Murder on the Orient Express

If viewers can get past Hercule Poirot’s extraordinarily long (and awful) mustache in the 2017 film, Murder on the Orient Express, listening closely to some of the detective’s choice observations on human nature and ethics can deliver philosophical dividends. Indeed, Poirot admits to being able to see the world only as it should be, which enables him to detect even small physical (and psychological) aberrations, even concerning eggs for breakfast, and so he has become, as he unabashedly states, the world’s best detective. After having solved the case on the stopped train, however, he realizes that even his “gift” at detection is not fully in line with how things should be, and so he compromises with his austere ethical standards because he finds himself in a “gray area,” ethically speaking.

The full essay is at "Murder on the Orient Express."

Awake

Although no overtly theological or religious material is in the film Awake (2007) because greed itself is the real antagonist, idolatry (self-idolatry actually) can be imputed, and in this sin the underlying sordid foundation of the vice can be grasped. In in his letter to the Colossians, Paul ends his list of sins with greed, “which is idolatry.”[1] The easiest way to interpret this classification of greed being a case of idolatry is to assume that the idol is money (or wealth). The idolatry of wealth is enunciated and perhaps even personified by Gordon Gekko in the film, Wall Street (1987). No amount of personal wealth is enough. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” greed being the desire for more. Gekko delivers the line during his speech to Teldar Paper stockholders. Left unsaid in his speech is the tremendous toll that greed can take not only on other people, but also oneself, for a very circumscribed, as to benefits, selfishness goes along with greed and may even be its foundation. A greedy person would presumably think nothing of betraying a friend if doing so would increase the person’s wealth, especially if no future financial benefit is likely from the friend. To be sure, greed need not be oriented to more money; a selfish person addicted to sex (i.e., in the sense of being regularly driven to have more of it) would have no problem betraying a even a spouse, and even demand of him or her that the addict’s outside sex with others, even with a romantic connection, must and even should be accepted in order to stay. Such extreme, unrepentant callousness can apply to greed for money too, and this is evinced in Awake. The vice of greed as ultimately self-idolatry has an evil connotation, given how much pain and thus harm self-idolatry can easily inflict on other people. The virtue of self-sacrifice is farther than the farthest star from such greed, and the sheer pathos of distance between self-sacrifice out of love and self-idolatry as greedy selfishness is palpable in the film, which arguably intimates and may even stimulate religious sensibilities without being explicit or preachy.

The full essay is at "Awake."

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1. Col. 3:5 (NIV)

The String

The original title of the 2009 film, The String, is Le Fil, which actually translates as thread rather than string. These two English words have different connotations and this bears on the film’s leitmotif. Whereas a person can string another person along, a thread has a connotation of linking people emotionally. The thread that ultimately succeeds in the film is that of caring, which is antipodal to hurting, emotionally speaking. In this sense, the film is like The Holiday (2006), another romantic drama in which the good guys (and gals) wind up on top. In terms of the theme of caring and not hurting other people, that The String centers on two gay men who fall in love whereas The Holiday is about two heterosexual couples matters little, though the resistance to homosexuality in The String is an additional hurdle. I contend that like The Holiday, The String can provide audiences with how falling in love can proceed naturally without exploding because one person hurts the other. In other words, the ethical wins out in both films in regard to emotionally intimate romantic relationships, and in this respect the medium of film has value in terms of ethics.

The full essay is at "The String."

All of Me

The transmigration of souls is usually associated with reincarnation. In the film, All of Me (1984), at the moment of death, a person’s soul can be put “into” another person who is alive such that both people “co-exist” consciously and can control the same body. The comedy is at its best when Steve Martin, who plays Roger Cobb, into whose body the dying millionaire, Edwina Cutwater, is transferred, physically enacts an alternating struggle between Edwina’s feminine movements and Roger’s masculine movements. Martin’s physical talent is amazing. The tension within Roger’s (and Edwina’s) shared body is gradually resolved as the two “souls” become friends—attesting to the underlying goodness of Edwina in stark distinction to the sordid character of Terry Hoskins, who has falsely agreed to let Edwina share her body—two souls and one body—instead of Roger’s in exchange for $20 million. It is the goodness of Roger and the unfolding of Edwina’s goodness up against the absolute badness of Terry that underlies the film’s narrative. In the end, the good win out, and Terry’s soul is put into a horse when Edwina’s soul is transferred by a Hindu guru from Roger to Terry. With Terry’s body all to herself, Edwina is free to become romantically involved with Roger. The good souls win and the squalid one is put in a horse. The upshot is that justice does indeed apply to souls.

The full essay is at "All of Me."

