Russian Electricity Hits a Financial Curtain

On February 8, 2025, the E.U. states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania turned off all electricity-grid connections to Russian and Belarussian supplies of electricity, thus reducing revenues for the belligerent country and its ally. Electricity would thenceforth merge with the Continental European and Nordic grids through links with the E.U. states of Finland, Sweden, and Poland. Europe was taking care of its own, for a price of course, while Russia was increasing trade with China and other countries to make up the difference from decreasing trade with Europe. In short, it can be concluded that unilaterally invading a country has economic consequences that diminish and reconfigure international business.

The full essay is at "Russian Electricity Hits a Financial Curtain."

Lord Krishna in the Bhagavadgita

The Hindu myth, the Bhagavadgita, is typically regarded as placing the god Krishna above not only the other Hindu gods—here rendered merely as Krishna’s various functionalities—but also Brahman, which is being and consciousness writ large. Because Krishna is incarnated in human form, placing him at the peak of the Hindu pantheon—in fact, even reducing the latter to the point that Hinduism is regarded by some scholars as monotheist—compromises the wholly-other quality of the divine that is based on it extending beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion, and thus beyond things we encounter in our world. In other word, the highlighting of Krishna’s role in the Gita comes at a cost. Depicting Krishna as the “Supreme Person” connotes less transcendence than does depicting Brahman as being and consciousness (of the whole). In going against the grain by making Brahman the unmanifested basis or foundation even of Krishna as well as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, Shankara, a Hindu theologian, philosopher, and ascetic of the eighth century, CE, can be interpreted as highlighting  transcendence in Hinduism, an element that establishes religion itself as a distinctive domain.

The full essay is at "Lord Krishna in the Bhagavadgita."

Bell, Book and Candle

If ever there were a mistaken title for a movie, Bell, Book and Candle must rank in the upper tier, for the spells in the bewitching comedy hinge on a cat and a bowl rather than bell, book, and candle. Magic can be thought of as the making use of concrete objects, combined with words, to engage a supernatural sort of causation meant to manipulate sentient or insentient beings/objects for one’s own purposes.  The film, Bell, Book and Candle (1958), is not only a love story and a comedy, but also the presentation of a story-world in which witches and warlocks engage in contending spells for selfish reasons. That story-world in turn can be viewed as presenting a religion, which can be compared and contrasted with others. Most crucially as far as religion is concerned, the supernatural element that is observable in the story-world points to the existence of a realm that lies beyond the world of our daily lives and thus renders the film’s story-world different. Put another way, the unique type of causation, which appears only as coincidence to the characters who are not in on the existences of witches and warlocks in the story-world, transcends appearance because the “laws” of the causation operate hidden from view, as if in another realm. I contend that it is precisely such transcendence not only in terms of belief, but also praxis, that distinguishes the domain of religion as unique and thus distinct from other domains, including those of science (e.g., biology, astronomy), history, and even ethics.

The full essay is at "Bell, Book, and Candle."

Return to Haifa

Return to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals. That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists, who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba (or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though perhaps it could have been).

The full essay is at "Return to Haifa."

Is the Hindu Bhagavadgita Monotheist?

Even though the Bhagavadgita is just a small part of the Mahabharata Hindu epic, the popularity of the former book in Hindu households has led to it being referred to as the Hindu Bible. This likeness should be taken at face value, for the contents in the Gita are very different than the theological context of the Bible, whether just the Torah, the Talmud, or the New Testament. Even though the virtue of kindness or love issuing out in compassion to other people is a shared descriptor of the Hindu Lord Krishna, which is the highest god in the Gita, and the Christian Lord Jesus, the ideational dissimilarities between the Gita and the Bible should not be glossed over. Put another way, not even the symbol of the mandala, which Joseph Campbell includes as the religious archetype of wholeness in The Power of Myth, should dispel the notion that religions contain unique and thus different philosophical and theological ideas and even just stances.

The full essay is at "Is the Hindu Bhagavadgita Monotheist?"

