Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: Guilty but Free

Because Syria’s government had not signed onto the Rome Statute, which renders governments and their respective officials subject to the International Criminal Court, including its arrest warrants and verdicts, Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother, Mahar, who were then in absentia under Putin’s protection in Russia, were not subject to the ICC when a Syrian court found the two brothers guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes on August 11, 2026. The two men could evade the death sentences issued by their own country’s judiciary as long as they could be protected by the Russian president in Russia. Although an Israeli court had tried and convicted the Nazi Eichmann of crimes against humanity, so a precedent existed for national courts adjudicating that crime, the fact that Israel had to illegally kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and the al-Assad brothers could evade being held accountable for their horrendous crimes in Syria suggests that the right, proper, and effective court to hear cases on crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes, is international, such as the ICC. That court’s weakness, however, as in Syria, Russia, and Israel not being subject to that court’s jurisdiction, points to a hole in jurisprudence on crimes against humanity, assuming that the proper and necessary jurisdiction is rightly international rather than national. With the U.S. having recently announced a full-on attack on the ICC (and its prosecutors) at the behest of the indicted suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, it could be asked whether the ICC was in a position to “fill the hole” in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity (and war crimes), or whether a coalition of the willing of national governments would have to start from scratch to construct a new international criminal court (and block diplomacy and trade with any country not willing to be bound by the new international jurisprudence). The judicial case against the al-Assad brothers (and their maternal cousin, who was in the courtroom and thus could be held accountable by the national court for having led the 2011 Daraa crackdown) demonstrates the value in shoring up international jurisprudence on crimes against humanity (and war crimes).

The full essay is at "Syria's Bashar al-Assad."

FIFA’s President: Bad Judgment under the Subterfuge of Miscommunication

In the 1990s, I asked the CEO of ATT whether there is not a conflict of interest in him being chairman of the board tasked with holding the corporation’s management accountable. “The buck stops here,” Armstrong replied as the dean of Yale’s business school looked on, uncomfortably. Fortunately, I was a student in another school at Yale at the time. Fast forward to 2026. The board of FIFA backed up its president, Gianni Infantino in spite of the fact that he had overruled a red-card to favor the U.S. team in that year’s World Cup and then he proposed selling a minority share of FIFA to private investors—a plan that was almost universally viewed by the regional football (soccer) associations as selling out the world’s game to private financial interests so they might profit from the non-profit international organization. FIFA had Infantino’s back, which prompted regional associations, namely UEFA, CONCACAF, and AFC to publicly raise a red flag concerning the very credibility of Infantino for having tried to sell out a minority financial interest in FIFA. Albeit sheer speculation, given U.S. President Trump’s interest in financial transactions in relation to his political office, and Infantino’s having acquiesced to Trump’s request that the one-game suspension from a red card against a player on the U.S. team be revoked, I wonder whether the two men hatched the idea of selling off a minority stake in FIFA to private investors, which might have included Trump himself, his family members, and even the Trump Organization. Such is the nature of collusion in what James Burns refers to in his text, Leadership, as transactional, as distinct from transformational, leadership.

The full essay is at "FIFA's President."

Sexual Abuse in Churches: A Turn to Healing

When Sarah Mullally was formally installed in a historic ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25, 2026, a former nurse became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her vocational background highlights the importance of healing, which was appropriate because her predecessor, Justin Welby, had stepped down because he had failed to address a serial sexual-abuse scandal. It had been important most of all to the victims—boys at a church camp who were sexually molested by a gay man volunteering at the camp—that Welby go. Close to the day of the ceremony, Mullally promised explicitly to attend to such victims, as is fitting and proper for a Christian cleric to do. It is what Jesus Christ would do, whereas he would not recognize the sexual predators or their enablers in the hierarchies of Christian denominations. The contrast itself bears witness to just how far some denominations had fallen from being justified in claiming to follow the principles preached by Jesus in the Gospels. That those sects had been able to do so even while representing themselves as distinctly Christian institutions shows just how power clerics have in beguiling laity.

