Unit 731.5

On this day:

1215
Zhongdu (now Beijing), then under the control of the Jurchen ruler Emperor Xuanzong of Jin, is captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Zhongdu.
1533
Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England.
1648
The Roundheads defeat the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War.
1660
Mary Dyer is hanged for defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1943
British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 is shot down over the Bay of Biscay by German Junkers Ju 88s, killing actor Leslie Howard and leading to speculation the downing was an attempt to kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

***

Tyranny can demand production but not innovation.

***

A meteor exploded off the coast of Massachusetts, causing a loud boom that could be heard throughout the state Saturday afternoon.

***

Bombs, drones, and missiles were exchanged over the weekend between the U.S. and Iran as they continue to redefine what a 'ceasefire' is.

***

Unit 731.5

Change within a free culture will always create new interfaces between the past and the future. Citizen interference with law enforcement, historically a recognized crime, is now apparently at least debatable. The vigilante now has an admired subtype, the vigilangione. Drone warfare has reshaped the requirements of the foot soldier. Technology — and a perceptible ethical slide — has changed our environment and us.

A biotech startup called Bexorg is extracting human brains just hours after death and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the tissue no longer has electrical activity, most of its key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.

According to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.

Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja said that the brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and other factors that make them a more realistic testing medium for drugs. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years,” Vrselja told Science.

Bruna Bellaver, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Pittsburgh, was also effusive.

“It’s a huge step up from mouse models,” she told Science.

Betting on America

On this day:

1830
The Book of Mormon is published in Palmyra, New York.
1917
World War I: First Battle of Gaza – British troops are halted after 17,000 Turks block their advance.
1971
East Pakistan declares its independence from Pakistan to form People’s Republic of Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Liberation War begins.
1975
The Biological Weapons Convention comes into force.
1997
Thirty-nine bodies are found in the Heaven’s Gate cult suicides.
1998
Oued Bouaicha massacre in Algeria: 52 people are killed with axes and knives, 32 of them babies under the age of 2.

***

"The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form."--Munger

***

OpenAI plans to build “an autonomous AI research intern”—a system that can take on a small number of specific research problems by itself—by September.

***

An interesting internet question: How does Ghostwriting fit with AI writing?

***

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), is a disarmament treaty that bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use. Signed April 10, 1971, it became effective March 26, 1975.
Russia opened its Biopreparat bioweapons development program the following year.
Unlike the chemical or nuclear weapons regimes, the BWC lacks both a system to verify states' compliance with the treaty and a separate international organization to support the convention's effective implementation.

A fantasy. A simple collection of actors going to great dinners, drinking great wines, with conferences disguised as cooperation, debate disguised as principle, and timelines disguised as progress.  

Like Heinlin.

***

In a similar vein, Trump continues to report on negotiations with people who deny they are negotiating with him. Would they be like Harvey, the invisible rabbit? Or would Harvey be Trump?

***

Betting on America

Freedom, like free verse, requires leeway.

But there must be some deference paid to the system that permits that freedom, some compromise with freedom to allow the health of the social fabric permitting freedom to flourish. Freedom cannot feed off its nourishing parent until it is a lifeless husk. There are no beach monitors. There are not enough police patrols to guard every traffic light.

Freedom must restrain itself.

--On Monday, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a sudden spike — with no public news to explain it — roughly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants.

--On the Friday before the war began, an unusual surge of more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed hundreds of bets predicting a U.S. strike on Iran by the next day, according to a New York Times analysis.

--On Jan. 2, a trader turned roughly $32,000 into more than $400,000 by betting on the capture of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro before it was announced the next morning.

--Last April, a surge of bullish stock trades appeared minutes before Trump announced a dramatic 90-day pause on the "Liberation Day" tariffs that were roiling the market.

Shameless? The death of shame? The question is not who is an unpatriotic crook; the question is who is not?

Freedom has limits. In a successful free culture, those limits must be mutually agreed upon and self-imposed. But if those limits are ignored and abused, someone will impose them.

The cops will move in on the beach party. Some forms of poetry will be banned.

Good and Evil

On this day:
1461
Wars of the Roses in England: Lancastrian King Henry VI is deposed by his Yorkist cousin, who then becomes King Edward IV.
1519
Hernan Cortes arrives in Mexico in search of the Aztec civilization and their wealth.
1776
American Revolutionary War: The Continental Army fortifies Dorchester Heights with cannon, leading the British troops to abandon the Siege of Boston.
1797
In the first ever peaceful transfer of power between elected leaders in modern times, John Adams is sworn in as President of the United States, succeeding George Washington.
1918
The first case of Spanish flu occurs, the start of a devastating worldwide pandemic.
2009
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Al-Bashir is the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the ICC since its establishment in 2002.

