1. Tal Shalev et al, “Israel Launches Diplomatic Attacks on Its Western Allies Ahead of Palestinian Statehood Recognition,” CNN.com, August 20, 2025.
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
On Presumptuous Pride: Netanyahu Castigates Europe
1. Tal Shalev et al, “Israel Launches Diplomatic Attacks on Its Western Allies Ahead of Palestinian Statehood Recognition,” CNN.com, August 20, 2025.
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
Complexity in Global Warming: On the Imprint of Pride
It would be incorrect to claim that the planet’s atmosphere and oceans are both getting warmer in a linear, across-the-board way. The existence of exceptions, such as the slightly cooler average summers in some places in the interior of North America, no longer allows for credible claims of climate-change denial, an agenda that was financed and promoted in part by fossil-fuel companies in the U.S. and E.U. before being totally repudiated by science. Indeed, the credibility of natural science vastly exceeds that of corporations with vested financial interests. Rather than discuss those, which have become better known to the public, I want to describe the sheer complexity of a generally warming planet, which is rarely adequately grasped by non-scientists, and delve into the sordid self-love that I contend is ultimately behind global warming.
The full essay is at "Complexity in Global Warming."
Monday, August 18, 2025
The E.U. on Ukraine: On the Human, All Too Human
On August 17, 2025, Ukraine’s
president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the
E.U., as a precursor to both of them meeting with Don Trump, president of the
U.S. on ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. President Von der Leyen had
decided to accompany Zelensky to Washington in part to potentially play
interference should the U.S. president again publicly berate Zelensky to his
face and in part to protect Zelensky should Trump’s position/pressure be too
pro-Russia (i.e., pro-Putin). To virtually all Europeans and to many Americans,
Trump’s verbal outburst at Zelensky in the Oval Office had been shocking,
especially as it seemed to be pre-meditated and orchestrated. Taking emotional
advantage of the head of a state being invaded by the empire-scale Russia can
assuredly be reckoned as being a bad host, and even low class for the president
of the empire-scale United States. International relations do indeed contain a
very human element, and in fact leaving it out of an analysis of an
international situation is nothing short of negligent.
The full essay is at "The E.U. on Ukraine."
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Trump Meets Putin on Ukraine: On the Exclusion of the E.U.
Like proud male birds dancing
for a female for the chance to reproduce, U.S. President Trump and Ukraine’s
Zelensky engaged in public posturing ahead of the negotiations set to take
place between Trump and Vlad the Impaler Putin of Russia in Alaska on August
15, 2025. For the public, to take the postures as real positions, set in stone,
would be nothing short of depraved naivete. Missing in action in all this
posturing was E.U. President Van der Leyen and the E.U.’s foreign minister.
Instead, the governors of two, albeit large, E.U. states were busy making
demands as if their respective political bases were more powerful than the E.U.
as a whole. In short, Van der Leyen missed an opportunity to join the dance of
posturing.
The full essay is at "Trump Meets Putin on Ukraine."
Monday, August 11, 2025
Wealth and Ethics in American Fiscal Policy
In a struggle between wealth
and ethics, practically speaking the former tends overwhelmingly to win hands
down, even if the form of government is at least nominally a representative
democracy, but in fact an oligarchy or plutocracy. The influence of the moneyed
interest both in the E.U. and U.S. is likely much stronger than most of the
respective citizenries know. When the poorest of the poor are to be made worse
off financially by cuts in certain government programs while defense contractor
companies stand to get more, which tends to mean higher bonuses for executives
(and campaign contributions for elected representatives), the skew toward the
gilded and away from the most vulnerable economically can be viewed as an x-ray
of sorts indicative of rule by wealth rather than by the People. U.S. President
Trump’s fiscal budget enacted in 2025 is a case in point by which the questionable
morality of the plutocracy or oligopoly form of government can be gleaned.
The full essay is at "Wealth and Ethics in American Fiscal Policy."
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Arjuna’s Vision of Krishna: On the Edge of Transcendence
In reading the Bhagavad-Gita
from chapter four on, it may be tempting to collapse all of Hinduism into a
monotheism in which Lord Krishna is God. Even in the context of bhukti being
directed exclusively to Krishna, other deities are alluded to in the text. To
claim that those other deities came out of Krishna, and even that Krishna
surpasses even Brahman, which is infinite being that is
imperishable awareness, thought (but not mind), power, and bliss, in terms of
ultimacy does not mean that the Gita is a monotheist scriptural
faith-narrative. Not even Krishna’s unmanifest form by which the deity’s
creative energy gives rise to the cosmos transcends form itself, and thus
reaches the unmanifest and formless Brahman. To be sure, that Krishna,
as the Supreme Person metaphysically and ontologically, is ultimately Self renders
the deity identical to brahman, but this does not mean that Krishna transcends
brahman. Regardless of where the Krishna-Brahman debate lands, and
there are admittedly shlokas in the Gita that support the ultimacy
of Krishna and shlokas that favor the ultimacy of Brahman,
Krishna need not be more ultimate than Brahman for a devotee of the
deity to be able to experience a lot of transcendence from ordinary experience.
In fact, because either referent that is the Absolute lies beyond the
limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion), according to
the Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, the human experience of
distinctly religious transcendence is where our attention can fruitfully
be directed. This is not to say that a referent (i.e., a divine, transcendent
object) is thereby relegated or even discarded in favor of the quality of
experience as its own referent. Rather, it is to say that we can know a lot
more than we do about distinctly religious, and thus transcending, experience,
and that such knowledge is part of the human condition—part of being human as homo
religios as distinct from being a political, economic, and social species.
First I investigate the question of whether the Gita is monotheist,
after which I argue that Arjuna’s vision of Krishna in chapter 11 of the Gita
is can be viewed as the “event horizon” of sorts in terms of how much we
can transcend as we approach the limits of our faculties.
The full essay is at "Arjuna's Vision of Krishna."