The Count of Monte Cristo

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is a Biblical saying that is perhaps as well known as it is typically ignored in the midst of passion. Even the advice that revenge is better served up as a cold dish rather than immediately when the grill is still hot is difficult to heed. The 1975 film, The Count of Monte-Cristo, can be likened to a “how-to” recipe book on how to exact revenge against multiple people, one after the other until the sense dawns on the avenger that one’s one life has been utterly consumed by the desire and then feels empty once the deserved suffering has been sufficiently inflicted. It is admittedly very difficult to walk away from a grievous injustice if the agent of the harm is allowed to evade suffering that is deserved. In the film, however, Abbé Faria, a Christian priest who has been unjustly held in an island prison for fifteen years, nonetheless urges Edmond Dantes, whose prison cell is connected to Faria’s tunnel, to resist the temptation to ruin the lives of the four men who had unjustly imprisoned Edmund, including De Villefort, Danglars, and General Fernand Mondego. In the end, Dantes, as the Count of Monte-Crisco, pays dearly for having gone down the road of vengeance. Even if the suffering inflicted on the unjust is deserved ethically, distinctly religious implications should be considered lest avengers are left existentially empty rather than as one might expect, finally at peace. The Christian notion of the Kingdom of God is prominent in this distinctly religious regard.

The full essay is at "The Count of Monte Cristo." 

Paradigm-Change in International Relations: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine as a Primer

“We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force.”[1] This statement was signed by E.U. leaders, as well as officials at the state level, and even leaders of sovereign European states such as Britain and Norway several days after U.S. president Trump had met with officials from Ukraine at the White House on October 17, 2025. If only the Europeans had been so unified in 1939; it is difficult to fathom how the world would be 14 years short of a century later had World War II not taken place. Force as a de facto decider of territory has been the default through human history. For the principle of the European political leaders to become the default would represent a step forward in our species’ political development, but the even though principle sounds great, it also looks hopelessly idyllic and not at all realistic.

The full essay is at "Paradigm-Shift in International Relations."

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1. Euronews, “European Leaders Back Ukraine Ceasefire Proposal at Current Contact Line,” Euronews.com, 21 October 2025.

Lord of War

Lord of War (2005) is a film in which a Ukrainian-born American arms dealer, Yuri Orlov, and his brother, Vitaly, who works with Yuri when not in voluntary rehab for drug abuse, make money by selling military arms to dictators including Andre Baptiste of Liberia. Whereas Yuri is able to maintain a mental wall keeping him from coming to terms with his contribution to innocent people getting killed by the autocrats who are his customers, Vitality is finally unable to resist facing his own complicity, and that of his brother. This itself illustrates that moral concerns may have some influence on some people but not others. Yuri’s position, which can be summed up as, what they do with the guns that we sell them is none of our business, contrasts with Vitaly as he realizes that as soon as the Somalian warlord takes the guns off the trucks, villages down the hill will be killed. Vitaly even sees a woman and her young child being hacked to death down below. Yuri tries to manage his brother so the sale can be completed and the two brothers can get out of Somalia, but Vitaly has finally had enough and has come to the conclusion that he and Yuri have been morally culpable by selling guns to even sadistic dictators like Andre Baptiste. Even as Yuri ignores his own conscience, Vitaly finally cannot ignore the dictates of his own, and he takes action. Does he ignore his happiness, and thus his self-interest, in being willing to die to save the villagers by blowing up (admittedly only) one of the two trucks, or has he reasoned through his conscience and found that it coincides with his happiness? In other words, are the moral dictates of a person’s conscience necessarily in line with a person’s happiness, and thus one’s self-interest? This is a question that the filmmaker could have explored in the film.

The full essay is at "Lord of War."

On the Impotency of International Law in a System of Sovereign States: The Case of Gaza

The sheer brazenness with which countries ironically recognized as being sovereign states by international law ignore international law even in regard to human rights that seeks to place boundaries on said sovereignty reflects the impotency of international law, and thus even that which recognizes national sovereignty itself. For the rest of us, continuing to believe that upcoming cases before the International Court of Justice, the UN’s court, are of consequence and thus even worth paying attention to, demonstrates abject stupidity, as if we were herd animals without learning curves. Admittedly, the stubborn, self-aggrandizing governments are ethically worse than the world’s population that lets such governments blatantly and even explicitly ignore judicial rulings of the International Court of Justice (and the European Court of Human Rights), but culpability can also be gleamed from the public’s truly pathetic irrational belief that another case against a country that has just ignored a verdict of that very court might just work in curtailing human-rights abuses and outright, even genocide-scale, aggression that outstrips even the sin of retaliation. Either I am blind or the proverbial emperor is not wearing any clothes.

