Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I went through a phase a few years ago of watching all the classic Hollywood dance movies, especially those of the legendary couple Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  So it was with a start this week that I learned recently that the key Supreme Court decision protecting parody as free speech, and against charges of the infringement of intellectual property rights, arose from those movies. The case is ROGERS v. GRIMALDI (1989). This means that it was decided at about the time I was watching all those movies, rented from a now-forgotten place called Blockbusters. That case was brought by THE Ginger Rogers, unhappy about a movie about two fictional Italian Cabaret performers. The name of the movie was "Ginger and Fred," because the two fictional performers in the movie were known to their admirers as "the Italian Ginger and Fred." Of course this presumes the familiarity of those admirers with the couple in the black-and-white photo above. A case now before the Supreme C...

  For those of us of a certain age, the image of Walter (avuncularity) Cronkite, sitting behind his desk, telling us about the world "the way it is," remains an enduring image of television news. One thinks of that teletype-machine sound behind him. (Was that fake, or was that the working office sound?)  Here are three Cronkite quotes worth recalling.  I grew my mustache when I was nineteen in order to look older. I never shaved it off even though it overran its usefulness many, many years ago. Once you get started in television, people associate you with your physical appearance — and that includes the mustache. So I can’t shave it off now. If I did, I’d have to answer too much mail. People who understand music hear sounds that no one else makes when Frank Sinatra sings.   There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

I remember doing an interview in September of last year with a lawyer who did a lot of work for the cryptocurrency industry.  It was clear already that there was "trouble in River City."  In July 2022, two important crypto businesses filed for chapter 11 protection: Voyager Digital and Celsius Network. Voyager Digital was a crypto broker. Unfortunately, it extended a large unwise loan to Three Arrows Capital, a crypto fund. Three Arrows defaulted, and Voyager never recovered.  So: why did Celsius Network collapse? You ask. Well ... Celsius Network was a crypto lending company that let users deposit their digital assets into a "Celsius wallet" preliminary to pledging them as security for their borrowing. The cause of its sudden failure is a rabbit hole I don't want to go down with you. But two quick points are observable from the surface: this failure was part of the more general cooling-off of crypto activity, in the manner that "hula-hoop lending" wo...

  There wasn't a lot remarkab le about the Oscars ceremony this year. Maybe it is just that I am more detached this year than I was not too long ago from the cycle of movies year-to-year. I had seen almost none of the nominees for the big categories, with the exception of  Tár. I enjoyed  Tár, a Cate Blanchette vehicle in which she plays a world-famous orchestra conductor, a protege of Leonard Bernstein no less. Blanchette's character becomes enmeshed in a career-threatening scandal. Anyway: it didn't win anything and, aside from my mild level of disappointment about that: there is nothing to report -- except, a very clever set of ads about a fellow named Otto Desc. The first ad shows us the image of a German-looking fellow whose full name is apparently Otto Descinski, known as Desc to his friends, and who has been a major influence in the world of cinematography for decades. Only today he will finally be recognized. That ad ran before the Oscars program proper got u...

  "Fridging" is apparently common term for a pop-cultural trope in which a male protagonist is motivated by the death of a wife, sister, or other  close female character. In the main timeline of the story we, the reading or viewing audience, don't encounter the loved one. She lives and breathes only in flashbacks. In a slight variant, she may have died in the first scene (as famously in DEATH WISH). She may even have been killed and stuffed dead into a refrigerator by the bad guys -- as in the Green Lantern story that gave birth to the term. An illustration from that is pasted in here.  The woman in the refrigerator exists only to motivate her man. "Woman dies. Man sad. Man processes sadness by revenge violence." Understandably, many find this trope annoying.  Fridging. Always good to expand one's vocabulary. But in matters like this it inspires in me the question: has everyone known this word except me?   Recently, though not today, I also learned the acro...

There has been some talk that former President Donald Trump will be arrested today. If he is, talk of Guo Wengui's arrest will fade into the background. Before it does, though:  The Trumper fire who was our last President was quite sparing about which of his grifter buddies he pardoned.  If, God forbid, he ever gets another crack at it he will presumably extend pardons far and wide but, last time around, he kept the circle narrow,  perhaps to generate incentives for all the grifters in the galaxy o work hard to see that there would be a next time.  Against that background, federal prosecutors in New York recently arrested exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. On the Trump scorecard, he is a friend-of-a-friend. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is a friend. Full stop. Trump, you may remember, signed Bannon's pardon, freeing him from responsibility for the We-Fatten-the-Wall-it-oddly-looks-like-Bannon's-wallet scam: he signed this document in his final hours in office...

  A BDC is a pass-through entity, created by the fiat of the U.S. Congress and the signature of President Jimmy Carter in 1980 to encourage investment in small and medium sized privately owned U.S. operating companies.  By "operating companies" one means companies that construct and sell things or provide services, as distinct from companies that exist chiefly to move money around, like BDCs themselves. BDCs are not supposed to invest in each other or other financial entities.  Anyway: HOW did the creation of 1980 law encourage such investment? By pass-through taxation. A BDC, so long as it follows the rules, is NOT a taxable entity. Its income is regarded as passing through directly to its investors, so that stream of income is taxed once (as the income OF the BDC investors) not twice.  What do they have to do to remain untaxed? There are two big mandates involved. The 70% rule and the 90% rule. They must have 70% of their assets invested in the sort of instruments ...

