My major concern is the very beginning of the interview, in which Attia, whose specialty is human longevity, says, “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff…. At the population level, it’s unmistakable what happens at the age of 75.” The statement has special resonance for me, as my birthday is December 1 (known locally as “Jack Finding His Father Dead in a Chair Day”). I don’t look forward to falling off any cliffs.
To frame the discussion with the threshold question to begin most ethics inquiries, “What’s going on here?”
1. The doctor is irresponsible and lying. He doesn’t say that statistically, there is a definite, measurable decline in human health as a result of aging if one is looking at the human population as a whole. He says “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff,” which will be heard as “At 75, all men and women fall off a cliff.” That is quite simply not true. It certainly isn’t true for my family, as my mother, father, and grandmother all were lively, productive, engaged and active well into their late 80’s. I just got a Facebook post from Pat Boone showing him training in a gym; he also does a weekly radio show on the Sirius ’50s channel in which he is witty, erudite, funny and except for a little hoarseness, immediately recognizable as the same guy who sang “April Love.” Pat’s 91. My next door neighbors are a decade older than me, and as far as I can see and hear, they are as active and lucid as ever, and I’ve known them for almost 45 years.
Item:The Democratic Mayor of Chicago hits the zenith of Orwellian NewSpeak and progressive “It isn’t what it is” gaslighting. Plus he’s an idiot.
Asked about “illegal aliens” in Chicago by a reporter, Mayor Brandon Johnson actually said, “We don’t have illegal aliens. I don’t know if that’s from some sort of sci-fi message for which you’ve had.”
Chicago has lots of illegal aliens, which is the accurate term for non-citizens (aliens) who are on U.S. soil illegally.
The reporter explained that he was using the accurate legal term, and Johnson, against all odds, made an even more ridiculous remark. “Listen, the legal term for my people were slaves,” he said. “You want me to use that term, too?”
Well, yes, if one is to referring to the period in which “his people” were, in fact, slaves, called slaves, sold as slaves, and referred to themselves as slaves.
“Let’s just get the language right,” the mayor continued. “We’re talking about undocumented individuals that are human beings. The last thing that I’m going to do is accept that type of racist, nasty language to describe human beings.”
Just as calling slaves “slaves” isn’t racist, calling illegal aliens “illegal aliens isn’t “racist.” “Undocumented individuals that are human beings” (Catchy!) are, in fact, illegal aliens.
“The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.”
—-The Washington Post editors, in an Editorial not only defending the President’s East Wing overhaul for a long-needed ballroom, but implying that he is a strong leader.
See! I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everyone says! The Post editorial duplicates the arguments I made here. It’s not a particularly ingenious point of view; it should be obvious to anyone capable of thinking through the orange mist of Trump hate.
Writes the Post: “It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties. The State Dining Room seats 140. The East Room seats about 200. Trump says the ballroom at the center of his 90,000-square-foot addition will accommodate 999 guests. The next Democratic president will be happy to have this.”
Now watch Post staffers quit in a huff, and laugh as my Facebook friends proclaim that Armageddon is here. The Comments on the Post are a window into the mental wasteland that D.C. Trump Derangement has wrought. The Washington Post actually gives Donald Trump credit for doing the wise, smart, and necessary thing, and these are the first 10 comments I read:
“As the editorial board compares building a backyard deck to a 90,000 sq. ft. ballroom that somehow makes a case for why my government’s needs it, my mind wanders to the past, where serious people wrote for newspapers.”
“Washington Post editorial board, I am embarrassed for you.”
“Hey, Jeff[Bezos]. We see you. How do Trump’s boots taste?”
“DEAR(?} WP EDITORIAL BOARD: According to your editorial, if Trump wants to tear down the White House and replace it with a replica of Mar a Lago, he could proceed without any safeguards. It’s not about whether a larger ballroom is needed but whether there are any controls. According to your editorial, if Trump doesn’t like the style of the Washington Monument, the Capitol building or the Smithsonian buildings, he could redesign them as he likes.“
“Sorry, it’s not his house. What else needs to be said?”
“Wapo won’t let me post what I’d really like to say here so it’s adios, arrivederci, bye-bye WaPo.”
“So how much money is Bezos contributing to the Golden Calf to build this thing? It will dwarf the original White House, and if Trump says it will be “beautiful,” we know what it will look like — he’s already turned the Oval Office into a pre-revolution French whore-house. How many times in a year will any sane president need a ballroom for 1000 people? Why not just built a football stadium on the lawn?”
