Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Maybe since you take the red pill, you see Santa and you find he looks like this.    Just a thought. Stealing from both South Park and The Matrix. 

  Years ago, I watched a DVD of a musical about a mathematician's struggle to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.  I believe it was called "Fermat's Last Tango."  It passed through my mind, then and often since, that it would be easy to write a song for a musical on such a theme using the tune to Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major General," a tune designed precisely to allow for complicated exposition. Alas! "Fermat's Last Tango" didn't follow this policy. The tunes like the words were all new. Good for them. But the idea has stuck with me. It has come to this. When squaring A and B and C, it sometimes works out right you see, Both when they push n up to three it never quite goes through: dear me! Now I shall prove just why this stands,  and get rewards in Krugerrands. The task involves elliptic curves  and forms that they call modul-urves, I'll borrow freely from the guys  Who've won each year the Abel Prize. Now: since old Rome...

  Vladlen Tatarsky is nothing at all analogous to Evan Gerschkovich, the latter is a journalist; the former is a mostly-unlamented corpse who was a mouthpiece for terrorists. Glenn Greenwald has been saying that it is unfair for free-press oriented activists in the United States to complain about EG's imprisonment by Putin when they stay silent about Tatarsky's death. Actually, it is not mysterious at all. That GG doesn't see the difference is a problem, not an insight. He is just parroting Putinesque talking points. Argh.

 The year's movie THE WHALE, starring Branden Fraser as Charlie, won a lot of awards in this year's awards season, include a Best Actor for Fraser. I recently saw it and, in general, I approve. SPOILER ALERT. If you don't want to learn certain facts about this movie and its plot, stop here. ------------------------------------------------   Charlie is morbidly obese and, in the course of the plot, he effectively kills himself by continuing to overeat while refusing medical treatment.    Charlie is also, importantly, an English teacher, assisting college students (by internet connection -- in his condition he cannot leave his home) as they develop their critical writing skills.  Charlie would perhaps rather be teaching literature than composition. The screenplay is full of references to the great American romantics, especially Whitman and Melville. The movie's title is a reference not only to the cruel term often used for obese humans, but to Ahab's nemesis....

  Wow.  That was a hot minute. Fox settled about as soon as a jury was seated.  Slate has a good account of the trial, such as it was.   Slate 's account ends with a woman fervently saying "thank you, Jesus." I think we're supposed to infer that she was a juror who had been resigned to having this trial dominate her life for the weeks to come. If so -- I understand her relief.  The amount: $787.5 million. More than three quarters of a billion dollars.  A nice chunk of money, although not an existential threat to the Fox empire. 

The trial in the defamation lawsuit that pits Dominion Voting Systems (plaintiff) against Fox News (defendant) has begun.  Or at least, late on Sunday the presiding Judge issued an order saying that it would begin today -- as I write, I'm imagining his order has been followed by the time you read this. Quick review: very soon after the election in November 2020, Trump partisans began claiming that Dominion-manufactured machines had been switching votes to Biden.   Certain Fox News hosts, Jeanine Pirro prominent among them, after reading about it in some of the wilder corners of the internet, began spouting this view on the air. Trumpette attorney Sidney Powell helped spread this idea.  By mid-November, a panicked Fox News producer circulated a memo that Judge Jeanine should be yanked off the air, precisely in order to shield the company from liability. That email will in due course be part of the plaintiffs' case. For Fox News did  not  yank her and she con...

 On an episode of CHEERS, uneducated farmboy Woody and overly educated Frasier Crane are talking.  Frasier mentions that he was a Rhodes scholar.  Woody looks fascinated. He asks, "Why does the asphalt on roads have so many different shades?" Frasier (long pause): "I was out sick that day." Woody: "Ah! And now it's come back to haunt you." 

The phrase "fruit of the poisonous tree" in justification of the exclusion of evidence from a court proceeding, has long been one of my favorite bits of legalese.  Now there is a book on the pre-history of the term. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4385356 When I was a practicing lawyer I was always hoping I'd have a reason to write a brief on the subject. It never happened. I won't actually cry over that long-spilt milk, but I will post the appropriate emoticon in lieu of actual tears. See above.  

 Virgin Orbit has filed for chapter 11 protection. This is a company that was spun off from Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. VG had already, before the spin-off, developed the LauncherOne rocket, for delivering payloads of up to 300 kilograms to low earth order. The spin-off was designed to market that.  On December 30, 2021, VO became a publicly traded company, on NASDAQ, with the ticker symbol VORB.  So ... is it important that it is it now in chapter 11? Possibly. VG was the chief competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX in the private-satellite-launch business. Personally, if Branson cannot do that job any longer I would like to see new entrants. Or a re-organized company, under new management and freed of accumulated debt, getting a fresh start at it. And the latter is what chapter 11, if it works properly, might bring about.   

 If "gormlessness" means stupidity, to our British cousins, then presumably as you strip the syllables away you find that "gormless" means "stupid" and "gorm" refers to the smarts that are missing when the negatives obtain. Right? Well ... not exactly. The root comes from Norse "gaum," for heed or attention. We might also, I suppose, call it  FOCUS. The implicit diagnosis is that the stupid are those who fail to pay attention. More the Black Adder than Mr Bean.  A recent novel by an Irish writer used the word thus: "I touched my mouth a lot when we talked, It was a childish habit and made me seem gormlesss."  I'm not going anywhere with this. Sometimes this blog is a bit ... unfocused. 

Discussed here.   Hawley, Paul clash on floor over TikTok ban  | The Hill It is good to encounter a conflict in which I'm still in full sympathy with Rand Paul. His father was more the kick-ass type, though.  

  Neil Gaiman apparently once advised other writers, "Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism."  Who the heck is Nail Gaiman, you ask, and what does he know about writing fantasy? Well, simply consider that he is the author of the InterWorld trilogy. World creation on a grand scale.  He was saying, on one level, "please don't compete with me in the world creation business." But he was saying on another, "fortunately for you, you don't HAVE TO compete with me in world creation. You can take the word you see around you and put your fantasy plots right there." It's a thought.   

 My recent reading includes PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (2022), an anthology edited by Jon Mills. This is not one of those several-conflicting-points-of-view anthologies. Mills himself and the various authors involved all seem to share the point of view, though they approach it from different directions.  Their contention, in a few words, is that psychoanalysis -- which these authors associate almost entirely with the work of Sigmund Freud and his most devoted followers -- implies the ontological position known as "dual-aspect monism."  Specifically, the libidinous drive at the heart of Freudianism is neither material nor mental. It is a neutral sort of stuff, developed out of the body (which has the natural-selection defined drives to survive and to reproduce) but not simply a description of the body, yet again not mental stuff in a traditional sense of the term either.     One way to think about the Freudian notion of "the unconscious" is pre...