Thursday, August 7, 2025
Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu
Israeli state officials met on August 7, 2025 to debate Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to expand the presence of the IDF, Israel’s military, to include all of the territory in Gaza, which had been under Israeli occupation anyway for many decades. With Gaza already under Israeli occupation, characterizing Netanyahu’s plan as being “to conquer all or parts of Gaza not yet under Israeli control” is strange.[1] Similarly, mischaracterizing the E.U. as a bloc even though that union has the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial is odd. The media’s artful way of reporting is without doubt superficial relative to Netanyahu’s unvirtuous decisions and their respective consequences to which the labels of genocide and holocaust have justifiably been applied around the world. Behind the relevant vice lies an extreme egocentricity that the ethical theory of Sikhism describes quite well, even to the level of ontology or metaphysics.
The full essay is at "Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu."
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Maimonides on Netanyahu
On August 5, 2025, Israel’s
prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all
of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he
“hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former
Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly
22-month war.”[1] Roughly
thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel
destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process
of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting
Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of
2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a
man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine,
sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel
felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death
would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity,
whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas
attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children
who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two
years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by
Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.
The full essay is at "Maimonides on Netanyahu."
Monday, August 4, 2025
Texas Overreaching
With enough Democratic members
of the Texas House of Representatives staying in Illinois and New York as of
August 3, 2025 that the legislative chamber could not reach a quorum and thus
be able to hold a vote on a Congressional redistricting plan that could gain
the Republic Party five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Greg
Abbot, who at the time was Texas’ head of state and head of the executive
branch, was considering various options to bring the lawmakers back. That only
one of those options was legal points to the importance of the rule of law being
applied to government officials.
The full essay is at "Texas Overreaching."
Saturday, August 2, 2025
The Irishman
Although Scorsese’s 2019 film,
The Irishman, is a
fictional crime story, it is based on Charles Brandt’s book, I Heard You Paint
Houses, which incorporates interviews that the lead character, Frank
Sheeran, who was in real life a close friend of James Hoffa of the Teamsters labor
union, gave. Even so, viewers should not make the assumption that Scorsese’s
intent was to represent contestable explanations of historical events, such as
the disappearance of Hoffa. Similarly, it cannot be assumed that the actual
writers of the four Christian Gospel faith-narratives intended to write
historical accounts; in fact, it is perfectly legitimate to adapt historical
events in making theological points. In making The Irishman, Scorsese no
doubt wanted to present viewers with a problematic sketch of how weak the human
conscience can be in certain individuals. In his book on Utilitarianism, John
Stuart Mill begins by lamenting that no progress had been made over thousands
of years by ethicist philosophers on the phenomenon of human morality. Scorsese’s
film supports Mill’s point.
The full essay is at "The Irishman."
Friday, August 1, 2025
The Gaza Holocaust
I contend that the genocide in
Gaza being committed by the Israeli government can also be termed a holocaust.
This is actually not much of a leap; what is surprising is that American mercenaries—retired
U.S. Army officers working as subcontractor security forces at food distribution
sites in Gaza—have also enjoyed the sport of shooting adult and even children
Gazans under the reasonable assumption of impunity. As the funder of the
subcontractor, the U.S. Government can be considered as an accomplice even more
directly than in merely supplying Israel with the weapons to use to kill off
the population of Gaza. The sheer inertia of the American electorate and the intractability
of the federal representatives can itself be viewed as a subtle accomplice in
the ongoing atrocity of the Gaza Holocaust. Even in the E.U., the electorate
and its federal representatives have been slow to adjust, as for instance E.U.
President Von der Leyen made an excuse in July of 2025 not to end the trade
agreement with Israel. With the U.S. so ethically compromised, the world wisely
looked to the E.U. and even to China to step in and stop the holocaust, especially
after an American who had witnessed the killing publicly described the horrendous
role of both the Israelis and Americans providing “security” at the food-distribution
sites.
The full essay is at "The Gaza Holocaust."
Monday, July 28, 2025
AI on Falling in Love: A Potential Course
In the film, Wall-E (2008), a robot “falls in love” with another, whose anthropomorphic pronoun is she/her rather than it as is fitting for a machine. As a robot does not have genitalia, neither the masculine or feminine single pronoun applies, and because a robot is an entity, the plural pronouns also do not apply. Word-games aside, the more substantive and interesting matter of whether a robot, and even AI (i.e., machine learning), can (or could potentially) understand the phenomenological experience of falling in love, and, whether yes or no, be able beyond mere prediction to match couples who would fall in love were they to meet. A college course on these questions, especially with relevant films including Wall-E and The Matrix being assigned, would be incredibly popular and capable of tremendous mind-stretching.
The full essay is at "AI on Falling in Love."
Saturday, July 26, 2025
Passive Aggression on Campus: Redefining Hate-Speech
Besides using social pressure
and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable,
the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions
criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different,
even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic
rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go
against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can
show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas
can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia
University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be
weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had
died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another
university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century
scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust
(and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of
the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance
and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself
to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).
The full essay is at "Passive Aggression on Campus."
Sunday, July 20, 2025
Pope Leo on the Fallacy of Collective Justice: The Case of Israel in Gaza
One of the many pitfalls in
the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, whereby government officials acting as government
can literally get away with murder domestically given the lack of credible de
jure and de facto enforcement of international “law,” is the ability
to inflict collective punishment based on group-identity, including the ideologies
that hinge on identity politics. Going the actual culprits of a crime or even a
revolt, collective punishment inflicts harm and even mass murder on an entire
group, including individuals thereof who are not at all culpable. Unlike “collateral
damage,” the ideology of collective justice includes intentionally harming
such individuals. It is an ideology because it is based on beliefs about a
group rather than an ethic that would justify normatively the infliction of
pain and suffering on the innocent. Furthermore, collective justice is an
ideology because it includes the artificial elevation of a group (i.e., the
collective) over the individual even though members of a group are arguably
foremost individuals, who typically belong to more than one group or
organization. To put the collective abstraction first ontologically is thus tenuous
at best. A person may be a Texan, a Democrat, a Catholic, and a member of a
football team, for example, so the claim that that person is essentially
any one of these would be dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In privileging a
part over a whole, thus being partisan, an ideology is in a sense arbitrary, even
in claiming that a state of affairs that is favored or desired is the
present state of affairs, as if the statement were a fact of reason rather than
a counter-factual statement.
