A new movie has opened, about the life of Fred Rogers, the longtime beloved host of Mr Rogers' Neighborhood. I have no plans for seeing the movie, but I think there is something to be said about that fact that Tom Hanks, no less, is playing the title character. It says, I think, that Hanks has settled into what may be the final, and a very long, phase of his career. Bill Cosby used to be called "America's Dad," back in the old Cliff Huxtable days. Hanks, for all his talent and fame, is settling into a recurring role as "America's Grandpa." I hope it doesn't end for Hanks as badly as it ended for Cosby!
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Okay, that headline may not be exactly "click bait." I'm glad you're with me anyway. I believe I've mentioned in this blog at some point a book by a Plato scholar, Racanha Ramtekar, PLATO'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY. The book drew a review from Nicholas Smith, and that review drew in turn a riposte from Ramtekar. I'll quote just a bit of the latter here. By way of background: it is a very common observation that the earlier dialogs of Plato take a very different point of view of morality and psychology than do later ones. One common contention is that Plato started off as a faithful follower of the historical Socrates, but then developed in different directions. This is sometimes called the "developmentalist" view of Plato, as opposed to he "unitarian" theory which makes the case that Plato was really consistent without. Ramtekar is neither a developmentalist nor a unitarian. She sees it as a false dichotomy. Her reviewer, Smit...
On my mind today (and on Thanksgiving fairly often -- I've used this as this blog's Thanksgiving reflection twice before), is the novel Mildred Pierce, published in 1941, written by James Cain, a writer whose reputation, once considerable, has lately gone into eclipse. As it happens, Mildred Pierce was also made into a movie in 1945, and became a television miniseries (HBO) in 2011. The title character has two daughters: Veda (11 years old when the story begins in 1931) and her little sister Ray (7 years). The photo above is of Veda, as portrayed by actress Morgan Turner in that HBO miniseries. The following two-word sentence is not much of a spoiler, by the way, because it happens quite early in the plot, and sets up the rest: Ray dies. Indeed, that's why I'm thinking of the book right now. Thanksgiving as currently practiced in the US has a lot to do with the sentimentalization of the nuclear family, and Mildred Pierce has a lot, in turn, t...
Yes, I know 'Nobel season' is over, the articles (and blog posts, including a couple here) that it regularly generates have been written and for the most part forgotten, though they might be taken out of drawers again next October when related cogitations come into play. But I want to revisit the institution of the Nobel Prize for a second, in the process harkening back to 1977. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year went to Ilya Prigogine "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thernodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures." The fascinating thing is, not only that Prigogine's contribution was fallacious, but that it was known to be such (by researchers on the cutting edge of chemistry, if not to the members of the Nobel committee) before the prize was awarded. What is non-equilibrium thermodynamics? Well, let's take that mouthful apart. Thermodynamics is the study of heat and its relationship to matter. In chemistry (as distinct...
Alan Dershowitz, a man for whom I once had some respect, has been such a pathetic shill for Trump of late that it is natural to hope that Nemesis will catch up with him. And perhaps it has. If so, Nemesis has taken the earthly form of another lawyer with an impressive reputation and aggressive persona: David Boies. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/boies-complaint.pdf I love the half-smile, or whatever you call that facial expression in his photo here. My talk about Nemesis etc is of course a poor excuse for any legal analysis of the merits of the lawsuit. I will leave any such analysis to another day.
At the end of August I wrote here about Francesco Orsi's 2015 book, simply titled VALUE THEORY. Here is a quote from the book, from a chapter called "Personal Value." "The agent-relativized structure can make sense of a range of situations where we think it morally significant that the agent was involved. I need to repay my debt to my creditor, but I learn that I could help B repaying her higher debts to her creditors . But if I do this, I will be unable to pay my debts.... I have an overriding duty to repay my debt. According to agent-relative consequentialism, this is because repaying my debt is better relative to me than repaying others' debts. Analogous examples can be multiplied at will." This makes sense to me. How sympathetic do we have to make B's distressed circumstances in order to release the agent relativity here? Of course, as Orsi also says, this must be understood with a "ceteris paribus" clause. He doesn't expand...
Jack sat down at the PC. It was one of a line of them in the local library. He took out his keychain, which had small "library card." (This was not like the old sort of library card that he remembered from school days -- this was a smaller thingy suited to a keychain, presumably to make it had to lose.) The card was there along with other convenient little items that have nothing to do with the act of entering or starting a car, including a card of roughly the same size that got him discounts at the local Shop & Grab store. So he entered a longish number into the PC -- thinking it was the library card number. A box in the screen informed him that number was not active. He entered it a second time, being more careful about his typing this time. He got the same error box. He moved over to the next computer at the bank. That seat was also unoccupied. While he was getting himself settled, by habit, he stuck the keychain back in his pocket. When he realized this, he f...