“I guess Jeff Bezos is looking for an invite to the dance floor.”
“The Billionaires have spoken through this EB opinion. Why does anyone who has obscene levels of money have to wade through regulations or be denied a modern estate in an historic neighborhood? We billionaires shouldn’t have to wait for anything or ask anyone’s permission. We’re rich. That means we’re smarter than everyone else in the room. You with less than us? Your opinion and your rights don’t matter. We, the richest of the rich, have spoken.”
This situation is a) unprecedented b) raises ethics issues that a typical first year law student or a bright 16-year-old could figure out c) is easily resolved, though the solution would be messy to execute and d) is being misrepresented by the news media because of course it is. I have been stalling, I admit, exploring it here because I am sick to death of Trump related controversies, but I just discussed it 45 minutes ago in an ethics seminar, so I can’t avoid the story any longer.
The Facts: Donald Trump, then a lowly private citizen (but ex-President) submitted a claim, lodged in late 2023, seeking damages for alleged violations of his rights by the F.B.I. and the special counsel tricked -up Russian election tampering investigation. In the summer of 2024, his lawyers filed a second complaint accusing the F.B.I. of violating Trump’s privacy when it raided Mar-a-Lagoin 2022 for to search for classified documents. That claim also accused the Biden Justice Department of malicious prosecution (Gee, ya think?).
Naturally, the Biden Justice Department (which also had a conflict of interest, as it was unlikely to relish the prospect of admitting wrongdoing during the Presidential campaign, did nothing, leaving the matter to be resolved after the election. But Trump won, and many of his lawyers are now officials in the Justice Department. They have, essentially switched sides. Even the President, not known for his sensitivity to ethical matters, realizes the problem. “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Trump has said, adding: “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”
Rachel Campos-Duffy is a regular sofa-sitter on Fox News’ IQ-killing morning show “Fox & Friends.” She is notable for one of the worst voices possessed by any talking head on TV, which is saying something: why someone at Fox hasn’t sent her to a vocal coach is a mystery, and the producers’ failure to make this happen is, I believe, irresponsible and incompetent. But I digress…
As noted in the previous post, October is National Down Syndrome Awareness Month. Campos-Duffy has a daughter, age six, with Down syndrome. She is her 9th child with former Congressman Sean Duffy, now Trump’s Transportation Secretary,who resigned from Congress in September 2019 after Valentina Stella Maris Duffy was born. (I wonder who takes care of all those kids, in a two career family?)
This morning Campos-Duffy brought her daughter onto the show as she spoke about Down Syndrome, its various ranges (Valentina is a high-functioning sufferer), and the challenges of raising these children. Her daughter was dressed up elaborately as “a flamingo dancer,” as the astute Fox hostess put it, and squirmed distractedly on the sofa next to her mother while paying no attention to her surroundings or what her mother was saying.
Campos-Duffy spoke about her child in such remote terms that I wasn’t sure that the little girl was her child. I half expected Valentina to blurt out, “I’m right here!” The spectacle reminded me of Jim Fowler’s visits to the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show,” when he would talk about a boa constrictor, stork or a pangolin while Johnny mugged and it crawled all over him.
At one point Valentina wondered away, off camera, while her mother was taking about her, and Rachel laughed uproariously. “See? She’s toilet trained!” Campos-Duffy said mysteriously as her two male colleagues also yucked it up at whatever the little girl was doing.
At one point, Mom asked Valentina a couple of questions, which the girl answered “yes” and “no.” Wow, she does tricks!
October is Down Syndrome Awareness Month, which is what triggered Part 2 of Ethics Alarms Hybrid Day, 2025. Most Americans are aware barely aware of DSMAD, however, since it shares its distinction with Breast Cancer Awareness Month, National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Domestic Violence Awareness Month,National Disability Employment Awareness Month, ADHD Awareness Month, National Physical Therapy Month, and Mental Health Awareness Month.
But wait! There’s more: It’s also National LGBTQ+ History Month, Filipino American History Month, Hispanic History Month,Italian American Heritage Month, and Polish American Heritage Month too. It’s also Cookie Month! And I’m sure none of us neglect celebrating American Archives Month, celebrating the work of archivists and the value of historical records, and my personal favorite, Black Speculative Fiction Month, which honors the achievements of black authors in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, because since stories and novels are so much more fascinating when the author has the right skin color.