The full essay is at "Pope Leo on the Fallacy of Collective Justice."
Saturday, July 19, 2025
The Israeli Military Kills Starving Gazans Seeking Food as Police in Massachusetts Intimidate Human-Rights Protesters
The full essay is at "The Israeli Army Kills Starving Gazans."
Friday, July 18, 2025
The E.U.’s Borders Held Hostage by the State Veto
With E.U. states like Germany,
Austria and Poland becoming increasingly active in patrolling their respective
borders at the expense of the Schengen Agreement, it makes sense that the proposed
E.U. budget announced in July, 2025 includes more money to protect the E.U.’s
borders from illegal crossings. This is important because reinstituting controls
on the borders of states contributes toward the visual of the E.U. coming apart
geographically. Such a set-back may be worse for the E.U. than the secession of
Britain was; in fact, letting that state go arguably strengthened the Union
because the British government consistently refused to admit that the E.U. is
more than a network of countries that the UK happened to belong to, which was
the view of the former governor, David Cameron.
The full essay is at "The E.U.'s Borders Held Hostage by the State Veto."
Friday, July 11, 2025
Negotiating from Weakness: The Plight of the European Union
To go to much effort to
construct an economy on the scale of an empire only to refer instead to the economies
within such a union, whether the E.U. or U.S. is to pay excessive homage to
an ideology that can be termed Euroskeptic and anti-federalist, respectively. To
refer to economies in one union and the economy in the other is
just one means by which an ideology can distort a person’s reasoning and
perception without the person being conscious of the underlying logical
inconsistency. Such an inconsistency is incurred not only in “having it both
ways” in the E.U. being a common market even as the states are referred to as economies
even though many share a currency and thus a central bank, but also in
referring to the federal system as if it were a mere “bloc,” or “network.” In all of these cases of ideological
word-games, the E.U. itself is minimized and thus implicitly marginalized from
within. With Russia invading Ukraine and Israel eviscerating the Muslim
residents of Gaza, self-marginalization for ideological purposes is indeed
costly. Even referring to the federal official who is in charge of foreign
policy as a “high representative” is implicitly denigrating and thus counter-productive
to the E.U. being able to stand up to Putin and even Netanyahu in 2025.
The full essay is at "Negotiating from Weakness."
Thursday, July 10, 2025
E.U. President Von der Leyen Survives A No-Confidence Vote
Falling short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass on July 10, 2025, the no-confidence vote on President Von der Leyen of the Commission in the E.U.’s parliament mustered only 175 representatives in favor while 360 voted against the motion and 18 abstained. Although commentators discussed whether the president was weakened anyway, a more important matter relates to the politics of the vote as distinct from the Parliament’s institutional interests as they relate to the Commission and the European Council. I contend that the Parliament, which represents E.U. citizens, has a vital interest that is vital to the E.U. itself in maintaining a balance between the collective power of the representatives of the citizenry and the power the state governments at the federal level. Parties making deals with Von der Leyen on policy positions undercut the vote as a means of holding the Commission to maintaining that balance.
The full essay is at "E.U. President Von der Leyen Survives A No-Confidence Vote."
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
Russia Benefits from Flawed E.U. Federalism
In the E.U., the 27 state
governments are able to wield a veto on most important policy proposals in the
European Council. Expecting unanimity where not even consensus is enough is so
utterly unrealistic at 27 that it may be time to reconsider whether the E.U.
can afford such an easy (and tempting) means by which state governors can
exploit the E.U. by essentially holding it hostage. To be sure, like the
filibuster in the U.S. Senate, the veto in the European Council represents the
residual sovereignty that states in both unions enjoy, but extortion for
financial gain by means of threatening or exercising a veto in the European
Council (and the committees of the Council of the E.U.) suggests that the continued
use of a veto by state governments is too problematic to be continued. Residual
sovereignty can find adequate representation by qualified majority voting,
which is closer the threshold needed to maintain a filibuster in the U.S.
Senate. That the E.U. state of Slovakia maintained its veto on a proposed number
of federal sanctions against Russia on July 9, 2025 when the European Court of
Human Rights ruled that Russia had violated international law in invading
Ukraine is a good indication that the veto had outlived its usefulness and was
being used by governors for sordid purposes by using the E.U. rather than
strengthening it in foreign affairs.
The full essay is at "Russia Benefits from Flawed E.U. Federalism."
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Elon Musk’s Controversial Politics: Beyond the Financials
The full essay is at "Elon Musk's Controversial Politics."
Monday, July 7, 2025
A Fortunate Man
Religion plays a prominent role in the film, Lykke-Per, or A Fortunate Man (2018). On the surface, Peter Sidenius, a young engineer, must navigate around an old, entrenched government bureaucrat to secure approval for his ambitious renewable-energy project. The two men clash, which reflects more general tension that exists everywhere between progressives and conservatives regarding economic, social, religious, and political change. Although pride may be the ruin of Peter and his project, the role played by religion is much greater than pride manifesting as arrogance, if indeed it is arrogant to stand up to abuse of power, whether by a government bureaucrat or one’s own father.
The full essay is at "A Fortunate Man."
Sunday, July 6, 2025
Climate Change in Europe: On the Culpability of the Media
A report by the E.U.
Copernicus Climate-Change Service in 2024 contains the finding that “Europe is
the continent with the fastest-rising temperatures on Earth, having warmed
twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.”[1]
In spite of “fastest-rising” and “twice as fast” are alarming expressions, no
such corresponding sense of urgency had translated into a political will
capable of pushing through game-changing legislation and regulations in the
European Union. The short-term financial interests of industry, cost-conscious
consumers, workers not wanting to be laid off, and taxpayers would pale in
comparison were a sense of emergency to take hold the domain of politics. “Weak”
states (i.e., governments) that are not willing or even able to resist short-term
political pressures from an electorate exacerbate the problem even in the midst
of climate change, which scientists decades earlier had predicted would really
begin to move the needle on air-temperatures globally in the 2020s (and just
wait until the oceans become saturated with CO2!). You ain’t seen
nothin yet may be the mantra for the 2030s.