Presence

The medium of film has great potential in playing with ontology, the branch of philosophy that asks (and tries to answer) the fundamental question: What really exists?  Put another way, what does it mean for something to exist. The being of “to be,” as opposed to not-be may be thought of, can be labeled as existential ontology. Whereas in the Hindu Upanishads, being itself is Brahman, which pervades everything in the realm of appearance, the Abrahamic religions posit the existence of a deity that creates existence and thus is its condition or foundation. Creation ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing) is another way of grasping why the Abrahamic god is not existence, or being, itself, for that which brought (and sustains) existence into (and as) being cannot logically be existence itself. Fortunately for most viewers who lead normal lives, the film, Presence (2024), does not hinge on such abstractions; the salience of ontology, or what is real beyond our daily experiences (in the realm of appearance), is merely implied in there being an entity that intriguingly is only a presence. It is real to both the main characters in the film’s world and to viewers of the film because of the inclusion of supernatural effects that the entity is able to register in the perception of the family living in the house. Crucially, such effects do not overwhelm the subtlety in how the presence is known to exist (i.e., be real). In this way, Presence succeeds where Poltergeist (1982) and Ghost (1990) do not: Presence is more philosophically intriguing and thought-provoking than the latter two films, and is thus a better example of the potential that the medium of film has in engaging viewers in philosophy. Being less oriented to visually titilating supernatural effects, Presence can better engage the mind philosophically. 

The full essay is at "Presence."

On the U.S. President as Chief Executive

As the chief executive of the U.S. Government, the president is tasked with executing the law—the passage thereof involving both the Congress and the presidency. It follows that a president cannot legally stand in the way of appropriated federal funding of projects and programs once such allocations have become law. For otherwise, a president could simply ignore appropriations passed by the Congress and signed into law by a previous president. The powers of the unitary executive would reach dictatorial proportions. Within roughly one week of being sworn into office for his second term in 2025, U.S. President Trump decided to pause all foreign aid, and “grants, loans and other federal assistance . . . to ensure spending is consistent with Trump’s priorities.”[1] Those priorities, I submit, would properly have influence on bills in Congress that were not yet laws, as per the legislative veto-power of the presidency and the ability of a president to put pressure on members of Congress by speaking persuasively directly to the American people. The value of leadership available to a presiding role should not be ignored. In terms of symbolic leadership befitting a presider in chief, refusing to enforce laws sends the wrong signal. To be sure, delaying rather than cancelling funding that has already been appropriated as law may fall within reasonable discretion that goes with the executing, and thus executive, function. However, the size, or magnitude, of the federal spending being held up but not cancelled may test the test of reasonableness. This may also be so if the political dimension—that is, the salience of political judgment in the issues involved—is significant.

The full essay is at "On the U.S. President as Chief Executive."

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1. James Fitzgerald and Ana Faguy, “White House Pauses Federal Grants and Loans,” BBC.com, January 28, 2025.

Farha

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, being in the wake of the Nazi atrocities, was arguably viewed generally then as something that the world owed to the Jewish people. Perhaps for this reason, the UN did not take adequate measures on the ground to safeguard the Palestinian residents. In retrospect, the possibility, even likelihood, that people who group-identify with (or even as) victims consciously decide to become victimizers should have been better considered. The film, Farha, made in 2021, illustrates the sheer indeterminacy, and thus arbitrariness, of human volition when it issues orders to the body to be violent against other rational beings. Channeling Kant, it can be argued that the decision to shoot a family that poses absolutely no threat impurely out of hatred based on group-identity fails even to treat other rational beings as means—to say nothing of as ends in themselves. The deplorability in being unwilling even to use another person as a means to some selfish goal, preferring instead to kill rather than respect the otherness of the other, grounds the verdict on the culprit as a being that is less than nothing. In another film, The Brutalist (2024), Laszio, the Jewish protagonist, erroneously concludes that Jews must surely be less than nothing, given how they were treated in Nazi Germany, but also how he and other Jews are regarded in Pennsylvania, especially considering that news of the Holocaust has reached America. Whether raw brutality or silent, passive-aggressive prejudice is suffered, turning one’s own victimhood, or, even worse, that of one's abstract group, into victimizing is ethically wrong. Such lashing out in retribution, or, even worse, in disproportionate vengeance, fails to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves, and even as means for one's own future use. Such cycles have a beginning, one of which  Farha captures very well at an interpersonal level. At that level, group-identity seems especially artificial, even as it explains the visible hatred to casual observers such as film-viewers.

The full essay is at "Farha." 

A Bishop's Partisanship Overshadows Her Christianity

On the first full day of U.S. President Trump’s second term, the president and vice president attended a multi-faith prayer service at the National Cathedral. Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde delivered the sermon on what is necessary for imperfect political unity in a country such as the United States. I contend that in trying to influence the president on immigration policy in a partisan way, she undercut the credibility of her message that there is strength in loving rather than retaliating against one’s detractors and even political enemies. The sacrifice of which she spoke concerning being kind in reaching out in humanity to people we dislike could be applied to herself in resisting the temptation to be partisan. That she lapsed at the expense of Jesus’ most important message is particularly striking.

The full essay is at "Undercutting Jesus' Message."