The full essay is at "Sexual Abuse in Churches." 

Centuries of Excluding Insiders at Yale

Jonathan Edwards fell out of favor with Yale’s president Clapp, who opposed George Whitefield’s Christian revivals as being too “enthusiastic.” So, Clapp had two pamphlets published to criticize Edwards, who had studied and then taught at Yale. In fact, one of Yale College’s residential colleges has been named after Edwards at least since the late twentieth century. I would imagine that few if any current or former JE students have been informed that Edwards ceased attending Yale Commencement exercises and even visiting campus once he had known of Clapp’s vitriolic pamphlets. It is ironic that in Edwards’s time, Yale’s faculty minimized the impact of original sin in what became known as the New Haven theology. It seems that compassion for people who hold a different theological (or political) view, as in “Love thy enemy,” was nonetheless above the grasp of Yale’s administration. Fast-forward from the first half of the eighteenth century to roughly three hundred years later and incredibly the same hostile, highly dysfunctional organizational culture was still well ensconced at Yale.

The full essay is at "Centuries of Excluding Insiders at Yale."

On University “Police Departments”: Accountability at Yale

Whereas in the E.U., universities do not have their own private police departments because the state governments hold the police power, the situation in the U.S. has devolved from such democratic accountability such that even small colleges (and even hospitals!) typically have their own “police departments.” This presents the unwitting American public with a potentially problem of conflict of interest: in disputes between a college or university administration, which is not democratically elected, and stakeholders, including students and the general public, the organizational police forces take orders from one side. This is especially problematic in cases, such as at Yale, in which the organizational police employees patrol off campus—off the university’s own “territory”—and arrest people who are unaffiliated with Yale and have not even been on the campus. Such a usurpation of the prerogative of the city of New Haven comes with the loss of democratic accountability.

The full essay is at "On University 'Police Departments'."

The UN: Israel Guilty of Reproductive Genocide

On March 13, 2025, the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report based on evidence of incessant incidents and Israeli strategic bombings to the UN Human Rights Council. “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination,” Chris Sidoti of the Commission stated.[i] This statement is oriented to particular incidents, albeit recurrent; the report goes on to charge the Israeli government with genocidal methods targeting the ability of the Palestinian population to sexually reproduce itself. Ironically, such methods may bring to mind the methods used in Nazi Germany, including those used by Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” to wantonly kill and strategically sterilize undesirables. It need not be a truism, however, that the descendants of victims become victimizers, though I suspect that studies on intergenerational psychology attest to the phenomenon. Also ironically, culpability with an intergenerational cause is also a theme in the Hebrew Bible. Thirdly, it is ironic too that Yahweh may have the last word on the Israeli transgressions, as this too is a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible’s faith-rendering of the history of Israel. It would be odd indeed were Yahweh behind a sort of rendering of justice against the Nazis by having Israel inflict severe pain on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Put another way, that justice did not catch up to every Nazi aggressor does not mean that excessive, and thus unjust, harming of innocents can complete the cycle of justice. In fact, both the literal “overkill” by Israel and Russia’s war crimes in invading Ukraine—both with impunity—raise the question of whether omnipotent Yahweh gives a damn, or even whether it is actually sheer fiction.

The full essay is at "The UN: Israel Guilty of Reproductive Genocide."

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1. “Rights Probe Alleges Sexual Violence Against Palestinians by Israeli Forces Used as ‘Method of War,” UN News, United Nations, March 13, 2025.

The Vatican on the Brink of Bankruptcy: The Missing Piece

During at least its first millennium, Christianity—with the notable exception of Clement of Alexandria—held that greed is tightly coupled to profit-seeking and wealth. Amid the increased trade, and profits, during the Commercial Revolution in the Middle Age in Europe, Aquinas began the trend severing the coupling to allow for greedless moderate profits, and thus wealth. Also in Medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church allowed monasteries to have collective wealth (including land) without being subject to having to go through the eye of a needle to enter the Kingdom of God.[1] With it supply of gold and real estate, the Vatican could be considered rich in the twenty-first century. When the exemption for collective wealth justifies those holdings from the stain of greed is one question; here I look at reports in 2024 that the Vatican was on the brink of bankruptcy, and why, for at least in one media report, one major reason is curiously left out even though that reason may have been making all the difference, and may even be considered just, whether in terms of divine or human justice.