The full essay is at "On the Impotency of International Law."

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Diwali, or Deepavali, is one of the biggest festivals in India. More than a billion Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists in the world celebrate the festival of lights in which good triumphs over evil. “Despite its deep religious significance, Diwali today is also a cultural festival observed by people regardless of faith.”[1] In this regard, Diwali is like Christmas, which plenty of non-Christians celebrate as a day of giving complete with the secularized myth of Santa Claus, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman. To claim that Diwali is exclusively Hindu or Christmas is only a Christian holiday—and thus in resentment to ignore either holiday—violates the spirit that both share. The “Happy holidays” greeting is an oxymoron, given its underlying motive of resentment. Yet if this were the extent of human aggression, the world would be a much better place. The Indian documentary film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), reveals much worse than the passive aggression of dismissing a national holiday as if it did not exist. The violence unjustifiably and wantonly inflicted by university police on students at several universities who are protesting caste discrimination and the politically partisan coup at the Film and Television Institute of India, goes beyond even the harm exacted by the discrimination by caste. A Diwali celebration is shown in the film, and this raises the question of whether we can of yet even assuming our species' “progress,” celebrate the victory of good over evil as long as human beings in power abuse their discretion with impunity.

The full essay is at "A Night of Knowing Nothing."

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1. Harmeet Kaur, “What to Know about Diwali, the Festival of Lights,” CNN.com, November 11, 2023.

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence has outdone itself, whether in terms of nuclear war or rendering a climate unsuitable for us.

The full essay is at "Oppenheimer."

Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding. 

The full essay is at "Judgment at Nuremberg."

"Old School" Scholars and the Contemporary American University: Oil and Water

In the 2000s, I had the honor of studying under Patrick Riley, a scholar of historical moral, religious, and political thought. Even though I had had "old-school" professors in the course of my degreed studies at Indiana University and Yale, Riley's approach can be said to be medieval. After four years of auditing his courses and those of many of other professors at Riley's request at a large Midwestern university, I received not a degree nor even many academic credits, but. rather, a hand-written letter in which he let his colleagues know that I could teach graduate-school level political theory. It is no accident that he periodically visited the University of Bologna, which, aside from hosting the huge project of publishing Leibniz's correspondence, was as the first university in Europe, founded in 1066. Back then, I bet letters of recommendation were the principal way in which scholars got hired; a scholar became recognized as one when the scholar he studied under realized that the budding scholar knew enough of the field, which is more than merely doing well in some classes. How technocratic and artificial contemporary universities would seem to ancient and medieval scholars. I think they would be startled at how many pedestrian scholars there are, who relish making narrow distinctions based on technicalities. In contrast, Patrick Riley a product of Harvard, where he continued to work and live even during the many years in which he took weekly flights during the semesters out to a Midwestern university, viewed European intellectual history in the great book tradition and was thus able to see intellectual inheritances well beyond Augustine's in Plato and Aquinas' in Aristotle. Riley traced how the theory of justice as love and benevolence came together from strands of thought in Plato and Augustine in the thought of Leibniz, and how the social contract school of political thought changed in going from Hobbes to Kant. Moreover, I admired Riley's relating of historical theological and moral thought to the political thought. How technocratic or pedestrian so many other twentieth-century scholars were, but not Patrick Riley. 

The full essay is at "Old-School Scholars"

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." 

Ideological Word Games: The Modern Weapon of Choice?

When I was young, my dad would sometimes criticize me for engaging in “word games.” Perhaps I was already parsing words; my parents and maternal grandfather were all lawyers. My last name is Worden, after all. I was raised to pronounce the name, war-den, and only after decades did it occur to me that people might spell the name as Worden rather than Warden if I pronounced it as word-n. I was the first even in the extended family to use the alternative; as Nietzsche wrote, no philosopher is a man of his time. We tend to think outside the proverbial constrained “box” because we critique assumptions and arguments (i.e., critical thinking), including those of the “boxes” that society leaves unquestionably standing as part of the status quo—the tyranny of which has repelled philosophers wetted to the idea that no stone should be left unturned, even if a society deems some stones as sacrosanct. It can be dangerous even to question the solidity of those stones, especially if they formed out of ideological controversies wherein tussling instinctual urges contesting for societal dominance. In this too, I am drawing on Nietzsche, who even viewed the content of ideas as being instinctual urges. In being willing to subject societally cherished ideas to fundamentally unique and deep scrutiny, Friedrich Nietzsche is the last, at least as of my time living in an American desert, both academically and geographically, where plenty of Nietzsche’s “herd animals” freely roamed. They were particularly vulnerable to ideological word-games in unquestioningly accepting the words from the insurgent ideologies as valid.

