Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The one thing that everyone knows about Zoom (Nasdaq:ZM) is that it has been a beneficiary of the virtual nature of office interactions since the onset of the pandemic.  It is nice that worked out for them but, what do they do for an encore?  For one, they want to expand their business lines, and to this end they want to buy Five9 Inc., a provider of could-based call center software.  The management of FIVN has signed off on the deal, pending stockholder approval. But that approval may be tricky.  ISS, the leading stockholder advisory service, is counseling FIVN stockholders to vote "no."  ISS is concerned about the stock-swap nature of the deal. Five9's stockholders aren't going to get any cash. They will turn in their shares of Five9 and receive shares in the combined company according to a fixed ratio. ISS says that the shares of Zoom are, the those of the combined company will be, too volatile to make this fair.   This objection raises a lot of fur...

Elizabeth Holmes is on trial.  Afghanistan in now fully in the hands of the Taliban, and the US turns out to have committed a final gratuitous war crime with a drone on its way out.  Two unrelated facts: right?  Well ... no.  Did Theranos Lose Afghanistan? | The Week

 "Do we get enough of a diagnosis of individual in poverty by comparing the individual's income with a socially given poverty-line income? What about the person with an income well above the poverty line who suffers from an expensive illness (requiring, say, kidney dialysis)? Is deprivation not ultimately a lack of opportunity to lead a minimally acceptable life, which can be influenced by a number of considerations, including of course personal income, but also physical and environmental characteristics and other variables...?" That is from Amartya Sen's New Introduction (2017) to the expanded edition of his classic COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. The original edition of this work is dated 1970.  The point Sen is making in that quote is in a sense a trivial one. OF COURSE, you might want to say, the mere numerical fact of an income level, contrasted with some arbitrary poverty-line number does not give us a full picture of the condition of any particular "...

As  the title of this blog post might suggest, this is not even remotely a "review." I would put some work into one of those.  Queen Bees had an almost absurd amount of high-price talent for what was in essence a silly movie.  It was not a bad way to spend two hours, but there are many movies of which that can be said.  Yet for a movie that unites Ellen Burstyn, Jane Curtin, Ann Margret, and James Caan (a Corleone , for Gawd's sake) the movie seems meandering and uninspired. The studio must have put out an awful lot of cash to make this forgettable piece of fluff.  That said, it was good to see Jane Curtin again. Those of us of a certain age will always think first, when her name comes up, of those memorable arguments SNL in its golden age staged between her and Dan Ackroyd that mimicked the point/counterpoint format Sixty Minutes was then using.      In honor of the good old days, it is THAT Jane Curtin, not the Queen Bees' Jane Curtin, you...

 Someone at Quora asked me to suggest resolutions concerning open historical questions on which one could based a formal debate I came up with five and I will simply quote myself here. I used the customary format- stating a proposition around which one could build either a "pro" ro a "con" case.  That the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten was the first important monotheist in human history, and the fount of the monotheisms of the “peoples of the Book” ever since. That the Roman Empire in the west didn’t end when we usually think it did — that essential social structures remained in place until the rise of Islam changed trade routes. That the invention of the stirrup led to the social/political system known as feudalism. That the medieval Catholic Church’s restrictions on usury were an important factor in the outbreak of Reformation. That Henry VIII was entitled to an annulment of his marriage to Katherine under the law and ecclesiology of the day, and the Pope’s refusal to...

 The 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack on the United States has come and gone.  The non-stop coverage of this anniversary all that weekend long by all broadcast media is still ringing in our ears.  Two thoughts on it, belated as they are here: 1) how does this compare to the 20th anniversary of another attack? there must have been some commemorations of Pearl Harbor Day 20 years later, December 7, 1961 -- were they at all like this?   Was there all this much navel gazing? 2) if there is a difference, then is it fair to say that the predominance of 9/11 in the collective public consciousness has something to do with the use of "9-1-1" as the American way of dialing for emergency health? 

 They don't have to give very careful attention to the IDs this year. The birth year on each card either starts with "19" or with "20."  As the groundskeeper in CADDYSHACK might put it, "So they have that going for them, which is nice." 

  Don't let me stop you. If you really want to take part in a riot, by, say, throwing a stone or two in the midst of a large crowd so no one will ever know what stone came from whom, and then you want to join an anti-police chant when the boys in blue show up .. go for it.  Just a thought, though. Before you're the guy who most enthusiatically costumes himself for the part, who stands out and gets camera time, who becomes the public face of the riot ... Give that an extra minute or two of thought, okay? Just a suggestion. 