The full essay is at "The Vatican on the Brink of Bankruptcy."

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1. See my books, Godliness and Greed, and God’s Gold, the latter text reflecting my further thought on the topic, especially on how Christianity can be held off from the increasing susceptibility to greed theologically.

The Lion in the Desert

In 1929, after nearly 20 years of facing resistance in Libya, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist ruler of Italy, appointed General Graziani as colonial governor to put down the military resistance of Libyan nationalists led by Omar Mukhtar. Graziani was ruthless, and fortunately he was arrested when Mussolini was toppled. His foremost atrocity was putting over a million Libyan civilians in a camp in a desert, with the intent to starve them in retaliation for the guerilla fighters objecting to the Italian occupation. The film, The Lion of the Desert (1980), faithfully depicts the historical events that took place in Libya from 1920 to 1931. The sheer arbitrariness other than from brute force in the occupation and the impotence of the League of Nations are salient themes in the film.

The full essay is at "The Lion in the Desert."

Toothless International Human Rights: Genocide in Gaza

It strains credulity to believe that vengeance against the Palestinian residents of Gaza was not among the motives of the Israeli government’s ministers in retaliating for the Hamas attack against occupation on October 7, 2023. Within days, Israel’s president publicly accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being guilty. Because it cannot be assumed that every resident of Gaza who had voted Hamas into office was in favor of the attack, and the residents who had voted for the PLO could even less be assumed to be supportive of Hamas, the Israeli notion of collective justice is ethically flawed. Deficient as a subterfuge for the very human instinctual urge to inflict disproportionate vengeance, the espoused justification did not hold South Africa off from charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). At the time, both South Africa and Israel were parties to the Genocide Convention. Because the ICJ was at the time the principal judicial body of the United Nations, the UN’s lack of enforcement power—notorious even on resolutions passed by the Security Council—meant that even a conviction could send the message that a national government can get away with even genocide.

The full essay is at "Crimes Against Humanity: Israeli Genocide"

Medium Cool

In Medium Cool (1969), John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage. The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law enforcement is necessary in a civilized society.  Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused. The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even their psychological pathologies.

The full essay is at "Medium Cool."

Rockford University: Paranoid on the Periphery

A young library supervisor of student workers at Rockford University insisted that Christmas is only a private holiday because it is exclusively religious after I had said that I wanted to finish the book by Christmas. When I pointed out that in this country (the USA) Christmas is recognized as a national holiday, the library employee said that it is only a holiday for the federal government (not the rest of us) and demanded that I define "country." Then, presumably out of ideological spite, while I was taking an hour walk break outside, he intentionally took the book from its proper place on a bookshelf and demanded that each time I want to use the book, I had to ask him for it. It was neither a reference nor a rare book. Surely he had not spied on every patron, or taken books from the shelves so any patron wanting to use a book again would have to ask him at the front desk; and yet, his boss, the provost of the small college whose office was off to the side of the library's entry hallway, rebutted my complaint about his subordinate and instead angrily threatened me that I had to respect library policies, or of course I could go to another library. No wonder that college was in financial trouble and could not keep its CEO. 

The full essay is at "Rockford University"

Compromising Public Health for a States' Rights Ideology: The Governor of Arizona Nullified a Federal Law during a Pandemic

On October 27, 2021, I rode on two mass transit buses in Phoenix, Arizona. Both drivers were knowingly and willfully violating the federal regulation (42 CFR sec.s 70-71), which requires transit operators to wear masks during the pandemic even when they are situated behind a plexiglass barrier. One of the drivers, whom I had twice before seen not wearing a mask, again had lowered the plexiglass window pane between the driver and customers paying.  The first time, I had asked her to put a mask on, given the federal regulation and her proximity to the passengers boarding. Replying as if making an announcement, she said, “If anyone feels unsafe on the bus, they can get off and wait for the next bus.” That prompted a passenger to insult me. The company subsequently backed up the driver's refusal by saying that the federal law doesn't apply to buses in Arizona. It did, so the company violated federal law with impunity.