The full essay is at "Climate Change in Europe."
1. David O’Sullivan, “Firefighters Battle Wildfires in Greece and Turkey, Prompting Evacuations and Emergency Response,” Euronews.com, July 4, 2025.
Friday, July 4, 2025
Putting a State in Charge of the E.U.
If only Ukraine could become the
51st member-state of the U.S., rather than the 28th state
of the E.U., given the veto of Viktor Orban of the E.U. state of Hungary on the
E.U. annexing Ukraine. Besides the inherent problems that come with relying so
much on the principle of unanimity in the European Council and the Council of
the E.U., mislabeling the prime minister of the state that chairs the legislative
committees known collectively as the Council of the E.U. as the E.U. president
not only marginalizes the federal officials, including President Von der
Leyen, who, as the head of the E.U.’s executive branch, can rightfully be
considered as the president of the European Union. In contrast, government officials
of a state chairing legislative committees can hardly be said to collectively be
the “presidency” of the European Union. Behind the promotion of this fallacy is
the anti-federalist, or Euroskeptic, political ideology that misconstrues the
E.U. as merely a network of intergovernmental relations between the states.
The full essay is at "Putting a State in Charge of the E.U."
Thursday, July 3, 2025
Don't Look Up
The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?
The full essay is at "Don't Look Up."
Sunday, June 29, 2025
E.U. Flag Day
Both the E.U. and U.S. have
their respective flag days during the month of June—on the 29th and
14th, respectively. This isn’t the only thing that the flags have in
common, and what sets both off from the flags of the states. I contend that these
similarities and difference regarding political symbols can function as markers
for what both unions are as complex polities of polities even as ideologies seek
to obfuscate and dissimilate, even dismissing or ignoring the history of both
unions. In other words, flags don’t lie; people do.
The full essay is at "E.U. Flag Day."
Saturday, June 28, 2025
The U.S. Supreme Court Clipping Judicial Overreach
The separation of powers that
characterizes governments in the United States assumes that each branch will act
to further its own interests, given the salience of self-interest (and
self-preservation) in human nature. It is assumed that the checks and balances
between legislative, judicial, and executive branches will keep any one branch
from dominating the other two, and, moreover, the government itself from
becoming tyrannical at the expense of the liberty of the citizenry. It is not
assumed or relied upon that a branch will prune itself without external
pressure from one of the other branches. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court may have
done so in ruling on June 27, 2025 to limit “the ability of lower-court judges
to block executive branch policies nationwide.”[1]
I contend that any real wing-clipping by 6 of the 9 justices is illusory rather
than indicative of the federal judiciary unilaterally restricting itself.
The full essay is at "The U.S. Supreme Court."
1. Abbie Vansickle, “Justices Put Limit on Judges’ Power, In Win for Trump,” The New York Times, June 28, 2025.
Bill Moyers: Pastor, Politician, Journalist
In a world in which higher
education is increasingly thought as preparation for a profession, being multidisciplinary
in college and especially in graduate school is decreasingly sought and valued by
students at universities in the United States. Unlike in the E.U., where it is
more common for the professional schools to be separate from universities given
the difference between training and education—skills and knowledge—American universities
make it institutionally possible for a person to get a MBA and MPA after a BA
in liberal arts or a BS in natural science, or, less commonly, to get a MBA degree
and a MDiv degree after having studied in the liberal arts and sciences. The MBA
and LLB or JD has been a more popular combination, and I spoke once with a MPA
student at Harvard who already had a MBA from Notre Dame and was considering a
degree in law. I think the benefits vocationally from being multidisciplinary
in one’s formal higher education (i.e., college and graduate school) tend to
kick in only after a few decades after one’s final graduation. Perhaps only in
retrospect does the traces of such an education reveal themselves in a person’s
work-life. I contend that the political aide, pastor, and journalist, Bill
Moyers, is an excellent example of how a multidisciplinary education can enrich
a person’s career, which is not likely to stay “inside the lines” of one
particular industry. This is not a bad thing.
The full essay is at "Bill Moyers."
Saturday, June 21, 2025
The E.U. Stance on Tariffs: Pressure from the States
After the U.S. took the
decision to impose reciprocal and car tariffs on the E.U., it did not take long
for several of the E.U. states to pressure the federal executive branch, the
European Commission, to punch holes in the E.U.’s counter-tariffs so favored
industries in the E.U. would not face higher prices on supplies from the United
States. As in U.S. states, E.U. states have their own dominant industries, whose
financial interests it is only natural for government to protect, as jobs
translate into votes. But pressuring the E.U.’s federal government to carve out
exceptions for imports desired by favored industries at the state level, such
as automobiles in the E.U. state of Germany, would deny the E.U. the full
benefit of a united front that federalism can provide against other countries.
For maximum leverage in trade negotiations, unilaterally removing
counter-tariffs is not wise; it is like a person intentionally tripping over
himself while trying to get to the grocery store. Given the regional pressures,
trade is rightfully one of the enumerated powers, or exclusive competencies, of
the E.U. rather than a shared competency or a power retained by the states.
The full essay is at The E.U. Stance. "
Friday, June 20, 2025
The Summer Solstice: Astronomy Is Not Meteorology
It boggles the mind that the
same meteorologists who know that June, July, and August days are counted when
calculations are made on the average temperature for summer nonetheless broadcast
the summer solstice that falls three weeks into June as the first day of
summer. To do so in the context of weather forecasts is nothing short of
intellectually dishonest. To an unfortunate extent, those meteorologists may
simply be following the herd of tradition at the expense of thinking for
oneself. The human brain is suited for much more than a herd-animal
mentality.