The full essay is at "Ideological Word Games."

The Bahá’i Religion: Theological Problems

The Bahá’i religion is based on the monotheistic teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, the nineteenth-century prophet whom Bahá’i’s maintain is the prophet even for the twenty-first century. The monotheism dovetails with the religion’s earthly goal of unity even in diversity.[1] At the same time, the religion is universalistic in that it holds that truth can come out of various religions, including non-deism Buddhism and polytheistic Hinduism. Bahá’i aims to be a tolerant religion in principle, although it seems to me that the monotheistic religions would naturally be favored. Although Hindu and Buddhist teachings and prayers are incorporated, Bahá’i does seem to emphasize Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet this does not absolve Bahá’iism from the tension in being both monotheist and inclusive of truth from non-monotheist religions. Even within Bahá’i’s grasp of the three monotheist religions an underlying tension can be found. Specifically, although Bahá’iism aims to accurately represent all three of the Abrahamic religions, the desire to emphasize what those religions have in common comes at the expense of taking each in its own, distinct terms. In particular, Bahá’i teaching treats Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed similarly even though they are different types in their respective religions. The imposed isomorphism enables Bahá’iism to claim Bahá’u’lláh as the fourth is a series of the same prophet-type. This type stresses the divine-connection of the prophet at the expense of his human nature. Meanwhile, the goal of unity—the Kingdom of God—is also portrayed in distinctly earthly terms, albeit idealized, as the unity possible around the world of different peoples in “a civilization founded on justice, equality and unity in diversity.”[2] Viewing the Kingdom of God in such concrete, even partisan terms can arbitrarily narrow and even skew the divine into terms that are human, even all too human.

The full essay is at "The Baha'i Religion."

For more, see: God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth;  Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical. Both are available at Amazon.

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1. This is similar to Schopenhauer’s ethical theory of compassion being based on Plotinus’s (a second-century Christian philosopher) notion of the One.

2. From the 2019 Grassroots Teaching Conference of the Four Corners Region.

Sexual Harassment at Yale: A Wider Picture of Intolerance in Political Correctness

In his commentary on “Sex and the College Dean” in The Wall Street Journal, William McGurn bemoans what he calls the “surrender [of] what little moral authority [deans and college presidents] have left to their in-house counsel and off-campus government authorities.”[1] McGurn points in particular to the rising influence of lawyers in college administrations. “Today deans have given way to lawyers. The consequence has been endless gestures to raise ‘awareness,’ constant upgrading of procedures and the proliferation of committees—all designed primarily to limit the institution's civil liability. Thus Rutgers says it is working on making the school ‘more inclusive’” after a gay student killed himself after his roommate had posted video secretly shot of the gay student having sex in the dorm room. Not to completely dispute McGurn’s “lawyer thesis,” I do, however, want to broaden the explanation based on material provided by McGurn himself. Specifically, the “more inclusive” language McGurn cites is the signature of the political-correctness movement that had swept college campuses in the United States since the late 1980's. McGurn claims that deans of students have gone from being adults to legalists in seeking to minimize their school’s liability; I want to add that those deans went from being adults to ideologues as well.

The full essay is at "Sexual Harassment at Yale."  

1. William McGurn, “Sex and the College Dean,” The Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2011, p. A15.

Bankers or the Bank: Which Is Responsible?

Along with paying $2.6 billion to settle criminal and civil charges for having “failed, and failed miserably” to notify the SEC of warning signs that could have short-circuited Bernie Madoff’s $17 billion Ponzi operation, J.P. Morgan Chase only had to acknowledge that its actions were improper.[1] No criminal prosecution ensued. The electronic evidence against Madoff's operation was too damning for JP Morgan Chase to have missed it. Indeed, according to USA Today, “JPMorgan had suspicions about Madoff’s operation as early as December 1998, when a bank fund manager warned the investment returns were ‘possibly too good to be true.’”[2] Without submitting any “suspicious activity reports” to the U.S. Government as required by law, the bank had pulled $275 million of its own “feeder funds” from Madoff’s fund two months before Madoff’s financial services firm collapsed.[3] In other words, the bankers connected the dots well enough for the bank's financial interest and perhaps even their own, yet strangely  enough no one at the bank could manage to let the outside world  know, even though federal law mandated reporting the suspicions to the SEC.  and responsibility urged it.

The full essay is at "Bankers or the Bank: Which is responsible?"