The full essay is at "Compromising Public Health During a Pandemic."

The Tyranny of the Veto: Eviscerating the U.N.

Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on October 4, 2011, effectively tossing a life preserver, according to the New York Times, to Syria’s president. The toothless proposal would have condemned the Syrian government for its violent crackdown of popular protests in which more than 2,700 had been killed. The proposal’s language had been softened from targeted financial sanctions; the council would merely have been charged with considering unspecified measures after a 30-day period. Two reasons can be cited for the two vetoes: commercial ties and a vested interest in forestalling any more threats to the doctrine of national sovereignty.

The full essay is at "Tyranny of the Veto: Eviscerating the UN."

Corona Crisis: Arizona in a “Free Fall” and “Out of Control”

On July 7, 2020, NBC News reported that Arizona had a record number of cases (105,094) and of deaths (1,927), with a four percent daily increase in reported cases. Also, coronavirus hospitalizations and related ventilators being used were also at record highs. A reporter with MSNBC stated, “Arizona is in crisis.” On the previous day, on MSNBC television, that same reporter had said, “Arizona is in free fall,” in that the number of cases was rising so fast. It had taken three months for the first 50,000 cases and only 23 days for the next 50,000. Observing that people were not wearing masks in downtown Scottsdale, he reported that “Arizona is out of control.” People there were not taking precautions, and the local and state authorities were not on top of the crisis. On June 22, 2020, a physician with the University of Arizona-Phoenix interviewed on The 11^th Hour show on MSNBC asserted that the Arizonans who were saying, “No one is going to order me to wear a mask,” were being selfish because refusing to wear a mask, say on a bus or in a store or restaurant/bar puts other lives at risk. Also a salient ingredient of the crisis in Arizona was the anti-science contingent of the population. In an interview at the time, Alan Alda (of the TV show, MASH) pointed to “pockets of people who still think science is just another opinion” as having a mindset that “puts us all in danger.”[1] The rigors of scientific experiment, such as the use of control groups and random selection, render science closer to knowledge than are mere opinions based on ideology and a person’s own experience. Privileging one’s own ideology and experiences counts as self-embellishing, and perhaps even self-idolatry. Such people are not likely to accept knowledge that contradicts their respective opinions and experience. Living in Phoenix at the time, I had encountered a lot of anti-intellectualism and incompetence along with refusals to enforce virus-deterring policies and even laws. Just one year earlier, Arizona’s education system through High School (K-12) had been rated as 49 out of the 50 States, but this does not explain the sordid attitude that is pervasive there.

The full essay is at "Arizona Out of Control."

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1. David Hochman, “Alan Alda Is Obsessed with the Power of Science,” AARP: The Magazine, June/July, 2020.

Do Police Departments Unwittingly Attract an Aggressive Mentality?

Might the personality type most excited by inflicting pain on others be drawn to “serve” on a police force?  Might force itself be an allurement to such a personality? Moreover, might organizations populated by the personality be inclined to set up defenses against being held accountable either internally or by other organizations? At the very least, deference ought to go to the victims rather than the “officers.”

The full essay is at "Does Lawful Power Attract Criminals." 

Putin’s Pals: Billionaire Junkies

Arkady Rotenberg, a former judo coach, became a billionaire industrialist by selling pipe to the state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom. Meanwhile, owning a minority state in a small bank in St. Petersburg that won control of another of Gazprom subsidiaries, Yuri Kovalchuk gained a net worth of $1.5 billion. Gennady Timchenko, “once the little-known sales manager of a local oil refinery,” went on to become one of the richest men in the world by co-owning “a commodity trading company that moves about $70 billion of crude oil a year, much of it through major contracts with Rosneft, the Russian national oil company.” What these billionaires shared besides getting rich was a certain connection—namely to Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin arrives for a campaign rally in Moscow.  Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The full essay is at "Putin's Pals."

