Ironically, I am doing one of these collection posts not because I received TWO emails from the assembled today telling me that I write too many posts, but because of the reason I write as many as I do. I don’t have the time (or the resources) to accomplish my mission as it is, which is to focus ethical analysis on the ethics issues all around us that should be thought of in that context, but seldom are. Why aren’t they? The answer is that they are seldom analyzed in an ethics context because most of our journalists, pundits, educators, politicians, lawyers, and “experts” don’t think about ethics very often, and neither do most of our friends, relatives and colleagues.
Today I felt bombarded with ethics stories and questions, and suffered ethics brain lock that stopped me from doing some important paying consulting work and meeting looming deadlines. Tomorrow I have a Zoom ethics seminar to teach (I hate Zoom) for two hours smack dab in the middle of the day. I’d love to write full posts on all of these, but I can’t. So here are some short versions…
1. There is a long, excellent Comment of the Day by Sara Bales that I intended to get up today. Tomorrow, Sara. I promise.
2. The Murdough Murders. South Carolina’s high court today overturned the murder convictions against Alex Murdaugh, the disbarred, thieving lawyer a manipulated jury had found guilty of murdering his wife and one of his sons in one of those “sensational” trials. The State Supreme Court found that “shocking jury interference” by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions had to be thrown out.
Ethics Alarms figured out that the trial and the verdict was a farce and said so in 2024, here.
The State says it will retry Murdaugh, which will cost the state millions and achieve nothing even if he is convicted of murder again, and he shouldn’t be. He is already serving a prison term (for financial crimes) that will amount to a life sentence. The State’s claimed motives for the two killings are bats, automatic reasonable doubt with a thinking jury.
Ethics Alarms 
#3) I’ve read several articles that state that it takes approximately one to two weeks to produce enough weapons-grade uranium (90% enrichment) for a single nuclear device starting from a 60% enriched stockpile. Iran has 60%% enriched uranium. Little boy was an enriched uranium gun-type bomb and was not tested before deployment. You just fire one mass of enriched uranium into the other mass of enriched uranium. Whether Iran has a nuclear bomb or is close is still just speculation but it is possible. The Fat Man design was a plutonium implosion device tested first, the Trinity Test in New Mexico.