The full essay is at "The Summer Solstice."
Thursday, June 19, 2025
The E.U. on Anti-Trust Enforcement: The Case of Google
On June 19, 2025, when the
European Court of Justice, the E.U.’s supreme court, received a nonbinding
opinion from the advocate general, Juliane Kokott, recommending that Google’s
appeal against an anti-trust fine of €4 billion be dismissed by the court. The
E.U.’s executive branch, the Commission, had found in 2018 that the company had
“used the dominance of its mobile Android operating system to throttle competition
and reduce consumer choice.”[1]
I contend that the company’s written statement in response can be characterized
as “stone-deaf” or oblivious to the issue at hand. Such is not an effective way
of managing threats in the environment of business. Moreover, the response itself
illustrates why governmental action on anti-trust on behalf of market
competition is valid and necessary. I contend that the invisible-hand mechanism
of a restored competitive market is more reliable than depending on managerial intentions
even if they are to be based on motivation that is social-engineered from
fines.
The full essay is at "The E.U. on Anti-Trust Enforcement."
1. “Google Hits Setback in Bid to Overturn Multibillion EU Antitrust Fine in Android Case,” APnews.com, June 19, 2025.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
American Federalism and Equal Protection: Transsexual Children in Tennessee
On June 18, 2025, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that a Tennessee law blocking transsexual children from
being able to undergo puberty-blockers and gender-changing surgeries does not
violate the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The court’s 6-3
opinion in U.S. v. Skrmetti was reported at the time to fall “largely
along conservative-liberal lines.”[1]
By this is mean ideological lines, both moral and political in nature.
Such is grist for the mill for the broad judgment of an electorate, in what is
otherwise known as popular sovereignty, which is superior to governmental
sovereignty in a republic. Add in the fact that Tennessee is a member-state in
a federal system in which the U.S. Supreme Court is on the federal level, and
the broad judgment of the electorate takes on more significance to the extent
that a federal system of an empire-scale union is in part supposed to take into
account and protect interstate ideological differences that defy one-size-fits-all
union-level policies. In other words, as cultural heterogeneity can be expected
in going from state to state in an empire-scale union-of-states, efforts “from
the top” to impose a single policy on every state do not allow the federation
to breath. Political pressure could be expected to build over time if such a
suffocating tendency eventuates, with the risk of dissolution increasing over
time as if depreciation.
The full essay is at "American Federalism and Equal Protection."
1. Josh Gerstein, “Supreme Court Upholds Tennessee’s Ban on Gender-Affirming Care for Minors,” Politico.com, June 18, 2025.
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
On the Role of Federalism in Foreign Policy on Israel and Iran
As U.S. President Trump was
drawing a line in the proverbial sand by stating repeatedly that Iran cannot be
allowed to have nuclear weapons, E.U. foreign commissioner (i.e., minister) Kallas
warned the world that military involvement by the U.S. in the military spat going
on between Israel and Iran would “definitely drag” the entire Middle East into
the conflict.[1] Accordingly,
she “made clear the European Union would not back America’s armed intervention.”[2]
By the way she came to that public statement, the U.S. could take a lesson in how
to optimally utilize federalism such that all of its parts shine, rather than
just those at the federal level.
The full essay is at "On the Role of Federalism in Foreign Policy on Israel and Iran."
2. Ibid.
Sunday, June 15, 2025
The E.U. as a Bystander on the Global Stage: A Self-Inflicted Wound
Why has the E.U. been sidelined amid the military tensions in the Middle East? The answer lies with the E.U.’s federal system, rather than the size of its economy or of its population. The E.U. certainly could have more geopolitical sway abroad were it not for a vulnerability being exploited within its own federal system. The vulnerability stems from a refusal by some state officials to recognize and respect the qualitative and quantitative differences between the federal and the state levels of the E.U. Specifically, when the governor (i.e., chief executive and/or head of state) of a state operates as if a federal-level official, especially that of a federal president, the authority of the actual federal president is undercut, hence weakening that person’s ability to convince the heads of foreign governments to include the E.U. president or foreign minister in multilateral negotiations centered on the Middle East, for example. Even unconsciously, foreign leaders may say to themselves, why should we respect the president of the E.U. if she is so easily upstaged by the leader of an E.U. state who is acting as if he were president of the European Commission? To speak with one voice, and to be able to speak for the E.U. rather than just one state thereof, an E.U. official must be the speaker. Macron of the E.U. state of France cannot speak for the E.U., but Von der Leyen could, provided her space is respected by the governors of the states. This is not to say that this is the only reason why the E.U. has been sidelined from negotiations on Middle East warfare; rather, my contention is that this reason is typically overlooked due to the Euroskeptic ideological delusion that the E.U. does not have a federal system of government even though since 1993, governmental sovereignty has indeed been split between the states and the Union. Perhaps the underlying question here is whether continuing to clutch at the anti-federalist ideology is worth the E.U. continuing to be weakened unnecessarily from within, and thus sidelined from international negotiations that do not center on Europe. Making such blind-spots transparent is indeed a valuable occupation, even if it can be infuriating to people whose interests and ideology are served best if societies look the other way.
Is Healthcare a Human Right?
Humanity still has not come to
a consensus on what are entailed specifically within the rubric of human
rights. Even in terms of those specifics that have come to be generally held to
be human rights, such as in designated war crimes and crimes against humanity
by international agreement, the lack of de jure and de facto enforcement render
such agreement nugatory in practice. As a result, calls for human rights are in
effect calls for warring to stop. The enforcement that goes along with laws
legislated by governments render any consensus on what constitutes human rights
more substantive in practice. This is undercut, however, in empire-scale
polities of polities, such as the E.U. and U.S., to the extent that human
rights are carved out at the federal level to applied across differing
cultures. Such ideological diversity between the American member-states has
triggered drastically-different notions of just what are included as human
rights to be played out in Congress. The debate over the government-financed
health-insurance program for the poor in 2025 illustrates such a lack of
consensus, which in turn suggests that the member-states should play more of a
role in how or even whether to provide free insurance to the poor. Sometimes,
one size doesn’t fit all. In short, the matter of federalism is very relevant
up front, before matters of the proper role of government itself and of human
rights are decided. In other words, the qualitative and quantitative
differences between a union of states and a state are very relevant up
front, lest states eventually peel off in utter frustration with a
one-size-fits-all approach to policy-making to fit an empire composed of
member-states.