Of course, October also has special days set aside to honor such boons as…well, why not give you the whole list? There’s Halloween and Columbus Day, of course, but also…
Here in Virginia, many of my Trump Deranged, “the only GOOD party right or wrong” friends and neighbors had cast their votes for Democrats Abigail Spanberger (for Governor) and Jay Jones (for AG) long before the former had revealed herself as a cowardly, principle-free weasel and the latter had demonstrated that deep down he is a hateful ideologue with violent tendencies. Oh, most of them, perhaps all of them, would have probably voted for these two awful Democrats anyway, which is my point. Early voters have no standards. They just have teams, and they are blind cheerleaders for those teams. That means that their votes are not civically responsible or respectable.
In Maine, as you may well have read, a babbling fool who is a Maine Democratic U.S. Senate aspirant in the upcoming primary was outed this month as posting a wide range of Reddit comments between 2013 and 2021 endorsing political violence, shrugging off rape, using homophobic slurs and denigrating police officers and rural Americans. But early voting started on October 6, before that information was available to the public, so he’s hoping he is carried to victory on a wave of uninformed votes.
Supreme Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson are in a tight competition for most flagrantly incompetent liberal member of the Supreme Court. Jackson appears to be well ahead, but Sonia let her inner sensitive Latina run wild in her recent emotional dissent in Boyd v. Hamm, in which the Supreme Court turned down the plea of a condemned prisoner to force Alabama to execute him by firing squad rather than by the relatively new method of nitrogen gas asphyxiation. (Sotomayor’s lame dissent was joined by her two Democratic, reflex-Left wing colleagues because they are nice.)
Some salient facts: Anthony Boyd was convicted of murder in the first degree because he and two drug-dealing comrades killed another drug dealer by binding him and setting him on fire. I’d say Boyd was ethically estopped from complaining that his own execution method was “cruel and unusual,” but he did, even though he had earlier been given a choice between death by firing squad and death by nitrogen, and picked the latter. This is more consideration than his victim was given; at least nothing in the trial transcript indicates that the victim was offered a choice between being roasted alive or having his head bashed in with a rock.
Sonia, however, want us all to feel horror that Boyd, who was executed after his last-ditch appeal to SCOTUS failed, suffered pain in the process of dying. “Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch,” Sotomayor opens her October 23 dissent. “Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.”
Wow. That’s some impressive legal argument.
My dissent from the dissent: I don’t care, and nobody should. The endless obstacles bleeding heart judges and ethically-confused death penalty activists have thrown in the way of our society’s obligation to set and enforce standards of conduct are destructive and costly. Boyd had a choice, and may have chosen the nitrogen method specifically so his lawyers could use it to stall the arrival of his day of reckoning. The murder he was convicted of committing was particularly heinous and cruel: I might be persuaded to endorse a system in which convicted murderers are executed in the same manner as their victims. But for such an individual to beg for a less “cruel” form of punishment is Death Row chutzpah. Yet Sotomayor fell for it.
Last week, President Trump called off trade negotiations with Canada because the government of Ontario, one of the nation’s provinces, released a deceptively edited advertisement using former U.S. President Ronald Reagan to criticize American tariffs. It was the beginning of the Ontario provincial government’s public relations campaign in the U.S. opposing tariffs, which of course have been a prominent feature of Trump 2.0.
In a typically restrained response, Trump erupted in fury against the spot, using all caps to call the ad “FAKE” as he announced the suspension of trade negotiations with Canada. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump wrote on his personal social media platform Truth Social.
John Tyler was our 10th President (1841-1845) and the first Vice-President to reach the White House via the death of his predecessor. That was the ill-starred William Henry Harrison, the oldest elected POTUS until our recent spate of geriatrics, who died shortly after being sworn in. Tyler is regarded as an obscure and rather dishonored President—he served in Jefferson Davis’s Cabinet during the Civil War, but his one big decision was a crucial one that took guts and audacity. The U.S. may not have survived without it.
As with many parts of the Constitution, the Founders were infuriatingly vague on the question of Presidential succession. It was unclear whether the VP was to serve as an acting President until a special election was held, or whether he became President for the rest of the dead President’s term. Tyler was a Democrat who ran on a ticket with a Whig President, so settling the issue promised to be a political battle that could have escalated into a dangerous crisis. Tyler didn’t wait for Congress to debate the matter: he just took the oath of office, said “I am the President at least until until the 1844 election,” and dared anyone to try to block him. Nobody did. That set “The Tyler Precedent,” and we should all say a silent prayer to John Tyler for it.
Ethics Alarms 