idiots

The Good Luck Jet Engine Sabotage

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

China Southern Airlines Flight 380 from Shanghai to Guangzhou was held up at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport after an elderly female passenger threw coins into the plane’s engine to ensure “good luck.” An investigation into the incident is under way, the airlines says.

This bizarre story raises a serious and difficult ethics question. At what point should there be severe societal penalties for egregious life incompetence?

The elderly are obviously the most prone to this sort of thing. At some point many of them just stop paying attention, or lose the ability to keep up. In criminal law, we do not typically punish people for harm they do as a result of ignorance, but there are limits. There have to be.

I have a long delayed post on life competencies on the Ethics Alarms drawing board; it will eventually be a permanent free-standing page, like the Rationalizations List. The topic is difficult. What skills and knowledge are all of us obligated to have, if not master? If our inattention to Continuing Life Education makes us menaces to society, how should society respond? With pity? Sympathy? Compassion? Pat the fools on the head, and give them a stipend?

Being an ethical member of society mandates being able to participate in society’s activities without constantly screwing up. That, in turn, requires a level of personal responsibility. Society needs reasonable, fair, not overly harsh or intrusive ways of persuading everyone to meet this minimum requirement of citizenship. What are they?

It doesn’t have to be as ludicrous as an old lady nearly crashing a jet by throwing good luck coins into its engine, either. As we are increasingly dependent on technology, and as technology moves up a J curve, the damage that can be done by, just to take a wild example that could never happen, someone in a sensitive position using “password” as their computer password, thus enabling a foreign governments to steal confidential data and use it to set off an Ethics Trainwreck, is terrifying. How does a responsible society send a message that is sufficiently persuasive to people before they blunder into chaos ?

I don’t know the answer yet.

I’m just asking.

And now, a song!

Three coins in the engine
Each one risking air distress
Thrown by one stupid granny
How should she pay for the mess?

Three coins in the engine
Each as deadly as the first
There they lie in the engine
See the flames there as they burst!

Which will make the airplane crash?
Which will make the airplane crash?

Three coins in the fountain
Through the turbines how they shine!
Just one wish will be granted
Hope the charred corpse isn’t mine…

 

________________________

Pointer: Fred

Source: Boing Boing

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 7/1/17

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Good morning, and welcome July!

Once famous American radio news commentator Gabriel Heatter (September 17, 1890 – March 30, 1972) sued to begin his World War II-era  broadcasts by  saying, “There’s good news tonight!” I’ve been trying to find an equivalent up-beat introduction for the Warm-Up from an ethics perspective. The problem is that this requires there to be some genuinely good ethics news. Not today. Maybe tomorrow…

1. The furor over President Trump’s pathetic attack tweets on two pretty awful MSNBC cable TV hosts continues, with “the resistance”—you know, like the New York Times—citing it as proof of madness, and right-wing media and bloggers increasingly rationalizing that it’s high time someone slapped down “media bullies” like silly Joe and biased Mika. The Left’s reaction is disingenuous, and the Right’s is incompetent.

Yesterday on the progressive echo chamber end of my Facebook spectrum, they were going nuts over the tweets, and one woman posted that she had voted for Trump but she regretted it now. She never would have voted for him, she said, if she thought he would act like this. I don’t know this idiot, but I had to reply:

“What? Trump tweeted and talked exactly like that for the whole campaign, and had been similarly gross and boorish publicly for thirty years! Remember Trump talking about blood coming out of Megyn Kelly’s “wherever” after the very first debate in 2015? “Little Marco”? Mocking Carly Fiorina’s face?” 

One could reasonably hope that being President might cause Trump to curb this habit, but one could not reasonable vote for him and not realize that similar conduct was a distinct possibility. On the news media and political side, the tweets prompted a re-run of the exact same (undemocratic, unethical) arguments they have made from the beginning for trying to overturn the election, as if something was new. This isn’t new. That’s part of what’s wrong with it. It also is the predictable conduct of the man elected by voters who were well aware he acted this way. I know you think they are cretins, Good People in Progressive Land, but that’s not a justification for invalidating their votes, and you are not going to get away with it if you try.