J.P. Morgan hitting a man. Was he demonstrating that criminal law applies to human beings rather than to organizations themselves?  Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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1. This was according to Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.Tim Mullaney and Kevin McCoy, “JPMorgan to Pay $2.6 billion in Madoff Case Settlements,” USA Today, January 8, 2014.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

Mitt Romney’s “About-Face" in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election: A Candidate’s Conflict-of-Interest

As was demonstrated in September 2008 as banks began to stop lending to each other even overnight, trust is the foundation, or grundlagen, of a market. The same is true in relationships between people. I would be surprised were a marriage ever the same after even a contrite spouse has had an extramarital affair. The same is true in politics; once the electorate has been lied to, it is very hesitant to remove the asterisk next to the politician’s name. The relevance of a politician’s extra-marital affair, such as the flowery lapse of Gary Hart or the sordid stains of Bill Clinton, is that the people conclude that they, like the wives, could be betrayed. Once established, a lack of trust tends to spread like an invidious cancer until it has encompassed the entire body politic. The shift is from justice to a lack of harmony on many levels.

Plato theorized that justice is the harmony within the rational psyche and polis (city, or country) as well as between the heavenly spheres (planets and stars)—the harmony between the rational and the vibrations of the spheres being in sync, which is justice itself. It follows that a person who lets his or her desires run rampant is in line with a squalid or aggressive city, and that neither of these shares in the musical/mathematic harmonious vibrations of and between the heavenly spheres. Lack of trust at the personal, business, or civic level can be said to be a symptom of the shift from the condition of harmony, and thus justice, to discord.

It follows that in a republic or union thereof, it is vital to maintaining justice (as harmony) that the electorate not be as sheep in taking in that which a politician claims regarding what he or she “really believes.” Once a candidate has stupidly lapsed in terms of trustworthiness, the electorate should be cognizant of the conflict of interest in the candidate later dismissing the substance of his or her real feelings or beliefs. In general, if a candidate’s statement is in line with him or her getting elected, a due dose of salt should be taken with that dish.

I have in mind Mitt Romney’s statement at a closed-door fundraiser in September, 2012 that nearly half of Americans don’t pay income taxes, view themselves as victims, and refuse to take responsibility for their lives, wanting to live off entitlement programs instead. 

The full essay is at "Mitt Romney's Conflict of Interest: Campaigning for U.S. President."

Police Against Protesters: Sadism or Politics?

The day after several marches and rallies by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in New York City, The New York Times reported that “two dozen people were arrested at a Citibank branch on LaGuardia Place on trespassing charges. Some witnesses said that the protesters had tried to leave but were locked inside by bank employees. ‘They were trying to leave, but they wouldn’t let them,’ said Meaghan Linick, 23, of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She said one woman who had been inside and left was forced back inside by police officers. Citibank, in a statement, said the protesters ‘were very disruptive and refused to leave after being repeatedly asked, causing our staff to call 911.’ The statement continued, ‘The police asked the branch staff to close the branch until the protesters could be removed.’” The Times report does not mention whether the protesters were existing Citibank customers trying to close their accounts. The report does refer to this at a Chase bank. “Earlier, about a dozen protesters entered a Chase branch in Lower Manhattan and withdrew their money from the bank while 300 other people circled the block, some shouting chants and beating on drums. The former Chase customers, who declined to reveal how much they had in their accounts — though a few acknowledged it was not much — said they planned to put their money into smaller banks or credit unions.’ The more resources we give to small institutions, the more they’ll be able to provide conveniences like free A.T.M.’s and streamlined online banking so they can compete with the larger banks,’ said Hannah Appel, 33, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.” The report does not indicate whether the former customers were arrested.

The full essay is at "Lawful Aggressors."

                                       Anthony Bologna of NYPD pepper-spraying protesters following his orders

Justice’s Last Resort: Accountability in the Roman Catholic Church Sex Scandals

A pattern of deeply violent acts of power-aggrandizement, followed by the efforts of “organizational men” to cover up the atrocities in the interest of the organization and even the offenders at the negligent expense of the offended, cannot but have ripple effects, or make waves, once the stories are revealed to the public. It is sad, very sad, when an offending institution, or “club,” refuses to enforce accountability on its offending functionaries—members of the club. In early August, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office released to the public an 884-page report finding that six Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania had covered up sexual abuse—molestation and even rape—by 301 “predator priests” over 70 years in the twentieth century.[1]

The full essay is at "Justice as Accountability: The Roman Catholic Church Sex Abuse Cases."

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1. Hayley Miller, “Indiana Priest Beaten Unconscious, Allegedly Told ‘This Is for All the Little Kids.” The Huffington Post, August 22, 2018.