***

By pulling EV models from their lineups, repurposing EV battery plants and laying off workers in some EV factories, the automakers are taking $50 billion in combined write-downs on their EV investments. The electric-vehicle investment bubble egged on by the Biden administration reflected a classic disconnect between a government’s lofty policy goals and a public that wasn’t convinced. Biden set the fantastical goal that half of all new vehicles sold by 2030 should be EVs. Currently that number is just six percent and dropping.


***

Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.-- economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.)


***

At a late January press conference, Mamdani lamented how "New Yorkers contribute 54.5 percent of state revenue and receive only 40.5 percent back." The irony here, City Journal's Adam Lehodey notes, is that Mamdani is essentially objecting to progressive taxation—giving out less in benefits to those who contribute more in revenue—between the city and state, while advocating for such taxation within the city.

***

15,000-20,000 people, including Islamic State affiliates, are now at large in Syria, after an exodus from a camp that held jihadists’ families, U.S. officials familiar with the estimate said. Security at the sprawling Al-Hol facility fell apart in recent weeks after Syria’s government routed the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which had guarded the camp for years.

***

Total global debt now sits at a record $348 trillion, driven by global investment in national security and AI. Trillion.

***

Good and Evil

The attractive CEO murderer will stimulate a lot of discussion, even moral reflection. Remember, the bomber Kaczynski had a lot of support from American academics. Is it the analog of morality or just evil well disguised?

Here is an article (the source I can't remember), written about another topic, that has application.

Biden's speech at the UN was a sad farewell. As Israel ramped up its attack on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, Biden prattled on about his hopes for peace. If possible, he projected a sad, discouraged optimism about a world with unfocused threats. Global warming was mentioned 6 times, Iran twice. The UN was quiet; you could not hear the explosions in Lebanon, the gunfire in Ukraine, or the war engines of China.

We want to think that the line between good and evil is clear and that individuals fall into one camp or another. In The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.”

Because the line between good/evil is not as straightforward as we wish, an essential principle for organizing society is, in F. A. Hayek’s words, to ensure that a “bad man can do least harm.”

Many know these famous words by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Those who deny this truth of human nature often believe that giving “good” people – those possessing the right ideology – enough power to control others solves the problem of organizing society.

Solzhenitsyn’s famous line doesn’t appear until page 746, and most people are unaware of the context. The famous sentence begins, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good…”

Who disclosed this truth to Solzhenitsyn? It was his own experiences in the Gulag.

In the same section of his book, he wrote, “Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings.” He then draws out what he saw in himself:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.

Insightfully, Solzhenitsyn saw the fallacy of using good intentions as a guide to action: “In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.”

The worst villains can delude themselves into thinking they are doing good. We should not be fooled into believing that freedom can be preserved by relying on good people’s good intentions.

Take an honest look at your stream of thinking and notice how self-interested it is. Yes, notice your thoughts of kindness and generosity toward others, too. But there is no reason for society to trust your good intentions, or mine, with the power to control others.

To find goodness, Solzhenitsyn had first to see his darkness. And then, having done so, a path to goodness opened up: “And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.”

Following his famous sentence about “the line separating good and evil” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”

That the line between good and evil oscillates is a truth Solzhenitsyn expressed repeatedly. In Volume 1, he wrote:

During the life of any heart this line [between good and evil] keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.

Clearly, Solzhenitsyn wanted us to understand our work is never done. Cultivating our goodness is the work of a lifetime.

In both Volumes 1 and 2, Solzhenitsyn repeats Socrates’s admonition, “’Know thyself.” In Volume 2, he added, “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.”

It’s not only the other guy Solzhenitsyn was writing about. Evil can come through any of us if we don’t work to recognize and choose against it. Solzhenitsyn would say we are deluding ourselves when we think evil is only out there. This is a truth that continues to be vindicated.

Recently, Jonathan Mayo compiled new details of the November 2008 terror attack when ten youthful terrorists from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba murdered 164 people in Mumbai, India. Their targets were ordinary Mumbai residents, people at a Jewish Center, and visitors at a famed hotel catering to tourists.