As for defenses of Trump like the opinion piece at Mediaite (“President Trump Deserves Credit For Taking On Bullies Like Mika Brzezinski“), how silly can you be? He’s the President of the United States: you can’t “bully” him. Even powerful media figures can’t bully him. He has all the power. They are punching up (more like slapping and griping and sneering up), and he is punching down, provoked by mites, lowering himself and his office by doing so.

2. Remember the Frye Festival fiasco? Billy McFarland, the inept con man/idiot who set it up has been arrested and charged with fraud.

Good. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Poll: And Speaking Of Crazy Tweets And Incompetent Elected Officials, What Should We Make Of This From Rep. Waters?

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Hmmmm.

And The William S. Burroughs Memorial Award For Fatal Stupidity Goes To….

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

….Monalisa Perez and her dead boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz III!  Yes, we should blame the victim. And his girl friend.

Clarence Darrow said, “History repeats itself.  and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”  If Monalisa and Pedro had been students of stupid moments in literary history, they would have encountered the ridiculous tale of novelist William Burroughs (“Naked Lunch”), who on September 6, 1951, was at a drunken party at a bar in Mexico City. For no apparent reason, Burroughs suddenly shouted to his equally drunk wife that it was time to show everyone  their “William Tell trick.”

They had never performed their trick before.

Joan Vollmer (well, they held themselves out as married, though they were not) balanced a highball glass on her head and Burroughs, playing Tell, tried to shoot the glass off with his revolver. William Tell wasn’t drunk, however, and Burroughs was. He aimed too low and shot Vollmer right between the eyes.

Believe it or not, Perez and Ruiz were even less sympathetic than Burroughs and his wife. They weren’t drunk, just cretinous and greedy. They were making a YouTube video. A few hours before Monalisa shot Pedro, a posting on her Twitter account read: “Me and Pedro are probably going to shoot one of the most dangerous videos ever. HIS idea not MINE.” The stunt he had talked her into involved Ruiz holding up a hardcover encyclopedia volume in front of his chest as she shot a .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol at the book from about a foot away “to see if it would go through.”

Well, waddya know! It did!

This was part of Pedro’s plan to become rich and famous via viral YouTube videos. Now he’s dead, Monalisa is charged with murder, and their yet-to-born child will be off to terrible start in life, in addition to carrying some dubious genes.

Yes, it’s a tragedy…a tragedy born of astounding recklessness, inadequate life competence, irresponsibility, and a poor understanding of risk-reward ratios.

Blame the victims.

There is no way around it.

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 6/17/2017

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

1. If you haven’t yet read them, Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on Chris’s brilliant Comment of the Day regarding ideological and partisan hate—plus Chris Bentley’s Comment of the Day on the same post, are all especially worth reading, not that all Comments of the Day by Ethics Alarms readers are not. I apologize for an unusually long intro to Steve’s post, but I had been holding on to a lot of related material from the day past on the topic, and it was either use them there or be redundant later. This meant putting Steve-O’s COTD after the jump, which is why I’m giving an extra plug to it now.

2. There were two significant criminal trial verdicts yesterday: the guilty verdict in the trial of  Michelle Carter, a Massachusetts woman charged with murder for using text messages to persuade her teenaged boyfriend to kill himself, and the acquittal of the Minnesota police officers who shot and killed black motorist Philandro Castile during a traffic stop. I’ll cover the Carter case later.

There were the obligatory riots after the verdict acquitting Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who fatally shot Castile in his car after he told the officer that he was carrying a legally registered firearm and then reached for his wallet to show the officer his license. This is just the latest cattle-car in the Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck, the familiar pattern of a badly-trained cop, a dubious police stop, poor judgment by a victim, and a needless death. I would compare it to the Tamir Rice shooting in Cleveland, where the officers involved weren’t even indicted.

