Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I write today to correct an injustice of my own making. In a recent post here poking some fun at former VP Mike Pence and his recent book deal, I said that Pence had  " fled Capitol Hill with secret service protection while a crowd chanted for his death." Actually, it now appears that he did not "flee Capitol Hill." In fact, although he allowed his security detail to move him to a secure room within the Capitol complex, he did insist on staying there, while the detail apparently tried to talk him into getting into his limo and letting them take him to the VP residence. If the story is accurate , then we have to say that Pence made just the right call. By staying in the building, Pence allowed for the resumption of the normal constitutional process once the mob wave had receded.  So, whatever we think of him -- I hope regular readers here will appreciate that I'm not a fan -- reasonable people must concede that at one juncture in his life, one that may prove i...

Who is Stephen Homner? There is a bit of a controversy, has been for decades, over the true authorship of "Brandy," the syrupy woman-waits-for-her-sailor ballad from Looking Glass in the early '1970s. There is a commonly expressed view that Looking Glass'  Elliott Lurie didn't write the song -- he bought it from Stephen Homner. The specific figure sometimes used is $10,000.  Lurie denies this.  Is there even a real Homner? So far as I know he has no existence outside of this claim.  The more heated accusation is made, too, that Lurie "stole" the song. Obviously both claims can't be true. If Homner (whoever he is exactly) willingly sold it and cashed the check then it wasn't stolen from him.  A seller of those rights for $10,000 would plausibly have had buyer's remorse when the song seemed to be coming out of every radio in the world but ... that's the way it goes.  And yes, he should have been given song credit IF this Homner person is re...

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.   -- Amartya Sen. Starvation is a problem, then, not of  inevitable scarcities, or earthly infertility, but of defective social and political arrangements.  Sen was born in Bengal (northeastern India and the country now known as Bengla-desh was all once "Bengal") in November 1933.  Of course this means that he was born a subject of King Edward VIII, about a month before that King would abdicate in order to be free to marry Wallis Simpson. It also means that Sen was old enough to have a general sense of what was going on when the Japanese troops were at his country's door, knocking, in 1942-44.  So if we understand anything about the horrific Bengali famine of 1943, we know that he knows of what he speaks when he writes of starvation.   The Bengali famine came about because Bengal had been importing most...

I have not read "Cat Person," and indeed haven't kept up with contemporary fiction at all since Updike died (2009). I have an old-fashioned sensibility about fiction that makes me very likely unhelpful on this.  But ... there are aesthetic issues of some moment addressed here.    “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian draws specific details from my life. (slate.com)

 Xpeng, an electric car manufacturer born in China but with an increasingly large footprint in the United States, has recently held two IPOs, one on NYSE last August, one on the Hong Kong Exchange just days ago.  When a company holds a second IPO, it is typically for a "secondary listing." Their first pop still establishes their primary listing. But Xpeng arranged these as twin primary listings.   "Aren't there are costs involved in doing things this way? Why did XPeng incur those costs?" Most of the talk is that the company is concerned about getting hurt  by the chilly relationship between the two superpowers. It wants to hedge against the possibility of Chinese-based firms being kicked off of American exchanges. But there is another side to the mutual hostility. China may well move toward “decoupling” its own technology industry from that of the United States, and the Hong Kong listing for Xpeng may have hedged some regulatory risks only by incurring others....

  I wrote about "radical enactivism" back in January.  To review: this is a philosophical theory about consciousness associated with Daniel Hutto of Antwerp.  It is a non-reductive identity theory of mind and body. In this, it sounds a bit like Spinoza, and the "dual aspect" school.  But Hutto maintains that we can understand the brain-mind relationship if and only if we look at it as part of the organism-environment interaction. That's as far as I got.  What else is Hutto, and the rest of the school, saying?  Three of the other members of the school are: F rancisco J Varela; Evan Thompson; Eleanor Rosch. They co-authored  THE EMBODIED MIND published in 1992. Varela et al invented the word "enactivism" to, in their words, "emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but s rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being...

The Supreme Court had a lot to say about the various clauses of the first amendment. Sometimes the most important statements a court can make are in its decisions on what cases it will not take up. And that was the case this term, with the high court's refusal to take up the case of Berisha v. Lawson.   That is important to the continuing role of the Supreme Court as a protector of freedom of the press, and the uniquely hard time that public figures have in mounting a plausible defamation lawsuit in the United States. The new configuration of Justices has been re-working the religion clauses from scratch in recent years, and that process has continued this term. And there is the much-publicized matter of the cursin' cheerleader to consider.  We will contemplate those points in that order today. (The above image is of Mary Beth Tinker, the plaintiff in free-speech-for-minors litigation of more than 50 years ago -- photos taken than and now.  her case came to the fore again...

Often, in recent years, we have used this third column for the discussion of what I think of as "structural" constitutional issues, leaving for the fourth column the more rights based constitutional issues. I won't make that distinction this time. There was really only one structural case worth discussing, in my own unappealable opinion. There was the tribal sovereignty issue of US v. Cooley . After that I will turn to rights based matters that come from amendments other than my favorite, other than the first.  Tribal Sovereignty Tribes have been doing rather well in the Supreme Court recently, as a group of sovereignty-venerating Justices treat the notion of their sovereignty more seriously than it has sometimes been taken. McGirt v. Oklahoma is the first instance of this to come to mind.  This year brought another tribal win: Cooley . The court said that police officers for a tribe have the power to search and to temporarily detain non-Indians on public rights-of-way ...