Major Cracks in Human Resources and Management in the American Grocery Industry Exposed during the Coronavirus Pandemic

For a certain personality-type, character, or mentality, it is easy to blame other people while remaining silent on one’s own mistakes (and mentality). This approach can be particularly harmful during a pandemic, for one’s own mistakes could be passing on the infectious illness. Such mistakes include refusing to maintain a physical distance from other people in public places and retail stores. As noxious as the blaming is, a more significant anthropological point may be that as a social and habitual animal, the human being may not be mentally advanced enough to keep a distance from other such animals even for self-preservation. I don’t think the instinctual urge for socializing exhausts the explanation, for the failure (and even refusal) to respect others enough to keep at a distance even when they ask surely involves weakness that manifests psychologically beyond merely having a bad attitude. Not even the artificial organizational-management systems our species has established are a match for the toxicity of a weakness that is even just passively aggressive toward other people. I contend that American management is susceptable to an even more severe weakness; one that foists organizational power as a club even on customers. 

The full essay is at "Human Resources and Management in the American Grocery Industry."

Strong and Weak Management: The Case of American Bus Companies and Regional Transit Authorities

By the end of the 2010’s, city officials in several American cities were rethinking bus service in a fundamental way; the passenger-fare revenue model was being questioned, and in some cases replaced with a model that fit better with serving poor people and changed local business environments. Yet the downside effects on the bus companies of trends, especially regarding ridership, may have been the result of internal organizational factors immune to a change in the revenue model. I contend that city officials and the managers of bus companies should resist the temptation to view a new model as a cure precisely because some problems, internal to the companies, could go on and silently undermine analysis of the new model such that it could erroneously be discontinued. To be sure, being willing to question a longstanding model is a mark of managerial strength. Indeed, it is precisely the managers of bus companies and regional authorities who are mired in longstanding assumptions who would tend to have the most difficulty in dealing with troublesome internal problems. 

The full essay is at "Strong and Weak Management: Bus Companies."

The Senate Trial of President Trump: Riddled with Conflicts of Interest

At the beginning of a U.S. Senate trial on whether to remove an impeached U.S. president from office, the senators take an oath to be impartial jurists. The impartiality is important because the senators are theoretically to listen to the partial U.S. House prosecuting managers and the president’s defense lawyers. Were the senators themselves partial, they would simply reflect the two sides that make their respective cases. In the trial of Donald Trump, I submit that few if any senators had any intention of being impartial and thus as serving as a jurist rather than as an extension of the prosecutors or defense. In effect, the verdict is left to whichever political party controls the Senate. I contend that having the Senate try presidents is problematic due to conflicts of interest.

The full essay is at "A Constitutional Conflict of Interest."

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Power beyond Corporate Governance

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did not attend a committee hearing at Canada’s Parliament on May 28, 2019 in spite of having received summons from Bob Zimmer MP, the committee’s chair. Instead, Facebook sent its director of public policy and its head of public policy for Facebook Canada. “Shame on Mark Zuckerberg and shame on Sheryl Sandberg for not showing up today,” Zimmer said toward the end of the hearing.[1] For sending two representatives rather than themselves, Zuckerberg and Sandberg faced the possibility of being held in contempt. They had testified before the U.S. Congress, so by sending two representatives the two leaders of Facebook may have acted rather dismissively concerning Canada’s federal legislature. At the time, Zuckerberg had virtually unchecked power at Facebook, including over the other stockholders. From his perch, the power may have been going to his head; even after two years of user-privacy scandals, Facebook’s CEO and Chairman of the Board may have determined that summons from legislatures where the company was operating were beneath him. Such a mentality is dangerous for a person with autocratic control of such a large company.

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1. Donie O’Sullivan and Paula Newton, “Zuckerberg and Sandberg Ignore Canadian Subpoena, Face Possible Contempt Vote,” CNN.com, May 28, 2019.