The Tech Industrial Complex

Democracy, Plato and Aristotle both thought, is a governmental system that is most susceptible to the mob—meaning mob-rule. Accordingly, the Electoral College and the appointments of U.S. Senators by state governments, the latter being the case from the establishment of the U.S. Constitution to a few decades into the twentieth century, were meant to limit any damage from momentary passions of the People to the U.S. House of Representatives. The governments in the United States, like those in the European Union, are republics in which democracy is a part rather than the whole. What neither Plato nor Aristotle could foresee in their agrarian city-states is the threat to democracy by plutocracy—the system of government in which private wealth rules. It is less understandable why the American electorates have ignored repeated warnings of the threat, especially as governmental power has concentrated at the federal level since the war between the CSA and the USA in 1861.

The full essay is at "The Tech Industrial Complex."

The Brutalist

It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show” in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced. In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented world.

The full essay is at "The Brutalist."

Emilia Pérez

In handling social ethics, especially if the topic is controversial, film-makers must decide, whether consciously or not, whether to advocate or elucidate. Whereas the former is in pursuit of an ideology, the latter is oriented to teasing out via dramatic tensions the nuances in a typical normative matter that move an audience beyond easy or convenient answers to wrestle with the human condition itself as complex. This is not to say that advocation should never have a role in film-making; The film, Schindler’s List (1993), for example, provides a glimpse into the extremely unethical conduct of the Nazi Party in ruling Germany. I submit that the vast majority of ethical issues are not so easily decided one way or the other as those that arose from Hitler’s choices regarding communists, Slavs in Eastern Europe, intellectuals, Jews, homosexuals and the disabled. In relative terms, the ethical controversy surrounding transsexuals is less severe and clear-cut. The value of elucidating is thus greater, as are the downsides of prescribing ideologically. One such drawback to indoctrinating on a controversial issue is that the ideological fervor in making the film for such a purpose can blind a film-maker to the cogency of the arguments made in favor of advocated stance on the issue. The film, Emilia Pérez (2024), illustrates this vulnerability, which I submit is inherent to ideology itself.

The full essay is at "Emilia Pérez."

Deflating Bloated Self-Entitlement in Retail: Barnes and Noble at Yale

Atrocious human-resources management, even regarding in-store employees of a sub-contractor, can easily be understood to detract from repeat customers; a refusal to hold such employees accountable can be a reflection of a sordid managerial attitude towards customers, especially in relation to employees. In cases in which the refusal is explicitly stated to an already-offended customer, the slogan, “adds insult to injury” is applicable, with disastrous effects in terms of repeat business, and thus revenue. That management is in some cases so bad reflects on the primitive condition of the “science” of management in business schools. That a case in point occurred in Yale’s (Barnes and Noble) bookstore, not far from Yale’s School of Management, suggests the sheer distance between the “science” and practice of management.

The full essay is at "Bloated Self-Entitlement in Retail."

GDP Per Capita in the E.U. and U.S.: Changing Perceptions

Historically speaking, the E.U. and U.S. are relatively large in territorial expanse and population, so it is only to be expected that significant economic (and cultural) differences exist from state to state in the respective unions of states. In Europe, some medieval kingdoms have relegated to being but regions in E.U. states. Holland, for instance, is a region in The Netherlands, which in turn is a E.U. state. The same can be said of Bavaria (and England, were the United Kingdom still a E.U. state). To compare the economic inequality in such a region with the inequality in the E.U. (or U.S.) over all would be deeply misleading. For example, rural/urban economic patterns that pertain to an economy containing one major city do not translate into the multiple rural/urban patterns that exist in a modern (empire-scale) union of states. In short, scale matters, especially in how we make use of mathematical averages.  Comparing GDP per capita is a case in point; states should be compared with states.

The full essay is at "GDP Per Capita in the E.U. and U.S."

Certifying a U.S. Presidential Election: A Constitutional Conflict of Interest

That it should go without saying that a constitution providing a government with its basic framework and procedures should not contain any conflicts of interest makes it all the more astonishing when an actual constitution is found to contain a obvious yet undetected conflict of interest that could be exploited by an institutional or officeholder and yet is easy to obviate, or fix. The implication in such a case is that a society can be too comfortable with institutional conflicts of interest without realizing that if such a conflict is exploitable, it is likely that it eventually will be even if not right away. Because U.S. President Don Trump’s pressure on his vice president, Mike Pence, on January 6, 2021 to refuse to certify the votes of the electors in some of the states did not result in any serious proposals to have another office than the vice presidency preside, a societal tolerance for even known conflicts of interests in general and in a constitution more particularly can be inferred. I submit that such a tacit willingness to continue with the status quo can eventually put even a republic itself at risk.

The full essay is at "Certifying a U.S. Presidential Election."