Joseph Kennedy III, the grandson of Sen. Robert Kennedy and the grandnephew of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, announced recently that he is a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for the seat in the US Senate now held by another member of that party, Sen. Edward Markey. The nomination will likely be decided by a primary on September 15, 2020. Ed Markey is 73 years old and has been either in the House of Representatives or the Senate continuously since 1977. This makes him the second longest-serving member of Congress from New England. Joseph Kennedy turned 39 on October 4. There is certainly a generational aspect to this challenge, just as in other parts of the country younger Democrats are challenging party elders for other seats. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in October of 1989, notoriously won her seat in the House, representing New York's 14th district, by knocking off a party elder, Joe Crowley, at the conclusion of Crowley's tenth term in...
Beto O'Rourke (NOT the guy pictured here) has left the building, specifically, the Presidential campaign. I begin that way because Beto's campaign always had a celebrity-celebrating Elvis-like aspect to it, Vanity Fair cover and all. If for that reason alone, I'm not sorry to see him go. Before he left, he did give us a chance to think about what the term "Overton window" means, especially in the context of gun control in the US, and in more particular in Texas. Joseph Overton, a free market oriented political scientist who passed away in 2003, and who IS the guy pictured above, originated the concept of a "window of discourse" encompassing all 'acceptable' positions on an issue, and since named after him by his admirers. The point is that only fringe thinkers believe proposition 'A,' and only thinkers on a contrary fringe, we shall say, believe 'E'. The current policy is C and the more sensible not-so-fringe reformers sa...
A few days ago, Henry asked my in the comments section to a post about a Wesley Salmon quote whether our knowledge of the basic natural forces and laws -- gravity, inertia, etc. -- is at bottom inductive? I said I didn't think so, and described the actual method of discovery as guess-and-test, or "abduction" in Charles Peirce's terminology. Today I'll go a little further into the distinction. The bottom line is that the "riddle of induction" shouldn't be all that worrisome because induction is seldom used. Abduction is the name Peirce (pictured above) gave. Unfortunately, it is also a synonym for kidnapping, but that isn't the point at the moment. Abduction in the relevant sense is inference to the simplest explanation for a phenomenon. It is often just a hunch or guess. Our knowledge about the laws of nature arose through abductions. Benjamin Franklin abducted: that it would be more economical to believe that the static sparks that ar...
I see the following, from Dr. Seuss, cited as an "inspirational quote" now and then. I find it odd: "You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes, You can steer yourself any direction you choose." I have to say, I don't feel inspired by it. And I'm not sure who is supposed to derive what from this. I applaud, as always, TG's facility with the anapestic meter. Da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM. He makes it look so easy. It can actually be a tricky meter to handle for any length, which is why efforts to sound Seussian so often fail, as parodists slip into iambic. Still ... If I were an amputee, with no feet (and, accordingly no shoes) would it be inapplicable? More important: anyone's decision about "where to go" in any context is constrained in a thousand ways. As refugee crises in the world ought to remind us: the powerful direct the traffic flows in the way that it suits them, not in the way that it suits t...
Proposition DD. Coloradans (who led the nation in the legalizing of recreational use of marijuana -- yeah, Rocky Mountaineers!) are now deciding whether to move in the direction of liberty on another important matter, one that could bring another major industry into the sunlight: sports betting. https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2019/09/26/colorado-sports-betting-water-plan/ In both cases, part of the sales pitch to get the public to legalize the industry involved is, "...and then the state can tax it, and do various good things with that money." I'm not enthusiastic about that part of the pitch but so long as the general direction is toward the liberty, the win will go to our best selves. ("That's a strange expression Bruce.") NOTE: The Proposition won, however narrowly.
One frequently hears this Homeric tag, 'the wine dark sea.' No, not the donut-eating Homer, the founder of western literature Homer. There has been some controversy on the subject. After all, the sea looks blue-green, not purple (or whatever color was the wine Homer might have been drinking when he came up with the tag.) There are lots of explanations. Julian Jaynes, the author of the controversial thesis about the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," used it as support for the proposition that human neurology has changed over time, even within historic time. That proposition is of course critical to his broader theory about consciousness as arising from the breakdown of the bicameral mind. But there is a simpler explanation, offered to me years ago, but one I've never seen in print. In Homer's day, people didn't drink wine from glasses. They didn't have glasses. They had opaque ceramic containers. So they didn't know what wine looked like th...
Harvard University recently issued its annual report. Here is a link: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy19_harvard_financial_report.pdf Finance nerds will be especially interested in the report on Harvard's famous endowment, a landmark example of institutional investing with an unlimited time horizon. The university gets revenue from a number of sources: research oriented subsidies, gifts, tuition ... but distributions from the endowment accounted for roughly one third of the income in the fiscal year that ending on June 30, 2019. The report of that endowment consists of pages 12-17. You can learn there that the balance sheet consists of 46% equity. That is a rather high percentage (it is broken down almost evenly between public and private equity). Another 33% consists of hedge funds. Harvard has gotten only a mediocre performance out of its hedge fund allocation, less than it has gotten out of public equity and far less than it h...