Kenneth Kipnis, a philosopher affiliated with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has died. He left a wide range of writing, on medical ethics, the philosophy behind constitutional law, prisoners' rights, and much else.  He co-authored at least two books with Diana T. Meyers: KINDRED MATTERS (1993, about the philosophy of the family -- inspiring my photo choice here) and POLITICAL REALISM (2020, about international politics and ethics in the nuclear age).  Kipnis was an active participant in AMINTAPHIL, the AMerican section of the INTernational Association for PHILosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.   Rest in peace.   

  Looking at the latest AP styleguide.  (Okay, how nerdish can one get?) There is quite a discussion here of religious references, which one capitalizes and which get lower case treatment. Arbitrariness, art thou Satan or Savior?  One lowercases "heaven, hell, devil, angel, cherub, an apostle, a priest," etc. But one capitalizes Hades and ... Satan. (Imagine that sentence in "Church Lady" pronunciation.)   Within this discussion, (pp. 257-58 of the 55th edition of the styleguide, for those of you following along at home) there is a subsection on the life of Christ. Capitalize the doctrinal names of major events in that life, as in the Last Supper, the Cruxifixion, the Resurrection.... But if His name (either with cap J or cap C) appears in the sentence, then the above doctrinal terms get demoted to lower-case treatment, as in "The preacher alluded to the 40 day period between the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension into heaven."  No, I'm not going ...

 Elizabeth Holmes is preparing to throw her former lover, who is also the fellow who served as chief operating officer of Theranos back when she was chief executive officer, under the bus.  Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes Will ‘Likely’ Take the Stand to Accuse Ex-Boyfriend and Co-Executive of ‘Intimate Partner Abuse’: Court Documents (msn.com) Did Elizabeth Holmes Defraud Patients and Investors? Update (breakingdailynews.com) She appears to be planning to claim that he, Sunny Bulwani, was the Svengali in the relationship, who abused her, destroying her independence of judgment in the process.   By the way, the smallish box above was going to change medicine forever. If it had all been true....

One of the common arguments of creationists is that (a) evolutionary theory is based on the radiocarbon dating of fossils, and (b) that dating is utterly unreliable. Both propositions are false. Just for the record, "radiocarbon dating" is only of several methods of radiometric dating, and not one that is important for work on the evolutionary tree.   Radiocarbon, specifically, is very useful for archeologists but utterly useless for paleontologists. It is the use of a radioactive isotope of carbon to tell time, given knowledge of the half-life of that isotope. For anything older than about 50,000 years, there is so little carbon-14 left that it can't be measured accurately. For older finds (those of interest to a paleontologist) one looks for the isotopes of other elements, which have longer half-lives and so different ranges of utility. Somebody once tested a dinosaur fossil using the radiocarbon method, and THAT system declared that fossil to be 50,000 years old. This ...

  In the old days he built his reputation as a tough prosecutor on insider trading and other securities fraud cases.  Later he leveraged that reputation to become Mayor of New York. Through the luck of the draw, it was Giuliani who happened to be Mayor when airplanes flew into the twin towers, and he became "America's Mayor."  That is the history to which people allude when they ask "whatever happened to" the old Rudi witht he tough cop rep.  The reputation was never based on much, except for the fact that for an ambitious man, seeking higher office and finding himself in possession of prosecutorial discretion. That was enough: the idea of going after Wall Street tycoons made perfect sense.  Tom Wolfe coined the phrase years ago: "the great white defendant." THAT is what a prosecutor wants and what Giuliani triumphantly found is such as Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.  I argued years ago, on general pro-capitalism grounds, and from the pages of The Pr...

 It hasn't gotten a lot of press in the US. Fortunately, the internet is global.  Malta’s Businessman Indicted for Daphne Caruana Galizia’s Murder (occrp.org) Malta's position -- the smallest country in the EU, an isolated eastern Mediterranean island -- makes it a wonderful place for money laundering. A lot of ill-gotten gains from the east have gone to Malta in recent years. They slosh around in the laundry and they make a few very nasty customers very rich.  That is the geopolitical Big Picture behind the death of Ms Galizia.  The particulars of her story are fascinating in their own right but for now I will leave you to them.