Why in the world would a motorist tell a cop in that situation—Castile had been officially stopped for a broken tail light, but in reality because he was black, and the officers thought he resembled a suspect in a crime who was also black—that he had a gun? This could be interpreted as a threat, and obviously Yanez saw it as one. The verdict looks wrong at a gut level, but it is easy to see how the jurors were thinking: they placed themselves in the officer’s position. They would have been in fear of their lives, so they couldn’t find a way to pronounce Yanez a murderer for doing what they could see themselves doing under similar circumstances. This was a legitimate case for reasonable doubt under the law. Police officers, however, are supposed to be less likely to panic than a typical juror. Castile is dead because of incompetent police work, but the criminal laws don’t allow different standards to be applied  for different occupations, not should they. Continue reading →

Incompetent Polling + Confirmation Bias + Lazy Analysis= Fake News

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy, reports the Washington Post. The writer then goes on to explain why this “surprising result” occurred. The main thesis: Americans are now so far removed from farm and food production that ignorance is epidemic.

I have no doubt that too many kids aren’t properly informed by the adults in their lives about basic facts of food and agriculture., just as I know that the average American has trouble placing the Civil War and World War I on a timeline, can’t name more than ten Presidents, and thinks JFK was “great.” I also have no doubt that 7% of the American public is dumber than a box of whoopie cushions.  Taking a poll result like this one at face values, however, shows why the news media was so sure Hillary Clinton would win.

Ann Althouse nailed it in a brief post she calls : “There’s nothing dumber than forgetting that other people might have a sense of humor and are screwing with you.”:

“When you’re studying something among people you look upon as commoners, you’d better stop and wonder: Am I the Margaret Mead?”

(If you are unfamiliar with the Mead reference, this will help.) Continue reading →

Incompetence Saturday’s Grand Finale: The Most Incompetent Story Ever Told!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The promise (L) and the reality (R)

I have now read about ten articles about the collapse of the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, and I still find it hard to comprehend.

The Fyre Festival was conceived by rapper Ja Rule and associate Billy McFarland in the Bahamas, and promoted by pop celebrities (I barely, just barely, know these people) Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, Hailey Baldwin and Bella Hadid, In a promo video posted January, the Fyre Festival promised..

“The best in food, art, music and adventure…on the boundaries of the impossible, Fyre is an experience and festival…A quest to push beyond those boundaries!”

I have no idea what that means, but it sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

“You’ll be flown roundtrip on a custom, VIP configured Boeing 737 aircraft between Miami International Airport and Exuma International Airport on Great Exuma,” said the festival’s website. “Guests will be staying in modern, eco-friendly, geodesic domes. … Unplug from the everyday and ignite your flame in the Exumas!” Among theacts scheduled to perform were Major Lazer and Blink-182, as well as a DJ “who specializes in producing ’70s and ’80s rock remixes for clients that include Middle Eastern and European royalty.”.

Celebrities with ties to the organizers  tweeted and Instagrammed, building buzz about Fyre.  Ja Rule tweeted just a month ago, “This is where the cool kids will be April 27-30 May 5-8!!! #fyrefestival #fyre.”

Ticket packages to experience the self-proclaimed “cultural event of the decade” included accommodations and chartered flights from Miami, with a low price of $900 and a luxury tag of $399,995 for access to the performers.  Days before the festival was to begin, @fyrefestival  was still ginning up anticipation.

Then the festival-goers arrived on the first day to find…nothing. Well, worse than nothing: chaos. Those who had  paid $500 apiece for what the festival’s promotion described as “villas” found that the only shelter provided were FEMA-style refugee tents. There was no food, except some hastily packaged cheese sandwiches. All of the scheduled performers canceled.

The festivalgoers who hadn’t arrived by private yachts found themselves confused and stranded, with luggage but nowhere to sleep for the night. Some paid festival employees $100 to return them to the airport in a flatbed truck, but when they arrived at the airport gate, they were told that they couldn’t access the airport, requiring more bribes to get to a plane, if they were lucky. The stampede of shocked glitterati desperately trying to flee backed up the local airports, stranding many attendees in deplorable conditions, like understaffed kitchen tents with  pots of uncooked food.