What stood out about the attack is that, in real-time, the ten terrorists were in communication with controllers, messaging them from Pakistan.

Mayo reports that while terrorists were at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, they received messages that the controllers in Pakistan “are furious there is no sign of a fire at the Taj.” The controllers phoned the youthful terrorists: “Nothing is going to happen until you start the fire. When people see the flames they will begin to be afraid. And throw some grenades, my brother. There’s no harm in throwing a few grenades.”

The terrorists in the hotel seemed “overwhelmed by the opulence of the hotel and [told] their handlers: ‘There are computers here with high-tech screens! It’s amazing!’ The controller [insisted] they ‘start a proper fire’ immediately.”

After the attack, one terrorist at the train station drove to a police roadblock and said, “Please, sir, I have done what I came to do. Please kill me.” The young man told police that “his father, a street seller, sold him to [the terrorist group], telling his son: ‘We’ll have money, we won’t be poor anymore.’”

The line between good and evil, even in the youthful terrorists, was moving in real-time.

Solzhenitsyn’s testimony helps us see that evil cannot be eliminated, but, in his words, “it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

If Solzhenitsyn is correct about the potential for evil existing in each of us, then Thomas Sowell, in his book A Conflict of Visions, has an important warning:

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. Their prospects of growing up as decent, productive people depend on the whole elaborate set of largely unarticulated practices which engender moral values, self-discipline, and consideration for others."

Steven Pinker echoed Solzhenitsyn when he wrote, “Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

It would be a foolish bet to expect that each person will grow up civilized and exercise their moral agency to turn towards good. Human cooperation and flourishing are enabled by moral traditions and the rule of law that constrains evil.

When unconstrained ideology triumphs over rights and morality, we quickly discover how fast evil triumphs over good.

In contrast, the extended social order created by the free market expands our opportunities to cooperate with others, and crucially, accepts human nature for what it is. The more we cooperate, the more we see our well-being depends on others. The thicker the interdependence, the greater the incentives to cultivate the good side of our human nature. (from somewhere)

There is a Platonic element here, that virtue is taught, and evil is error. The commercial world just teaches better. But theft can alleviate hunger, and the Japanese really thought their Chinese victims were soulless lumber. Horribly, big evil looks like more than just a big mistake.

Two Tales

 

The big difference, however, is that market entities deal with each other only through voluntary transactions, so both sides must agree that they are better off for the transaction to occur. The threat of force stands behind transactions with government entities.--Holcombe

***

The British Government sent 470 delegates on a 5,000-mile round trip to the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.
The delegation, including seven ministers, more than 100 civil servants, and two official videographers prompted allegations of net zero “hypocrisy” against the Government. The UK registered 470 delegates to the summit, according to figures reported by the Mail on Sunday, compared with 405 from the US, 437 from Italy, and 115 from France.

***

Two Tales

Modern life has turned over two cases with a strange, common thread: the healthcare murder and the Biden pardon. Both acts, one criminal and shameful, one just shameful, have stimulated peculiar sidebars. Some commentators say, 'the insurance industry is abusive,' the Biden apologists say, 'one must empathize with a father's grief.'

This is not simply an argument that two wrongs make a right, it is a muddying moral equivalence that blunts ethical code. and law. This is the hallmark of vigilanteism.

The vigilante does not demand justice, he demands satisfaction. As such, it is egocentric, and not ethical. Any greater vision is subjugated to the demands of symbolism. This is the uncluttered pre-civilized mind.

Civilization sees the individual as such, not as a representative of some larger concept or group. So Hatfield will always hate McCoy and Montague will hate Capulet. The bigot never bothers to see an individual. Civilization changes that. The individual suddenly has value and is no longer reduced to a symbol or a representative.

The healthcare murderer and the child pardoner sidestep the fragile construct of the law. They sacrifice the law--and us--for a businessman or a relative. They demand a 'bigger picture' that includes those dark pre-civilization days of dehumanizing groupthink. 

Neither is Antigone.

Is Civic Virtue Taught?

Is civic virtue taught? The Greeks thought so. "Ethos" and "ethics" are both from the Greek work "habit;" they believed the qualities of  personal responsibility--and social responsibility--were learned from childhood, practiced and developed. Learned--and therefore taught.

 

If civic virtue is taught--and schools are not teaching it--someone else is.

 

Education is curious in this country as it is focused upon continuing on in testing; it has no real social arm. And it is taught by people obsessed with balance, with evenhandedness. Imagine a school system where ethics was a course like geometry, a course you could fail. Imagine the different breed of teacher that would require. What would happen if that grade followed you through life.

