high fire hazard with a high burn interval.

Then they decided that they would go all in on the green energy to the degree that there was a huge governmental push (which often starts with the residents) for green production over safe electric lines, AFTER there was already substantial documentation that the power lines were likely to cause significant fires. Of course, the electric company is nowhere near blameless, but neither are the voters.

The idea that we now have DIE standing in the way of appropriate water being used to put out a fire, because we find that DIE is more important than lives and property (after all, we are founded on the notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion right, not that old fashioned life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), well, that is a conscious choice by the Hawaii electorate too.

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In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The routine placement of DEI famatics in positions of authority around America is a dangerous and destructive fad. Witness M. Kaleo Manuel, former deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management, who said in a livestream debate hosted by the University of Hawaii last year, in discussing water distribution on the island,

“Let water connect us and not divide us! We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity…How do we coexist with the resources we have?”

Manuel, a former Obama Foundation leader who coached volunteers in “practical skill building for social change,” Manuel said he considered water “an important tool for social justice.” So it should not be surprising that when the real estate developer that supplies water to areas southeast of Lahaina recognized the threat posed by a dangerous combination of high winds and drought-parched grasses in Maui and asked Manuel for permission to fill up one of its private reservoirs in case firefighters needed it, the Obama social justice warrior’s main concern was equity, not preventing death and destruction from fire. Manuel told the company that it had to consult with a local farmer about the impact of water diversion before he would approve the request. Five hours passed without water being added to the reservoir, and the brush fire that had been contained that morning flared up again and swept through Lahaina, burning everything and everyone in its path.

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Ethics Quiz: SkyNet’s Avocations

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

District Court Judge for the District Of Columbia Beryl A. Howell endorsed the United States Copyright Office’s decision to refuse copyright protection to the owner of an artificial intelligence system that generated visual art. Stephen Thaler owns a program called the “Creativity Machine,” but he was denied a copyright by the office for a piece of visual art his system created. It “lacked human authorship,” Howell decided, meaning that it lacked the “bedrock requirement of copyright.”

“[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright,” Howell wrote. “In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No.”

Wait: the thing didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to create something. A human being was involved at some level. If a human enters the perimeters that an AI program follows and the result is unique art, isn’t that sufficient “human involvement”?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is that ruling competent and fair?

My guess is that this is another (of many) examples of courts misunderstanding new technology, with rulings that will eventually look silly in the rear-view mirror.

Climate Change: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

How can you tell that you’ve landed on a woke website where facts don’t matter? Here’s one way: the site features a story that tries to explain the declining attendance at the Disney theme parks without mentioning the headlong, suicidal rush of the Disney organization to embrace radical progressivism and all that entails. Here’s another big clue: the propaganda site defaults to climate change, the Left’s all-purpose explanation for anything people don’t like, because that’s how fear-mongering and indoctrination works.

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Insufficient Mockery Alert #2: Blaming The Maui Wildfires On Climate Change

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

You knew this was coming, right? The amazing thing was that it took so long for the climate change hysterics—aka pretty much the whole Democratic Party—to go do that voodoo that they do so well. As the horrible facts came in, it was pretty apparent to all but hopeless “Facts Don’t Matter” addicts that many factors helped cause the disaster in Maui, including administrative incompetence, warnings that were ignored, a deadly combination of hurricane winds and dry conditions, fallen power lines, and more. But the climate change Borg never lets any tragedy, disaster or weather-related anomaly go by without linking it to climate change. Too hot? Climate change! Too cold? Climate change! No snow? Blizzards? High winds? Sharks in the water? Racism? Poverty? Whatever. If it’s bad, climate change is the culprit.

Yet for some mysterious reason, ABC, which is owned by Disney who these days never heard a piece of woke propaganda that it didn’t want to shout to the metaphorical rafters, headlined a story, “Why climate change can’t be blamed for the Maui wildfires.” What did ABC think would happen?

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Friday Open Forum (Cont.)

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I have to squeeze in some EA Catch-up today despite an unusual number of paid ethics work projects. I hope the forum takes up any slack.

Yesterday’s posts were truncated mid-day by my first excursion to a baseball game (Red Sox vs. Nats) since 2021, when I found having to eat a hot dog while wearing a stupid mask made the game unbearable. But there have been some alarming developments since then too…

Play Ball!

Ethics Verdict: “Rich Men North Of Richmond”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Cutting to the chase: It’s ridiculous that this standard issue country ballad is a culture war battlefield. Anyone who took the time to watch Ken Burns’ documentary on the genre will immediately recognize the themes, though Anthony’s blue collar anthem is a bit more whiny than most. Jeez, man, stop bitching and do something about it: that’s the American way! Though I guess he is, by exploiting the politicization of everything today to make a lot of money with a song that doesn’t offer anything new or original, just the familiar “Those rich politicians up North don’t care about us hard-working folks, so life is a struggle and it ain’t getting any better.”