And where were the organizers during all this? Nowhere near the “festival,” in Ja Rule’s case. (McFarland was  either partying on a yacht the first night of the festival, or he actually showed his face and tried to assist the victims of his ineptitude. I tend to the first account, because if he did show up, I would assume that he would be chum by now.)  Ja Rule was performing… in Chicago. He later issued a ridiculous statement, saying in part,

“I’m heartbroken at this moment. My partners and I wanted this to be an amazing event, it was NOT A SCAM as everyone is reporting. I don’t know how everything went so left but I’m working to make it right by making sure everyone is refunded … I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT … but I’m taking responsibility I’m deeply sorry to everyone who was inconvenienced by this.”

Comments:

1. If you organize and promote an event and it turns out like this one, it IS your fault. You idiot.

2.  If it was a scam, at least the results could be explained as something other than someone persuading many people to trust and rely on him when he had no idea what the hell he was doing.

3. Inconvenienced? INCONVENIENCED? Selling tickets to an event in the Exumas that requires people to fly there and be met with a total fiasco is a lot more than an inconvenience.

His partner, Billy McFarland, had equally jaw-dropping comments, which included these gems..

We started this website and launched this festival marketing campaign. Our festival became a real thing and took [on] a life of its own. Our next step was to book the talent and actually make the music festival. We went out excited, and that’s when a lot of reality and roadblocks hit. 

The Exumas didn’t have a really great infrastructure – there wasn’t a great way to get guests in here – we were a little bit ambitious. There wasn’t water or sewage. It was almost like we tried building a city out of nothing and it took almost all of our personal resources to make this happen, and everything we had, to make this festival go on. We thought we were ready and built two different festival sites….The morning of the festival, a bad storm came in and took down half of our tents and busted water pipes. Guests started to arrive and the most basic function we take for granted in the U.S., we realized, “Wow, we can’t do this.” We were on a rush job to fix everything and guests were arriving and that caused check-in to be delayed. We were overwhelmed and just didn’t have the foresight to solve all these problems….We thought we were making timeframes that were correct. We were a little naïve in thinking for the first time we could do this ourselves. Next year, we will definitely start earlier. The reality is, we weren’t experienced enough to keep up.

KABOOM!

Continue reading →

Calling This Lawyer Unethical And Incompetent Doesn’t Quite Capture His Basic Problem: He’s An Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Defending his client of rape charges, Tennessee criminal defense lawyer Steve Farese told the jury during his closing argument,

“People can be very good at lying. Women can be especially good at it because they’re the weaker sex and we … and we want to protect them and not have anybody take advantage of them at least I do.”

Head-exploding  fact #1: The jury Ferese was appealing to by emphasizing the inherent dishonest nature of  “the weaker sex”  was made up of eleven  women and three men.

Head-exploding  fact #2: The jury still acquitted Ferese’s client.

That doesn’t make his argument ethical. The statement appealing to anti-women bias was a direct ethics violation, a breach of  Tennessee Rule of Professional 8.4 (d) forbidding lawyers from engaging in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice, which deliberately appealing to anti-woman bias clearly is. For the future, the episode also raises questions about whether such a closing would breach the new ABA rule 8.4 g,  yet to be adopted in Tennessee or any state, which states that it is unethical for a lawyer to

“engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.”

The ABA notes specify that “This paragraph  does not preclude legitimate advice or advocacy consistent with these Rules.”

I am certain Ferese’s statement would breach 8.4 (g), not that it isn’t unethical anyway.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day (2): “A Definitive Tome About Pit Bulls, Which The Breed Bigots Will Ignore, Naturally”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

No, this isn’t my sister’s Havanese, but you get the idea…

“There are two kinds of people…” and one of the most undeniable ways to finish this much-worn sentence is “those who understand dogs and those who don’t.” To understand them is to marvel at them, cherish them, and love them. Not to understand them, as an astounding number of humans do, is to live in ignorance and fear, and to miss out on one of the mystical joys of life: bonding with an animal.

I never fully appreciated this until my younger sister under went a rare midlife conversion, changing sides from the canine-phobic to the dog-allied.  Divorced, she was faced with an empty nest, and though she had always emulated my mother, who had nothing but contempt for dogs (cats too), decided that she could not bear returning to a house with no one to express joy that she had returned.

