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 Sarah B that I intended to get up today. Tomorrow, Sarah. 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.

That’s Ellen, now Eliot, Page above, the talented actress who decided to be surgically altered into male form, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the 5’1″ delicate and frail trans performer was cast in director Christopher Nolan’s big budget version of Homer’s “Odyssey” as Achilles, one of the greatest of Greek mythology heroes, a badass so feared that his absence from the battlefield prolonged the Trojan War.

I have no idea why such a deliberately political and silly casting choice would be made (or allowed) but I don’t care. I only watched the movie where Bill Murray was cast as FDR because I wanted to see if he could pull it off (no, not even close), but casting Page as Achilles insults the audience’s intelligence. Now, there was a Greek hero in the Illiad whom Page might have played: Ajax the Lesser, a diminutive warrior with a Napoleon complex. But if Achilles is barely over five feet, then Ajax the Lesser would have to be a midget.

No, I’m not so much bothered by Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy. It is also stunt casting but she is exotic and gorgeous, and one could imagine the African’s unique beauty launching a thousand ships.

I love the Illiad and the Odyssey, and I’m open to new interpretations as long as they don’t defile the stories or make them ridiculous. I draw the line, however, at this.

I sure would have liked to have Curmie’s take here, but he’s off in a No Kings rally somewhere…

The Democrats are certainly tempting Republicans to repurpose that 1960 JFK campaign poster to impugn the wisdom of trusting any Democrats “as far as you could throw them,” in one of my father’s favorite phrases.

Item: Eileen Wang, the former mayor of Arcadia, a city within LA County, resigned after admitting to acting as an illegal foreign agent for China. Her federal plea deal was unsealed today. She worked with the People’s Republic of China to distribute propaganda with a fake news website between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to the Arcadia City Council in November 2022, then moved up to mayor. She faced a maximum of 10 years in prison, but the deal got her much less. I don’t know why she shouldn’t be shot. She’s a traitor.

She’s also a Democrat. Her fellow California Democrat, Eric Swalwell, had a sexual affair with a Chinese spy. Speaking of JFK, he also had an affair with a comely spy, in his case from Israel.

For some reason, I had a difficult time confirming Wang’s party. She’s a Democrat, of course, but most news reports omitted that fact. Were they covering up for their favorite party, or did they just assume any one paying attention could guess which party is more likely to sell out to China?

According to court documents, Wang worked with her then-fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, on a web site called “U.S. News Center,” supposedly a news source for Chinese Americans. The loving couple, however, were really taking marching orders from Beijing. They “executed directives” from the Chinese government to post pro-Chinese propaganda and reported back with data on how many views each story received, according to the plea agreement.

In one case, Wang was ordered to post a PRC-dictated essay denying the existence of genocide and forced labor in the Xinjiang region. “There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” the mayor was told. Wang complied by publishing the required lies, and her handler wrote back, “So fast, thank you everyone.” Receiving praise for her work, Wang wrote back to her handler, “Thank you leader.”

The Wang story comes out just after Rep. Jayapal announced that she has been working with Cuba to undermine U.S. policy. The whole Democratic Party, meanwhile, is openly parroting Iranian propaganda and vocally hoping that the U.S. loses that war. All this, and the cheating and lying about redistricting too.

Would you buy a used car from this party?

Why???