Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Trump's former VP, Mike Pence, has a two book contract for $4 million with Simon & Schuster.  Maggie Haberman says that Pence's book deal is "grating on" Trump.   Well, yes, but Pence has so many distinctions going for him.: 1) First Republican Vice President of the 21st century not to have shot anybody in the face during his tenure; 2) Apparently refused to participate in a coup d'etat to preserve the life of Trump's administration;  3) Thereafter fled Capitol Hill with secret service protection while a crowd chanted for his death; and 4) His head was a comfy home for a fly during a televised debate. If you can't make a book out of all that, what would it take??? 

  So ... POTUS 45 is said to be looking for a book publisher. This is a traditional thing for ex-President's to do, after all. More so than scheming for some fantasy "reinstatement" under the hidden reinstatement clause of the constitution. [It was written by the founders on invisible ink on the back of unused bamboo ballots. That clause.]  Anyway, COLT 45 wants to sell a book about his presidency. But getting a prestige main-line publisher to sign on is, according to reports, proving to be difficult.  Presidential memoirs are always ghost-written -- heck it can be an assembly-line operation. The Trump organization is up to the task of putting together a book to which he has put his name. They've done it before. But they don't want it to look like a vanity production. And they probably don't want a committed conservative publishing house like Regnery. Random House published Trump: The Art of the Deal in the '80s. There has been considerable consolidation ...

  Found on Quora recently:  Does it make a lot of people angry how "rigged" the stock market seemed in 2020 and lately in 2021? Why or not? How is it true that the stock markets are more rigged than any time in history?  Let us consider that question. It represents the failure of generations of finance journalist, including your correspondent, to convey to the public any real sense of how markets work. It also represents a stark case of presentism, the impulse to give the latest things the greatest importance, ad all superlative words, so that the latest rigging, whatever exactly it may consist of, must be the most rigged ... ever.  Our friend may certainly be making reference -- since he has in mind the last year and a half -- to the Paycheck Protection Program and its fallout. As the severity of the pandemic became obvious, Congress passed the CARES bill, including the PPP. As a consequences, hundreds of millions of dollars seem to have been fraudulently allocated....

Terry McAuliffe won the Democratic Party's nomination for Governor earlier this month, setting up an autumnal show-down with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin.  There was no suspense in the Dem primary, McAuliffe won with 62% of the vote, and the second-place finisher got only 19% . Nobody was biting nails.   McAuliffe is an old-school political hack, who guaranteed the loan that the Clinton's used to buy their nice new house in Westchester County (pictured above) when they were ready to  move out of their leased Pennsylvania Avenue place in DC. He almost immediately thereafter became the head of the DNC and is credited with valuable modernization of the fund-raising machinery there. He also had a big part in running HRC's campaign in 2012.   His opponent, Youngkin, is a former CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the biggest private-equity management firms in the world. He played a big part in Carlyle's transformation from a partnership into a publicly traded ...

 I don't believe in chartism. Let's start with that. Chartism is the hypothesis that stock markets, like an etch-a-sketch, draw pictures, and that some of these pictures are bullish, others bearish. But, just for fun, let's discuss a Chartist pattern today. The most renowned of them is the cup-and-handle.  You see an example above. At the right edge of that chart, a true Chartist would be screaming to himself, "BUY!!!"  Here are a couple of points: This formation only matters if it happens AFTER a longer bullish period. And it is a "continuation" pattern. That is: the cup-and-handle illustrate that the bull market in XYZ stock has taken a necessary "breather" and is ready to resume its upward course. You see that the "cup" formation is supposed to be a U-shape, not a V. Also, chartists are happiest when the volume numbers at the bottom of the cup are low. Both of those facts signal that there was no rush to dump the stock once it star...

  During all the heated debate about the Texas "election integrity" bill, I asked what seemed to me a simple question in a tweet. I asked if the Texas law had a no-food-or-water clause analogous to that in Georgia, passed into law earlier this year.  I hadn't located the actual bill text yet when I asked. It turns out I had to find it for myself -- nobody on twitter was at all helpful. Here is the link:  Bill Text: TX SB7 | 2021-2022 | 87th Legislature | Introduced | LegiScan And the answer, at a quick scan, is "no." There is no analogous clause.  But, to get back to my story: I asked this question on twitter and received only one reply (no answer). The reply wondered why I hadn't said "New York" instead of "Georgia" for purpose of comparison. After all, New York has the "same" rules.  A little research indicates further: no, New York does not have the same rules. It has some similar rules, which seem to have been in place for y...