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, explaining recently why he had given all of the Jan. 6th footage to Tucker Carlson, and not to the world in general, asked the circle of reports around him, "haven't you ever had an exclusive?" Now, he is saying, Carlson gets an exclusive. That's how the cookie crumbles.  Personally, yes. As a member of the fourth estate, I have had exclusives. They work this way. A source tells me, "right now this information is yours alone to do with as you can -- but as of noon tomorrow, it goes up on businesswire. "  In my corner of the journalistic world, putting a release on businesswire (or prnewswire) is, in effect, telling the world.  Real scoops, in other words, are designed to be self-terminating. Either McCarthy or Carlson could give the world all of this footage -- not through businesswire, but by putting a link to it up on their respective websites. That hasn't happened yet. The world is reliant on Carlson's monopol...

  As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago now, in the course of "Money Week," one of Keynes' signature ideas is the liquidity trap: business slows to a crawl when everyone becomes a hoarder. No one wants to lend, or keep their money in the care of institutions that lend, and the interest rates cannot get low enough to correct this situation in supply/demand terms.  Do we believe in this idea, dear reader?  The standard free-marketer's response to talk of a liquidity trap is that it is nonsense. It is based on the idea that there can be a sharp increase in demand for money that is NOT an increase in the demand for goods. Everybody becomes a hoarder. But why? Because everybody becomes attached to the medium of exchange, at the expense of the actual exchange? That sounds like a personal pathology, unlikely to be common enough to have macroeconomic effects. Most people realize that money is a medium of exchange. It is valuable BECAUSE it buys goods and services. It is not v...

The most hyped case facing the US Supreme Court this term has been Moore v. Harper , the controversy that encouraged Trumpists to press their shiny new "independent state legislatures" theory of election law.  Nothing but mischief (or monkey business -- hence my illustration) was expected from this case. The court never seemed likely to buy into that theory in the unmoored terms in which it is generally phrased but, hey ... one never knows. My own impression is that this court's potential as a fulcrum for a rightward revolution is pretty much spent. The last several Republican Party nominees have been selected with only one common litmus test: their view on ROE. That case is no longer the law, and aside from that, 'the six' are very different from each other. If the dissenting three in that matter can hold together they won't regularly be in dissent, or they'll be able to exert significant influence.  The wet dreams of the right and the feverish nightmares...

Don't know what this is all about, but it evidently has something to do with the still-ongoing breakdown of the crypto world. With it has come the breakdown of what some people not too long ago were calling Web 3.0 MyAlgo on Twitter: "IMPORTANT: ⚠️We strongly advise all users to withdraw any funds from Mnemonic wallets that were stored in MyAlgo. As we still don't know the root cause of recent hacks, we encourage everyone to take precautionary measures to protect their assets. Thank you for your understanding." / Twitter Some people?  Heck, TBH, I was one of them. In June of last year, still less than a year ago, I wrote this:  How Blockchain is Changing the World: Finance, Marketing, and Web3 | Gate 39 Media   Don't go there and read the whole thing. You can read the gist of it here: Consider eCommerce. On Web 1.0 there would be, say, a catalog for prospective buyers of widgets. Users would scroll through it to find the widget they fancy. They might then use an e...

  The concept of "madness" is not one with which psychologists, psychiatrists, or neurologists, of the 21st century have any dealings. Musicians, yes ... see above. Philosophers also still talk about madness, because philosophy is uniquely keyed to its past, still arguing cases litigated by Plato or Philo or Lao-Tsu.  Anyway: Justin Garson, a professor of philosophy at CUNY, has written a book simply titled  Madness: A Philosophical Exploration .  Garson's point is that in ancient times there were two very different views of what the ancients called madness. There was madness as dysfunction, or madness as strategy.  When medieval Christian philosophers addressed the point, they tended to combine both ideas. Madness could serve as an earthly purgatory, both punishing and improving.  It is early modern thinkers, from Locke to Kant, whom Garson credits/blames for the dominance of madness-as-dysfunction in our own time.  A review devoted largely to summari...

If you had to name ONE defining characteristic of the revolution in economics scholarship known as Keynesianism: what would it be?  Probably this: Keynes offered a distinctive explanation of sharp economic downturns within capitalist systems -- call them crises, depressions, recessions, or whathaveyous. Keynes explained them in a way that suggested a toolbox of remedies. His book, The General Theory, was published in 1936, so you would expect it to have something to say about that subject.   What is distinctive about his theory is that although it involves the price of borrowing money (i.e. interest rates) it does NOT directly entail monetary policy. His tool box does not include things like "mint silver." Indeed, this may be considered odd because his is the first significant book in the history of economics to appear AFTER the overthrow of the long dominant role of gold either as money or as a backer of money.  Yet he put that issue on the shelf. Instead, Keynes p...

Yesterday, we spoke of a former cryptocurrency honcho, now hoping for an international prisoner exchange that night free him. Tomorrow we will speak of old-fashioned government-fiat money and the role it plays within Keynesian economics.  Today, I offer a quotation from an ancient philosopher. A Stoic, Epictetus, said this about money. He imagines that a friend has asked him to go earn some quick money and then share it. He replies to this hypothetical friend.  "If I can get it while maintaining my self-respect, trustworthiness, and high-mindedness, show me the way and I'll et some. But if you're asking me to lose my good qualities so that you can get things that aren't even good, you can see how unfair and unfeeling you're being. What would you rather have, money or a trustworthy and self-respecting friend?"