My wife, who had witnessed  my sister’s callous treatment of our dogs, who were greatly insulted, was dubious, and was certain her new companion, an abusrdly cute, cheerful, silly, dumb as a brick Havanese named “Elphie,” would be neglected. She has never been happier to be wrong.

My sister’s entire attitude has changed, not merely toward dogs, but toward the whole of humanity and the world. She is happier, friendlier, more resilient and less anxious. She has fearlessly assisted a huge lost wolf hybrid; she has guided a wandering Great Dane home; she lets pit bulls leap up to lick her. Now she complains that she missed so many years of interaction with what she has learned are fascinating, empathetic, loving creatures with individual personalities and the ability to surprise and delight every single day.

I thought of my sister as I read Lisa Weber’s Comment of the Day on the most recent Ethics Alarms post about the other side. Here it is:

A dog’s heart is cooperation over competition. Here in SoCal the shelters are full of Pitties and Chi’s and their mixes. I blame greedy ignorant breeders, a throw away society that thinks nothing of getting rid of dogs that become an inconvenience, and a lazy society that won’t put the effort and time into researching before acquiring, socializing and training….but still wants a puppy over an adult dog…

I sit at my desk, typing this listening to the soft snores of the dogs at my feet. All 16 of them. Yesterday there were 17. I had to help one old fellow shuffle off the mortal coil yesterday. Some asshole dumped him and his elderly lady friend at the shelter, claiming they “found them running stray”. Because they were “stray” the shelter by law had to hold them 5 days for their owner to reclaim them, which never happened. See in our state, it costs $80 to surrender your dog, but to drop off a stray is free. Hence we get a lot of strays that certainly weren’t stray.

The little old pug dogs, Monty and Matilda, sat on the cold, cement floor of a kennel terrified for 5 days before I could be allowed to get them. By then they both had caught kennel cough and an intestinal bug. Matilda has a collapsing trachea, and her kennel cough quickly turned to pneumonia. I had to put her in my ICU cage on oxygen twice to save her life. She is recovering now, but still doesn’t want to eat much. Her boyfriend Monty had bizarrely abnormal x-rays and an ultrasound revealed a huge tumor on his liver which was displacing his other organs. I had him just two weeks before having to let him go. At least he died warm and loved with gentle hands and the tears of someone who loved him on his coat instead of on the cold cement with a heart stick. That is how he would have died if I didn’t intervene. Both of them little old balls of furry love. How can humans fail their oldest companions so completely?

Continue reading →

Helpful Hint: When A Man Proposes Marriage This Unethically, The Right Answer Is NO

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Wow. What a classy proposal!

In Ohio, romantic Kyle Stump, 23, painted: “Michelle Marry Me. I Love You” and a heart—Awwwww!—- in  red letters on the side of a building in the city-owned shopping mall at Lake Sheffield, Ohio. His proposal covered 30 feet of wall space.

His girl friend Michelle Astorino still missed it until Stump took her to the building one night with a flashlight.  She said “yes,” the fool. Then police arrested him based on a tip, and matched the handwriting on the wall to a form Stump had filled out in 2012.

Did you know they tried to catch Jack The Ripper the same way? But I digress.

Stump pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief  and was sentenced to 60 days in jail with a $500 fine. The jail term was suspended as was most of the fine, but Romeo will have to pay $332 to sandblast the wall clean, and has to perform 80 hours of community service.

“They don’t have to be so hard on me,” Stump complained to the media. If I were the judge, that comment would be enough to make me reinstate the jail time and the full fine.

He says the legal setback means he’ll have to buy an engagement ring on an installment plan. Did I already say “Awwww!”?

“We’ve basically just brushed it off and are excited about our engagement,” Michelle told “Inside Edition.” “It’s still a crime, we understand that, but, I mean, it’s not that serious.”

No, you moron, in fact defacing public property or any property is very serious, and it doesn’t matter if you’re defacing it with “Hitler Rocks!” or “Give Peace A Chance.” It’s destruction of property, wastes scarce public funds,  shows disrespect to your neighbors and community, and proves your honey-bunny has the basic ethics comprehension of a terrier.

Well, at least it’s a good match..

Both of you are idiots.

Please don’t have kids.

________________________

Pointer: Fred