 

This would be a revolution in the West. Imagine the crisis that would occur if social and personal behavior had a societal net where every citizen had a basic, school taught foundation. Such a system would, of course, require a general agreement on what the basic social requirements would be. That is an easier task in ancient Greece or contemporary Japan with the obvious homogeneity advantage. But how would such an idea be implemented in the U.S.? What basic, stripped down behaviors would be encouraged as correct?

 

And how would diversity fare? What element in such a system can not be diverse? (Keeping in mind that much of current social and economic thought views diversity as a crucial component of the creative, experimental process that all economies and societies unconsciously undergo.)

 

In a diverse culture, is such a system of accepted ethics even possible? Or, in the other view, in an ethical culture, how much diversity is possible?

Ledgett/Snowden

Richard Ledgett Jr., 58, has worked at the National Security Agency since 1988. He was recently interviewed by the WashPo. Some excerpts:
 
So we’re code makers and code breakers. That’s what we were formed to do, and everything we do grows from that. ...And on the code-breaking part, our mission is to break foreign codes.

[as to Snowden's motives:] The narrative that he’s told publicly about this actually doesn’t track if you parse the timelines. He says he was motivated by Jim Clapper’s remarks to Senator Wyden and the revelation that those remarks weren’t accurate. If you look at the timeline, Snowden was actually stealing material and in contact with reporters eight months before that, so that doesn’t track.
I probably spent more time than anybody but our chief investigator on the actual investigation on this. I know a lot that I still can’t talk about because it’s sensitive investigational stuff. And if he does ever come back to the United States it will be part of the government’s case against him. The things that I can say, I think a lot of what was in the House Intelligence Committee’s report where they talk about him actually being mad about being disciplined — I think that actually tracks more with motivation.

I think if you weigh the benefit and the harm, the balance comes out pretty far on the harm side. That doesn’t mean that there was absolutely no good to what he did. And I think that’s an important nuance. It’s heavily weighted towards harm. The little bit of good is forcing a conversation that we probably should have had earlier. And for me that was a lesson learned. That we should have talked about the particular authority, the Patriot Act authority, earlier in the process.

On balance I think he should go to jail. Assuming that he gets a trial and is convicted, which I think the case is very strong. I would vote for conviction. I think I would be disqualified from the jury.

Ferguson

A detective I know says that all the major American cities are putting their law enforcement vacation days on hold in preparation for the coming grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo.. They expect another explosive catharsis from the angst in the Black community, an exorcism of some deep inner evil. And, of course, the drowning of some witches. This apparently will be worse than the Irish riots after the murder of the Kennedys.
Tolerance can be as dangerous as benighted symbolism; sometimes it conceals indifference. But ours is a culture of growing passivity in the face of continuous outrageous behavior. In some cultures it might be criticized as nihilistic. Often it is simple cowardice. 

See No Evil

Thinking, civilized people should seek the truth. But the recent circumstances involving the three teenagers who shot the Australian boy might make all of us reconsider this.

One kid named Jones who was among the guys who shot the Australian kid in Oklahoma told the arresting officers they were bored and killed him for "the fun of it."

The shooting has stimulated a lot of criticism that centers on American gun laws, even from the Australian Prime Minister. (The murderers are minors and can not buy guns legally but that seems to be unimportant to the debate.) Another thesis has been floated that the killers were under some gang initiation requirement.

So there seem to be extenuating circumstances. A motiveless murder can somehow be qualified. There can be angles to mindless savagery. This revolting episode might have a context! While this argument makes no sense, I'm for it. I can barely imagine the alternative: Three young men hunt and kill another young man, a total stranger, for sport.

So I'm just fine with the argument that, like a Borges novel, the gun did it. Or they were ordered to do it by a gang leader. The vision of armed pitiless monsters roaming the plains is worse than any apocalyptic dystopia from any zombie-loving director. And the idea that a subculture might exist that easily yawns, stretches and moves into hunt-and-murder mode is too much for any thinking, civilized people to consider.

When the Bell Tolls for No One

A new program has appeared in American schools whose purpose seems to be teaching objectivity. While this may be a noble goal it is focused on a peculiar event: 911. The gist of the particular course episode seems to be to show some understanding of the 911 terrorists and their mindset. One of the sections raises the question of how the Americans are perceived internationally and how American policies might engender antagonism in other nations. This is an effort to make the 911 atrocity understandable.