The full essay is at "Is Healthcare a Human Right?"
Friday, June 13, 2025
A U.S. Senator Thrown to the Ground: Security on Steroids
A U.S. Senator being thrown to
the ground and handcuffed rather than escorted out of the building because he
asked a difficult question for the speaker holding a news conference
illustrates not only the bias towards using excessive force that having police
power lavishes on human nature, but also a proclivity toward excessiveness
without any internal mental check that is entwined in virtually any human
brain. That the primary arresting FBI employee was the only person in the room wearing
a bulletproof vest inside the federal (government) building may also
reveal his penchant for exaggeration—or, going too far without realizing it.
The prescription in terms of public policy is a strengthening of checks on law-enforcement
employees even, if possible, by embedding other municipal (or federal)
employees whose sole function it is to evaluate police conduct either by
listening in or observing even in real time. A U.S. senator being thrown to the
ground and handcuffed in a federal building in California rather than
escorted out of the building evinces a power-trip more base, violent, and primitive
than the typical power-trips that occur on the “floor” of the U.S. Senate. It
must have been a shock to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla on June 12, 2025 to be
physically shoved to the ground, especially if the rationale for his removal
from the press conference was itself an exaggeration.
The full essay is at "A U.S. Senator Thrown to the Ground."
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
On Kindness to Detractors: Compassion Beyond Universal Benevolence
In late April, 2025, Richard Slavin, whose Hindu name and title are Radhanath Swami, spoke on the essence of bhukti at the conclusion of the Bhukti Yoga Conference at Harvard University. Ultimately, the concept bhukti, which translates as devotionalism directed to a deity, such as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, refers to the nature of the human soul. The immediate context is selfless love, which is directed to a deity, and this context immediately involves extending universal benevolence to other people (and other species), and even to nature (i.e., the environment). After Radhanath’s talk, he walked directly to me. I thanked him for his talk and went on to suggest refinement to compassion being extended universally, as in universal benevolence even to other species. To my great surprise, he touched my head with his, which I learned afterward was his way of blessing people, while he whispered, “I think I want to follow you” or “You make me want to follow you.” A Hindu from Bangladesh later translated the swami’s statement for me. “He was telling you that he considers you to be his equal,” the taxi driver said. I replied that being regarded as that swami’s equal felt a lot better than had he regarded me as his superior, for in my view, we are all spiritually-compromised finite, time-limited beings learning from each other.
The full essay is at "On Kindness to Detractors."
Israel Kidnapping at Sea: On Absolutist National Sovereignty
In the dark of night on June 9,
2025, Israeli military forces intercepted The Madleen, a yacht operated by the
Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), a political-activist group oriented to
getting food and medicine to the residents of Gaza in Israel. Activists from
the E.U., Brazil, and Turkey were on the boat until they were forced onto an
Israeli boat and taken to Tel Aviv’s airport, where they were pressured to sign
a document that they had entered Israel illegally and agreed to be deported.
Once back in the E.U., its activist Greta Thunberg told reporters that Israel had
committed “an illegal act by kidnapping us on international waters and against
our will, bringing us to Israel, keeping us in the bottom of the boat, not
letting us getting out and so on.”[1]
She had agreed to give her written consent to be deported (even if that meant
being permanently banned from Israel, she likely would have welcomed the
stipulation), but she refused to admit that she had entered Israel illegally.
She had, after all, been kidnapped in international waters. Being forced to enter
a country by its government, whose officials reason nonetheless that the
entrance is illegal, merits the spotlight on enquiry, as this actual mindset can
be said to be pathological in nature. I submit that pathology with governmental
sovereignty is never a good mix.
1. Jaroslav Lukiv and David Gritten, “Greta Thunberg Deported,
Israel Says, after Gaza Aid Boat Intercepted,” BBC.com, June 10, 2025.
Friday, June 6, 2025
RBI Overheating India’s Economy: On Materialist Greed Fueling Ceaseless Consumerism
A phenomenon as massive as the
global coronavirus pandemic, which ran from 2020 to 2022, is bound to have
major economic ripple, or wave, effects in its wake. India’s record high 9.2% growth
of GNP in the 2023-2024 fiscal year illustrates the robust thrust of pent-up
demand met with increased supply. To the extent that consumption over savings
is the norm in any economy, a couple years off can subtly recalibrate economic
mentalities to a more prudent economic mindset wherein saving money is not so
dwarfed by spending it. Moreover, putting the brakes on a consumerist routine
and societal norm can theoretically lead to putting the underlying materialism
in a relative rather than an absolute position and thus in perspective.
Yet such a “resetting” must overcome the knee-jerk instinct of any habit to
restart as if there had been no change. Coming back to college, for example,
after a summer away, students tend to pick up their respective routines right
away as if the recent summer were a distant memory. India’s astonishing rate of
economic growth just after the pandemic demonstrates that the penchant for
consumerism and economic growth as a maximizing rather than satisficing variable
returned as if the steeds in Socrates’ Symposium—only those horses represent
garden-variety eros sublimated to love of eternal moral verities, to
which Augustine substituted “God.”
The full essay is at "RBI Overheating India's Economy."
Thursday, June 5, 2025
Musk vs. Trump: American Business and Government at Loggerheads?