  We proceed to some cases in which the court's concern is the interpretation of statutes.  Copyright and Fair Use 18-956 Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (04/05/2021) (supremecourt.gov)   In intellectual property, this session will be remembered for its decision in the procedurally complicated Google v. Oracle.   Even that name is resonant: it suggests a legal battle of corporate giants of King Kong versus Godzilla proportions. I wrote about this case in this blog in October, and I refer those readers who might want background to that discussion . It was obvious by the time the case was argued last fall that there were two ways Google could win: either it could convince the judges that application programming interfaces (APIs) were not copyrightable, OR it could persuade them that this use of the Java API (now owned by Oracle) is a fair use even if the copyright exists.  At argument, Stephen Breyer made a fascinating observation. He compared the Java API...

Another term of the US Supreme Court has come and gone and, as I have for years, I will encapsulate it in this blog. Welcome to the discussion of this and the following three posts.  This term began in the midst  of the Presidential election campaign, last October, only two weeks after the demise of Justice Ginsburg, only one week after the confirmation of her successor, Amy Coney Barrett. This was an extraordinary political context. It was almost as if the Republican leadership in the US Senate, which four years before had loudly announced its devotion to the principle that the Senate should not deliberate on a Supreme Court vacancy during an election year,  regardless of who might be helped or hurt by that deliberation ("keep this tape"!), had been acting hypocritically and opportunistically in making those solemn avowals.  Ah, what an unfortunate appearance.  Also, we saw that this Supreme Court, with Justice Barrett on board, steadfastly refused to be drawn ...

Carbon Capture in focus at PE firm CIP The world is changing, and one private equity firm this year changed its name and strategy to reflect new market realities. In late April, JOG Capital took its 14-year track record and more than $1.3 billion in energy investments and overhauled its investment thesis. Renamed and rebranded as Carbon Infrastructure Partners (CIP), the founders are signaling a new focus and investment mandate: finding alpha in carbon capture. Cumulative investment in carbon capture and storage (CC&S) could hit $1 trillion by 2050, Bank of America concluded in a recent analysis. . That would represent exponential growth from the present size of the industry (by one recent estimate, $1.75 billion). CC&S technology is seen as a big part of the puzzle of what our species can and must do to preserve a liveable environment for ourselves on this planet.The idea is that carbon can be removed from the atmosphere (“captured”), usually at a large point site, then seques...

  The question that gives us our title today comes from a classic Calvin & Hobbes cartoon: one of those that does NOT include the tiger at all. The cartoon consisted of a brief conversation between Calvin and his mother.  Calvin wants a ride to the store. Mom says he is perfectly healthy and the weather is nice -- he can walk. She adds, "why do people have feet?"  He responds, "to reach the gas pedal."   There is a profound commentary about philosophy and teleology there somewhere, but I won't work so hard as to dig it out. 

  Brian Hunter, as some of you may remember, was a trader in natural gas and oil for an investment firm named Amaranth.  Due to certain reckless Hunter trades, Amaranth melted down in 2005-06, and caused a good deal of volatility in the oil and gas derivatives markets in the process.  Why am I interested in this? I covered it at the time, as a reporter for Reuters, but it was one of many things I covered back in the day and I'm sure I've forgotten many of them.  One reason that this is on my mind is the coincidental significance of the year 2006 in a very different corner of the oil and gas world, the executive suites of Exxon-Mobil. That was the year one Rex Tillerson, a future Secretary of State, became the CEO of that company.  The two companies, Amaranth, and Exxon-Mobil, have almost nothing in common except that they both have or had something to do with oil and gas. But Exxon is a vertically integrated firm that pumps the stuff out of the ground, provides ...

 The FTSE Russell, a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange group that prepares various financial benchmarks, and whose HQ you see pictured, has just rebalanced its family of US stock indexes.  Why does this matter? Well, it matters a great deal to the world of passive asset managers -- pension funds, college endowment funds, and so forth -- because they typically have a strategy and at other times have a specific statutory or regulatory mandate, to follow specified indexes. So if FTSE (pronounced "footsie,") rebalances its indexes, then many of those managers will do likewise with their portfolios, and a lot of assets are going to be bought and sold accordingly.  It matters also to the world of active asset managers because they sometimes see opportunities in arbitraging that situati on for money. Suppose FTSE decides stock ABC is no longer going to be in its index. This requires Big Uni Endowment to drop ABC and buy its substitute. THAT means that presumably the price ...

Here is a link to a good review of what seems to be an important book about the current state of physics.     Review: Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder (eyrie.org) The author of the book, Prof. Hossenfelder, has a blog I'm sure I've quoted from a time or two here. She is plainly no admirer of string theory or of a "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics,  I will say no more.  Except that I like the illustration google images offered me for the many-worlds theory you see here.  Man and woman meet. They are either a love connection or not (the lid is opened and that cat is alive or dead). The time lines split. In the bottom half, we see the world if they part quickly. Either our protagonist meets another woman or he lives alone, The world splits again. And so forth.  Cute and simply done.