Well, I’d rather listen to this than “Imagine.”

Here are the lyrics:

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A Canary Dies In An Ethics Culture Mine, And It’s No Surprise That The Mine IS In The State Of Washington

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the city of Federal Way, Washington, Denise Yun is running for the City Council on a platform of protecting businesses from crime. Meanwhile, Nick Rose, a Federal Way Trinity Ace Hardware store owner, apparently caught her attempting to steal multiple hammers from his store by stuffing them into her purse.

Seeing her act suspiciously and spying the glint of something metallic in the woman’s jumbo purse, Rose asked if he could see what she had in there, to which Yun replied, “Absolutely not!” So he reached into her bag anyway, and pulled out one of his hammers. “It was one of my hammers that had a little ACE tag hanging on it. It was a ball peen hammer, so I just grabbed it. And as soon as that happened, she just stormed out of the store,” he said. Taking the rest of the hammers.

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And Yet Another Baseball Great Chooses Money Over His Team, Fans, Integrity and Honor…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Over the weekend, I got to watch (again) the nauseating spectacle of Detroit Tigers firstbaseman Miguel Cabrera disgracing his own legacy as one of the greatest players of all time. A guaranteed first ballot Hall of Famer with over 3,000 hits and more than 500 career homers, Cabrera is no longer even a passable performer at age 40, and hasn’t been since 2017. That year and every year since, Cabrera has been paid an average of $30 million a season for production that the Tigers could have gotten from a mediocre minor league journeyman playing for the Major League minimum salary. All weekend, the TV broadcasters were blathering on about what a wonderful human being “Miggy” is. If he were really wonderful, he would have retired as soon as he realized he was stealing his salary and hurting his team in the process.

Cabrera has graciously announced that this will be his final season, as if he had any choice in the matter. His long term contract is up: he’s squeezed over $200 million out of it without having a single season worthy of his reputation or his salary. He has one (1) home run this season, with less than a third of the schedule to go. The year he signed his contract, he hit 44.

But Cabrera isn’t the subject of this post; I already complained about him and other greedy, fading players here. There’s a worse offender in baseball now, believe it or not. The current miscreant is St. Louis starting pitcher Adam Wainwright, who had announced before this season that it would be his last. [Wainwright, by the way, has one of the more varied and interesting Ethics Alarms dossiers among pro athletes.] He is 41, and not only are 40+-year-old pitchers who still belong in the Major Leagues rarer than star sapphires, Wainwright’s 2022 season at 40 was not a harbinger of optimism, though he still was getting batters out, albeit not as he once had. But Adam Wainwright has pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals and only them for 17 years , winning just short of 200 games along the way. He is regarded as a hometown hero to Cardinal fans, who also wanted him aboard for one more campaign because they had reason to think their perennial play-off team had a real chance to get to the World Series again in 2023, and nothing is more valued on such teams as a grizzled old veteran who has been through the wars before.

It was a good theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Wainwright was done, through, cooked, out of pitches and excuses. This season his earned run average is almost 9 runs a game, which means he is pitching batting practice to the opposition. A starting pitcher without a long-term contract and with no reputation as a team legend is usually cut if he can’t keep his ERA below 6; under 4 runs a game is good, under 4.5 is considered acceptable. But 8.78, which is what Wainwright has delivered in 15 starts? A decent college pitcher could do that well, maybe a top high school pitcher too. And for this consistent failure, Adam Wainwright is being paid $17,500,000.

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KABOOM! How Can A Company—A CANDY Company No Less!—Possibly Think This Packaging Is Responsible?

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Well, there goes my head again, and I really need it this weekend.

Hold on to yours: this really and truly is one of the “Pride” packages for Mars Inc.’s Skittles:

I don’t understand how this could happen in a major corpoation. In a pluralistic society, it is unethical for products and services to deliberately polarize the public, politically, socially, in any way whatsoever. True, the temptation for rainbow-colored Skittles to try to exploit the LGTBQ propaganda for marketing purposes must have been strong for some marketing execs with the cranial depth of a walnut shell, but the fact that sane parents don’t want their kids proselytized by their candy shouldn’t be that hard to grasp.

If the type is too small for you to read, the legends somewhere under the rainbow include “Joy is Resistance” and “Black Trans Lives Matter,” both of which are semi-incoherent, but the intent is clear. (Is the character with the sunglasses supposed to be in drag? What does “skate & live” mean? Is skating on the rainbow a metaphor for embracing an LGBTQ identity?)This is the equivalent of forced political speech, and the force is being applied to children. Holding that package sends an unintended message, weird as it is, and once that political message is associated with the brand, eating Skittles at all becomes a political act.

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