This is very dangerous ground.

Open-mindedness. Parallax. Seeing things in context. It all sounds commendable. For years it has been used to explain differences among peoples, particularly differences in the success of cultures. But seeing the better side of atrocity is no virtue. Strangely, seeing an action as the product of many fused factors, usually social and economic, never seems to include elements of immorality, savagery or evil.

Should we really argue that the strains of World War 1, an unfair Treaty of Versailles and inflation led to the Holocaust?

Petraeus, Bernard de Clairvaux and Joe Frazier

One wonders about leadership and the problems it brings. Does every advertisement for ship captain have to be answered by an Ahab?

This Petraeus thing is a real problem. Petraeus is a very talented a man to lose from leadership, especially when one examines what is on the public stage at present. Certainly a CIA chief should be in enough control of himself enough to avoid the obvious problem of sexual compromise. but we have seen a lot worse and have managed these problems in the past. Kennedy (Hirsch etc.) was fairly close to a nutcase who was facilitated in his sexual weirdness by the best and brightest pimps in the history of degenerate man. The press certainly knew this. But they held their collective nose--and their tongue. Clinton was totally incontinent but was protected by his wonderful personality which did not allow anyone to take anything he did, even government, quite seriously.

In the military, of course, things are magnified; infidelity in the U.S. Army is a military crime. Cultures have struggled with this for eons. The Christian world in The Middle Ages was populated by many parareligious groups, groups with all sorts of complex assignments--the Templers were warriors and bankers, the Hospitallers were warriors and nurses--and all took monastic vows. The Janissaries were a similar military unit in the Ottoman empire--almost a caste or class--who eventually moved into many aspects of administration and who, originally, were a celibate entity. (There may be some warrior  magic here, as well; before his fights Joe Frazier took celibacy vows, sometimes for up to nine months. And there is a distaff side: A wife's fidelity in many cultures was seen as protective to the warrior-husband and an injury to him--or his death--was seen as prima facie evidence of her infidelity and she would suffer for it when the warriors returned.)

Perhaps because of Clinton we have relaxed a little. Bush was elected despite his alcohol history and, while recreational marijuana use in college destroyed a Supreme Court nominee in the 1980s, Obama ran defiantly with his cocaine history. On the other hand, no one could look past Gingrich's personal life. "Candidate," after all, come from the word meaning "white." Clean.

But beneath this is an old idea, championed by the Greeks, of symmetry. A man was likely to be reflected in his life, his behavior, in all facets--even in his appearance. No "compartmentalizing" for them. If you were dishonest in your business, your friends could not trust you. If you were indecisive in daily decisions, you could not be counted on in a crisis. If you subcontracted the defense of your city to a bunch of brave mercenaries, you got a man who could be bought.

An unfaithful, irresponsible accomplished man in power is an unfaithful and irresponsible man.

Liberty, Equality, Production

"I had become aware that, in our time, the new social state that had produced and is still producing very great benefits was, however, giving birth to a number of quite dangerous tendencies. . . . My aim in writing (the) book was to point out these dreadful downward paths opening under the feet of our contemporaries, not to prove that they must be thrown back into an aristocratic state of society ... but to make these tendencies feared by painting them in vivid colors, and thus to secure the effort of mind and will which alone can combat them -- to teach democracy to know itself, and thereby to direct itself and contain itself."--Tocqueville, responding in an argument between liberty and equality in democracy.


One of the interesting aspects of the current presidency is the idea that this debate between liberty and equality is new, with new concepts and knowledge, when it actually is as old as the country. This debate is separate from the central government debate between the federalist and the anti-federalist, where the concern was the power needed by the state to function appropriately and what liberties would have to be surrendered.

The question of equality and liberty is more complex. The moral and ethical questions include what the individual can demand for himself and what his neighbor can withhold. So each individual in the equation has an equal claim for specialness.They are both different sides of the same coin. An additional  problem concerns whether the inhibition of liberty inhibits the community production, so the net effect of the government's expropriations necessarily decreases their largess. So that in an effort to improve the lot of one, all decline--even the intended beneficiary.

So not only is there a conflict within the intent; there is a conflict between the intent and the outcome.

Atlanta's Burning Question

Interestingly, the Atlanta school department involved in the administrative led cheating scandal must now take an on-line ethics course followed by an on-line exam.

One can only wonder if they will cheat on the ethics final.