When the wealthiest person in the
world and the President of the United States cross swords, people are bound to
notice. Such a very public clash between billionaires, one of whom is the most
politically powerful person in the U.S., should not lead the rest of us to
infer that the interests of large corporations and the U.S. Government,
including the respective executives and elected representatives, typically
conflict. Corporate and individual mega-donations to political campaigns, the proverbial
“revolving door” between working in government and at a corporation, the reliance
of regulatory agencies on information from the regulated companies invite the
exploit of conflicts of interest such that legislation and regulations are even
written by corporate lawyers for their respective companies’ financial
interest. Furthermore, that many very large American-based corporations have
interlocking boards of directors gives corporate America considerable unified
force in seeing to it that Congress and the federal president remain friendly
to business interests. That both benefit from the status quo and have de jure
or de facto vetoes of reform proposals reinforces the staying power of the club.
Even as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders enjoyed considerable media attention and
crowds in his speaking tour against oligopoly (i.e., consolidation within an
industry such that companies can set prices at will and can thus extract extra
profit beyond that which would accrue in a competitive market), it would be
wildly optimistic to hope for an onslaught of anti-trust enforcement from a
Republican or Democratic administration.
The complete essay is at "Musk vs. Trump."
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Worse than Hell on Earth: Gaza
Each of us is so close to
human nature that our perception of it may be blurry or partial. One of Freud’s
contributions is the insight that we don’t even know ourselves completely,
given the existence of the subconscious. This is also true of trying to
comprehend human nature at a distance, as whether humanity is or is not by
nature compassionate to people who are suffering greatly at a distance. The sheer
duration of the extreme suffering of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza in the midst
of ongoing military attacks by Russia and Israel, respectively, beginning in
the early 2020s, and the sheer impunity absent any interventionist coalitions
of countries from around the world combine to give a negative verdict on human
nature concerning compassion from a distance. It can even be said that the
ongoing passive complicity around the world impugns not only us, but human
nature itself. While less explicit than in furnishing weapons to Russia or
Israel, the complicity of human nature is more serious, for even as geopolitics
change, human nature is static, at least in a non-evolutionary timespan. Given
the extreme suffering in Gaza in particular, the lack of political will around
the world to step in militarily and assume control of Gaza may mean that human
nature itself is worse than hell on earth.
The full essay is at "Worse than Hell on Earth."
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
The U.S. Government’s Debt: Federalism Unbalanced
On May 5, 2025, the debt of
the U.S. Government stood at $36.21 trillion, $28.9 trillion being held by the
public and $7.31 trillion being intragovernmental. That total is $1.66 trillion
more than the total federal public debt on May 5, 2024. Projected interest
payments of $952 billion in fiscal year 2025 would be 8 percent higher than the
interest payments made in 2024. By comparison, the U.S. budget for national
defense in fiscal year 2025 totaled $892.6 billion. Whether going to investors
of treasury bonds or defense contractors and other corporations, the combined
$1.85 trillion for fiscal 2025 represents a transfer payment to the wealthy
from American taxpayers rich, middle-class, and poor. Meanwhile, Republican
lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in May, 2025 that
would subject Medicaid and food assistance to significantly less money and
subject the States with having to spend more on the administration of those programs.
Principles of political ideology reside just below the surface. My task here is
to flush them out and relate them to each other, rather than to impose my own ideology.
The full essay is at "The U.S. Government's Debt."
Monday, June 2, 2025
MIT: A University or a Government?
On the very same day in which
Harvard’s president received a standing ovation during the university’s
graduation ceremony in Harvard Yard and emphasized verbally that students from
all around the world come to Harvard to study—U.S. President Trump having
recently ordered Harvard’s international students either to transfer from
Harvard or be sent home—MIT’s president barred the 2025 class president from
attending her graduation ceremony on the next day because of her speech
denouncing Israel’s decimation of Gaza in violation of international
human-rights law. Whether extermination or genocide, that the International
Criminal Court (ICC) had issued arrest warrants for Israel’s sitting prime minister
and a former defense minister should be enough for MIT’s senior officials to recognize
that speaking on behalf of human rights and against mass carnage and
intentional starvation is laudatory rather than horrendous. Even with the political
pressure that must have been coming the federal president, it was possible to
resist such pressure, which is why Harvard’s graduates gave the president of
Harvard a standing ovation of support. Sometimes international affairs really
are simple. Opposing Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza is not only morally
good; doing so is a duty. After all (but sadly not after all), Israel’s
military actions over 1.5 years had already resulted in whole cities being
leveled and 1.2 million residents facing starvation. The policy of U.S.
Government and the money of the American military-industrial companies, both of
which were still aiding Israel’s military, was also ripe for moral criticism. In
effect, MIT’s “academic” officials felt justified in taking the draconian step
of barring the graduating-class student-president from the campus on the day of
graduation because she had spoken out for human rights. There surely are
tough decisions in life given how subjective and even multivariate human
judgment is, but condemning and even bypassing MIT in the wake of that
institution’s highest officials barring the student from even receiving her
diploma in the graduation ceremony even though her family had come to see it is
not a difficult decision to reach. While dwarfed by the coldness of Israeli
soldiers in Gaza, “heartless” is not an adjective that a university’s top
officials want applied to them or a university itself, especially in regard to
students on the cusp of being alumni with great earning, and thus donating,
potential.
The full essay is at "MIT: A University or a Government?"
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Insulting Police in Georgia: Totalitarianism Criminalizing Politics
Whereas the Georgia in North
America has been a member-state of the U.S. from that union’s beginning, the
Georgia in Europe was still not annexed by the E.U. slightly more than 30 years
after that Union’s beginning. Whether to join an empire-scale union of states
is a political decision, as a union of states is a political animal. When a
prospective state government criminalizes political protest and public discourse
on that decision, such a government violates the federal requirement that the
state governments adhere to democratic principles, which exclude criminalizing
the political opposition. The government of Georgia in Europe crossed this line
when a politician of the opposition was arrested for insulting the state
police.
The full essay is at "Insulting Police in Georgia."
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Harvard vs. Trump: Yale Doesn’t Matter
Less than a week before
Harvard’s graduation ceremony in May, 2025, and about a month after Trump had frozen
$2.2 billion in federal funding that would have gone to Harvard and then
threatened to remove the university’s tax-exempt status, an Obama-appointed
U.S. district judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump
administration’s order that foreign students at Harvard must either transfer to
other universities or leave the United States, effective immediately. In
its complaint filed with the district court, Harvard argues that DHS Secretary
Kristi Noem violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law. It requires
that a rational basis be given by the federal government, which must take administrative-law
steps before such an order can be definitively executed against a university.