On May 19 a young news associate working for the Associated Press in Arizona was fired because it said she had authored “some tweets” that “violated AP’s News Values and Principles.” Nobody has pointed to misconduct in her work for the AP itself. What seems to have happened here is that a campaign by the Stanford College Republicans singling Emily Wilder out as an “anti-Israeli agitator” by way of questioning the AP’s objectivity on the issue started to catch fire, and the AP sought to douse that fire quickly. My understanding is that (1) Wilder had worked at AP for only 17 days when she was fired, (2) she had not written the contested tweets during that 17 day period, and (3) she had created them while an undergraduate at Stanford College, when she was with the campus newspaper. On May 15, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the building in Gaza used by the AP in the coverage of that conflict. This was part of a broader exchange of fire between the Palestinian group Hamas and Israel, and i...

  That is all. 

  Most of us, and by "us" I mean everyone who entered the 21st century already an adult, and is still here: most of us have at some point heard a common explanation of the causes of climate change, in terms of a greenhouse. It is this:  CO2 in the atmosphere prevents infrared light from escaping into space. This means that, as in an artificial greenhouse, more light gets in than can get out, so over time the temperature rises.  To this, climate change skeptics often reply: the absorption of infrared light is saturated at carbon dioxide levels well below those of the earth's atmosphere. If the saturation point is X, then the move from an X +2 level to an X + 20 level can't increase the infrared light, and so can't increase the heat. So let's get busy digging up or drilling for more of those fossil fuels!  That is a fallacious argument.  But it can be difficult to see this because the metaphor is faulty. A greenhouse has a single surface that blocks the infrared...

  I am happy to find that I have not, in year after year of writing, just been doing the journalist equivalent of shouting into a void. My work does find echoes here and there. Here is a sample. A paper by Wulf A. Kaal (itself from a decade ago -- these things can take a while before coming to my attention) that appeared in the University of Notre Dame's law review. The paper is about "the application of contingent capital in corporate governance." If you don't know what that means: we'll leave it be for now. But if I have made a marginal contribution to the development of the scholarly understanding of contingent capital, I have earned a couple of karma points toward my ultimate goal: being incarnated as a dog in a loving human home, and being spoiled rotten for 14 years or so. THAT will be a great gig.  https://www.academia.edu/45416749/Initial_Reflections_on_the_Possible_Application_of_Contingent_Capital_in_Corporate_Governance  

  I wrote here recently about Richard Tuck's book on Hobbes. I mentioned that Tuck is also the author of a PHILOSOPHY AND GOVERNMENT: 1572 - 1651, a broad work on the development of European political thought in those fascinating decades, and I suggested that I would have something more to say about how Tuck's broad approach feeds into his study of Hobbes. This is that more. Tuck is fascinated by the cross-channel connection between the Brits and the Dutch. The Brits were happy to support lowland rebels against the Spanish empire, when THAT was the central opposition in their world. But once the Dutch became an empire themselves, the Brits' attitude turned hostile.  Hobbes, especially on Tuck's reading, owed a lot to the Lowlanders in the development of his own thought Consider Justus Lipsius, a Flemish classicist, (1547 - 1606) on the one hand and Hugo Grotius (1583 -1645) the escapee from a Dutch prison who defined the modern notion of a "just war," on the o...

 Was it an act?  Matt Siegel is world-famous: if the Boston area is your world.  Siegel is the radio host of the "Matty in the Morning Show" on KISS 108, which has been on the air since 1981. He is -- present tense -- still the host, even though he seemed to have quit for a moment there. Some of us thought that it was an act, and he that he would come back triumphantly in a wave of publicity. Did THE "Matty" need publicity? Not in his own market he didn't and doesn't. He has 450,000 regular listeners. Maybe this was some Machiavellian scheme to go national?  Anyway, on Wednesday, May 19, Matty, the harmless-iconoclast type of radio host, announced apparently in genuine anger, that his bosses weren't going to allow him to make fun of Demi Levato's announcement that she is now a non-binary "they."  Any discussion of them should use the preferred (properly plural!) pronoun. Matty said, "Matty out" and walked off. Hmmmm. It only took ...

  Democrats in Congress are saying that Republicans are giving them a hard time over the creation of a "Jan. 6 committee" because they are "afraid of the truth."  I carry no water for the Republicans of today, but I have to say, THAT way of putting the problem is a little ... meh.  The kind of August Commission and Big Thick Book of conclusions that the Dems have in mind here isn't meant to set out The Truth. It is meant to present an official version thereof. Consider the Warren Commission, by way of example. Even people who believe that Oswald killed Kennedy and did so acting alone will likely tell you the Warren Commission's connection with truth was, at best, casual. Johnson believed that the country needed a soothing tale. He tapped Earl Warren, who agreed to provide a soothing tale. If they did stumble upon the truth, the fact is a coincidence.  And the problem with Republicans today isn't that they are afraid of The Truth. It is that they are afra...

The case that we have already met it.   (PDF) Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images (researchgate.net)