SCOTUS Puts Its Finger on the scales in the Pensylvania Senate Race

I made the case in a post here on May 31 that reality wasn't cooperating with our very human desire for nice story lines.

As part of the evidence, I referenced the May 24 Republican primary in Pennsylvania, for the nomination for the US Senate, in which Kathy Barnette, the underdog surprise candidate (THAT is always a nice storyline), faded into relative insignificance at almost the moment the actual counting of ballots began.

Right around the time I wrote that post, the issue has narrowed down to this: would undated signed mail-in ballots be counted? There was nothing fraudulent in the wind: some voters simply forgot to fill out the date line on the outside envelope.

Had those votes been counted, it seems, McCormick might have won. Without those ballots, Oz had his win/

But let's back up. In the final stretch of the campaign, Mehmet Oz remained a favorite almost entirely on the strength of Trump's endorsement. THAT suggested a storyline (Trump still has great control over the GOP!) but this didn't really work since he and David McCormick were effectively tied as of the next morning and several days thereafter.

Now we have at last a decent storyline for the case. It was Bush v. Gore redux, a campaign in which the U.S. Supreme Court put its fat fingers on the scale and determined the result.

It was the Court that decided, in effect, that undated ballot would not be counted. So the Court gave this case to Oz.

The trial court judge who first heard the case, the Hon. Renee Cohn Jubelirer, did not have an opportunity to issue an opinion, but at oral argument she had favored the McCormick attorney's arguments.

Have you ever made a mistake when you put a date on something?” she asked lawyers for Oz. “I know I have. … Should that defeat a person’s ability to vote?”

Back in the days when I still used paper checks, signed them with ink and sent them to people to whom I owed money, THOSE ancient days, I mistakenly dated a few with a date like "January 3, 1993" when it was in fact the 3d day of 1994. Most of us old enough to remember ancient times did that now and then. Jubelirer was suggesting that nothing worse than THAT had happened here. And, usually, ... those checks cleared.

Commonsense overturned by SCOTUS. How odd!

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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