Even then, a university can appeal the last administrative-law decision to federal
district court. At the very least, a university must be provided with the
alleged violation of visa law and given the chance to make corrections or defend
itself rather than be caught off-guard by a fait accompli by fiat. Less noticeable
in the midst of the brawl, it is no small matter that a director of the federal
security agency so brazenly and obviously violated administrative-procedure law.
At the very least, it is duplicitous and hypocritical for a government official
tasked with enforcing law against criminals to knowingly violate law to which
she herself is subject in her official capacity. At the very least, Noem’s
conduct should raise concerns regarding the need for greater oversight over DHS
by Congress and whether it should be easier for Congress to remove a Cabinet-level
political appointee. Perhaps it should be within the purview of a federal judge
to suspend and even dismiss a Cabinet secretary judged to have violated federal
law in an official capacity. In the context of an increasingly imperial
presidency, more checks are arguably necessary. This is not, however, the topic
at hand; instead, my thesis here is that even though Harvard should indeed
pursue its case in federal court against the Trump Administration, and the
university’s values are superior to the way in which Yale has capitulated to that
government, Harvard’s administration could improve the university by exercising
the sort of maturity that recognizes the kernels of truth in the otherwise spurious
claims. Such maturity would be two degrees of separation from the mentality of
Yale’s administration with respect to spying on student with the help of the
FBI.
The full essay is at "Harvard vs. Trump."
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Underneath the Rhetoric: Israel’s Hatred of Palestinians
Official public statements by a
government’s officials obviously trade on rhetoric—manipulation by wording
being a part of statecraft—but when the rhetoric is so self-serving and
divorced from facts on the ground (i.e., empirically), wording can be
indicative of the underlying mentality, which is real. I submit that the
statements of Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu and Israeli foreign-ministry
spokesman Oren Marmorstein in May, 2025 amid the Israeli military offensive in
Gaza reveal the surprising extent that hatred can warp human perception and
cognition without the warping itself being grasped by the very people in its
grip.
The full essay is at "Underneath the Rhetoric."
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Selfishness and Damnation on a Subway
Imagine, if you will, a crowded,
standing-room only subway car during rush hour. Even though people are
standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his. It would
be difficult upon seeing such a sordid display of selfishness not to reflect on
the person’s values and character. The flipside of selfishness would be obvious:
an indifference towards other people, including that which might benefit them.
Instead, selfishness, which is self-love that is oriented teleologically to the
person’s own benefit (i.e., private benefit) at the expense of benefits to
other people and even a society as a whole. The shift from the ethical domain
to that of religion may seem easily done—people of bad character are likely to go
to hell rather than heaven—but not so fast, lest we presume to be omniscient (i.e.,
all-knowing) and capable of promulgating divine justice. It is indeed
very tempting to relegate selfish people to hell.
The full essay is at "Selfishness and Damnation on a Subway."
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Beyond Description, Atrocious, Inhumane: The New Normal?
“The situation for
Palestinians in Gaza is beyond description, beyond atrocious and beyond
inhumane.”[1]
So wrote Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, on May 17,
2025. He could have been looking at films taken when the Nazi concentration
camps were liberated in 1945 at the end of World War II. It was a shock to the world
back then. The scale of the inhumane atrocity of over a million people living
in rubble and starving by design in the next century raises the question of
whether extreme inhumanity toward a group in searing hatred was becoming
normalized, and thus tolerated by the world absent even a coalition of the
willing to step in and counter what even democracy could inflict.
The full essay is at "Beyond Description, Atrocious, Inhumane."
1. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, LinkedIn.com, May 17, 2025.
On the Ideological Illogic of European Federalism
Europe may have contributed
immensely to philosophy but logic seems to have been in short supply at times,
as Europe ties itself in ideological knots in service of nationalism itself, as
if that ideology had not given rise to two world wars in the twentieth century.
I am not referring to the incendiary, irrational fear of the word, federalism,
being applied to the European Union, but, rather, to the role of nationalist
ideology in distorting the application of comparative institutional politics by
journalists.
The full essay is at "On the Ideological Illogic of European Federalism."
Pope Leo: Poised against Plutocracy?
Poised as the “new Leonine
era,” worded as if gilding the proverbial lily as if a golden ring, the
installation of Pope Leo XIV reinvigorated Pope Francis’s preachments on the
poor and economic inequality because Robert Prevost chose Leo in large part
because of Pope Leo XIII of the late nineteenth century, whose “historic
encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the
first great industrial revolution.”[1]
Due to “his choice of pontifical name and his mathematical and legal training,
Pope Leo XIV has awakened hope and curiosity among the faithful and the more
secular world about the influence the Catholic Church could exert on the
economic world during his pontificate.”[2]
In the exuberance of a new pontificate, it is easy to get carried away with
excitement as to possibilities. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s
crime against humanity in Gaza, no one could be blamed for seeking out hope
wherever it could be found. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind just
how marginal the calls of conscience can be, given the onslaught of greed not
only in the present day represented by powerful corporate (and related)
governmental interests, but also in greed’s institutional accretions built up
over time that have a force of their own in protecting the economic (and
political) status quo.
The full essay is at "Pope Leo."
2. Ibid.
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Strength in Numbers: The European Union in Foreign Policy
One of the chief benefits of having an empire-scale union of states is the sway, or influence, abroad that comes with strength of numbers. Dwarfing the foreign-policy of a state government, and even of an informal bloc of a few states plus others outside the union, an empire-scale united-policy enacted to influence other countries can make the delegation of the additional governmental sovereignty to the federal level worth losing some state power abroad. I contend that this lesson can be gained by examining the European-Russian relation during the month of May in 2025.
The full essay is at "Strength in Numbers."