Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The Biden administration has nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the vice chair for supervision on the Federal Reserve. That is not one of the best known positions that it is a President's duty to fill, but it is an important one. In coordination with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency within the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve has supervisory authority over the banks that the federal government insures. The vice chair for supervision has no special role in the monetary-policy part of the Fed's remit, but she is in charge of its regulatory role.  Still, this is rarely the stuff of confirmation fights. Why are the Republicans making an unholy fuss about this appointment? There are two bad reasons, and one kind-of good one. The first bad reason is that Sarah Bloom Raskin is the wife of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D - Md). To stop her ratification would be to deal a blow to him and he, to his lasting credit, has done nothing to endear himself to the Republicans of the upper hous...

    "Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities." Is the present drama over Ukraine, in the United States and perhaps in Russia as well, much more than an effort by the public authority to keep us common folk from getting bored? 

  There are two (maybe three) great origin myths of the western world. We begin our stories either with the ancient Greeks or with the ancient Jews. Sometimes we get sophisticated and say that "we" as the west are the merger of the two -- a third story frame.  At the heart of the troubled subject of Iranian/western relations is the simple fact that the Persians are the 'bad guys' in BOTH of the underlying two myths. The Greek narrowly escaped being swallowed by the Persian empire. The contemporaneous Jews did not escape that fate, although thanks to Esther they survived it.  Yes, there are other more recent sources for the animosity, and there is the sociological fact that our elites will always want us to have foreign enemies. It is better we aim our bile at foreigners than at the domestic elites themselves! So, at any rate, the latter believe.  Beyond all that: Iran is Persia and Persia have always been the enemy. Since long before there was Islam. 

  I rashly offered in an earlier post to write a timeline of the transition from archeology to history. By this I meant the vast period in human history between the first known permanent settlement for humans, generally dated to a site in what is now the Czech Republic 25 thousand years old (25 KYA) and -- as the later terminus, the moment humans began pressing cuneiforms on clay tablets in Sumeria, about 6 KYA, also known as 4,000 BC, or if you prefer, BCE.  As I say, that promise WAS rash. But I will cover the larger portion of the span right now, and save the ending of it to a later time. This time ends with the oldest known manifestation of organized warfare between humans. Around 8,000 BC. Ever since then, it has been one damned war after another. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Anyway, allow me to offer what I have. We start about 2K years after we left off with that first settlement.  23 KYA. This is the age of clearly human footprints in New Mexico, 3,000...

The New York Times can print the Project Veritas memos. One problem with demanding censorship with regard to a particular text is that you may draw a lot of attention to something that would otherwise have passed largely unnoticed.  This is called the "Carol Burnet" effect, I believe. The term goes back to a 1976 column in The National Enquirer that portrayed comedienne Burnett as drunk. It was a short dfour-sentence item that might have been very quickly forgotten had Burnett not sued over it.  The litigation lasted for years and ended up being an important precedent. BUT the lesson remains: if you think you are hurt by people who spread item X, consider the degree to which your lawsuit will do exactly that, before bringing it. A simple thought for Project Veritas to contemplate this week. The underlying subject of the memos in question was perfectly obscure. Now it will be clear. It will also be or at least it will briefly seem, important. 

  Pierre Bayle, one of those stellar French philosophers of the late 17th century, had a great reputation in his own day and for some time thereafter, though he has somewhat faded from attention of late. Nonetheless, when he WAS a rock star, another philosophical rock star, Voltaire, called Bayle "the greatest dialectician who has ever written."  I mention that only to introduce something fascinating that Bayle wrote about Spinoza.  Bayle found in Spinoza's writing "echoes of various religious teachings: Persian 'sufism' and 'cabalism'; some ancient Indian doctrines; [and] the contemplative practices of a Chinese sect named Foe Kiao, founded around the same time as Christianity."  I interrupt at this point to let you know that Bayle almost certainly got the notions of this Chinese sect from a source that used a corruption of the Chinese term for Buddhism. Bayle clearly underestimates the age of Buddhism here and believes apparently that it origin...

That photo, by the way, has nothing to do with this content. I put it up when this post was going to have a very different subject. I'll keep it there out of inertia. It does not harm.  I have decided to use this post to preserve a fascinating brief passage from THE RULE OF LAWS by Fernanda Pirie.  "Frustratingly for historians, in the climate of tropic India manuscripts written on cloth or palm leaves, or even on copper plates, deteriorate quickly. Only the most popular, those that were recopies and re-written over the centuries, survive. But from the eighth and ninth centuries, scholars began to produce commentaries on earlier texts and digests of what they considered the most important of these writings, which helped to preserve the tradition and its learning." So, although what contemporary scholars are trying to piece together is a very ancient tradition, one which was old when Alexander the Great showed up at its northwestern extreme, it is one we can understand now...

  Arroyo’s Gasmar investment offers a glimpse into the future of energy    By leungchopan Arroyo Investors last week disclosed an investment in Gasmar S.A., a terminal and storage facility for liquefied petroleum gas (propane) in northern Chile. The case for that investment is cemented in a particular view of the industrialized world’s energy future. Houston-based Arroyo Investors, an independent investment manager that focuses on power and energy infrastructure investments in North and South America, has more than $2.5 billion in assets under management. Rudolf Araneda, partner in Arroyo’s office in Santiago, Chile, said in a statement: “As Chile continues its push to lower the carbon intensity of its energy consumption. LPG is a critical energy source to displace higher carbon intensity fuels such as diesel and biomass. Gasmar’s receiving and storage assets are critical to advancing the growing need for LPG services in Chile.” The supply of propane Gasmar has a facility...

I am positive that Biden's first priority is to choose a Justice who will vote essentially the way Breyer has been voting on politically sensitive matters. After all, 3-6 is not a great hand, but it is better than 2-7. He has said that he will pick a black woman because it helps him with much of his base and because he is confident he can do it without compromising that prime directive. None of this is complicated, though it seems to have set off the predictable conniptions among those for whom having conniptions is part of a business model. There is nothing distinctive about specifying demographic classifications in this way. LBJ nominated Thurgood Marshall, the first black Justice, in August 1967. His key Civil Rights legislation, won by breaking filibusters, were fresh memories and for some fresh wounds. Nobody bothered pretending the Marshall nomination was not race conscious. To make this a bipartisan point we need only note that Ronald Reagan said during the 1980 presidentia...

Recently I discussed the evolution of pre-human primates, bringing the story up until about 3 million years ago.  Today, I'll say something about the timeline since then.  Three million years ago the most human-like species around was the australopithecus (southern apes).  There has been a lot of focus in recent years on Australopithecus Afarensis. Afarensis had a variegated diet, adapted it seems to plants both of the forest and the savanna. It likely ate meat too, judging from the stone tools it had available.  The heel bone was adapted for bipedality. Did the afarensis give rise to homo-something-or-other? The transition, if there was one, is difficult to pin down, but the two species have a close relationship of some sort. An abstract from a paleontological paper written in 2015, concerning the discovery of a partial mandible with teeth from circa 2.8 MYA,  reads in part:  " This specimen combines primitive traits seen in early  Australopithecus ...