Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  A solid point from Existential Comics. I'll just leave it here without further ado.  Nietzsche On Women - Existential Comics

  “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, "And what I assume you shall assume, "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” I was thinking of this passage of "Song of Myself" recently in connection with a 1949 book, THE VITAL CENTER, by political historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The second world war was a recent memory. The Cold War was a new and dangerous reality. Schlesinger, a Cold War liberal, presented Roosevelt-Truman liberalism, and democracy with a small "d" in general, as a vital center, between the horrors of Stalin on the one side and those of the fascists on the other. He saw the then-recent split in the Democratic Party as symbolic of this. The progressives under Henry Wallace left the Party in 1948 to run their own campaign. The segregationists under Thurmond left the same party for their very different reasons. Schlesinger was rather hard on both of them, in praise of Truman. Indeed, Schlesinger is harder on the two dissident Dems ...

  I learned incidentally last week, while working my day job, that the fast-food chain Checkers did a debt restructuring quite recently. They gave up a lot of equity to some of their creditors in return for a big write-down on the debts. In other words, they and their creditors worked out much the same deal for themselves that a bankruptcy court might have, with a lot more time and expense and higgling, had they gone the chapter 11 route.  New owners are in control now at the board level, but they seem content to leave the same management group in charge.  To reformulate that: management made a nice deal for itself, saving its position in the face of a debt burden that looked ruinous.  Not the most exciting news ever, but one always likes to hear of the financial troubles of corporations that are household names.  Wait .. Checkers isn't a household name in your household? Well, it is mostly a southern thing. Checkers is very big in Georgia, Florida, and east Tex...

J une has been a good month thus far for US economic news. Some points: 1. The month began with U.S. politicians avoiding a cliff, avoiding default on U.S. Treasuries. Good for us, and good for the rest of the world. The world, after all, needs a numeraire , a measure of the measures, a money of the monies. The numeraire was long ... gold. Now it is the U.S. dollar. With a U.S. bond default, one fears it would soon be something else ... perhaps the Chinese yuan. The transition would not be accomplished without grave difficulties and hardships and, once it was resolved, a new geopolitical balance would have been struck. One difficult to contemplate with equanimity. 2. The Fed decided NOT to raise the base rate of interest this month. It has been on a long campaign of increases, in order to try to cool down inflation. The goal, though, is to thread a needle -- to cool the price increases without dampening productivity and job creation. 3. A new contract for the west coast dockworkers. T...

As of last year scientists had mapped the whole of the human genome, that is, the complete set of nucleic acid sequences for humans, encoded within the 23 chromosome pairs of cell nuclei. Since then we have known ourselves as a species in a more thorough way than we ever had before.   It was two years ago that the Human Genome Project completed work on the female human genome, Mapping the Y chromosome took a little longer, bringing the job into 2022.  This was, then, the conclusion of a 30 year long project. The HGP was founded in 1990. A thought.  Wasn't the whole genome mapping part of the never-ending War on Cancer? IIRC the idea was that a fullmap would let researchers identify the cell-level mutations linked to specific forms of cancer, rto design better medicines accordingly. Has it helped? Are any new medicines on shelves in  pharmacies (general or hospital pharmacies) as a consequence? Yes, there hasn't been much time since the project was completed....

  There is a general impression that the sentence "it was a dark and stormy night" is a laughably bad way to start a novel. This impression is advanced by the Edward Bulwer-Lytton award for the best/worst deliberately bad sentence and by our collective memory of Snoopy, with his typewriter on top of the doghouse, typing exactly those words.  The novel that starts that way (sort of) is Bulwer-Lytton's PAUL CLIFFORD (1830).  I saw "sort of" because there is no period at the end of the word "night." Snoopy puts a period there. People quote THAT as if it were a laughably bad sentence. It isn't. That alone would be a fine terse mood-setting sentence. Edgar Allen Poe used exactly those words, with a period at the end, in a story he wrote one year later.  The actual sentence Bulwer-Lytton wrote, though, was:   "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind wh...

Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct." Justice Anthony Kennedy, LAWRENCE v. TEXAS (2003). 

  A man who ran formerly with Trump, as his VP candidate in two successive elections, is now running against Trump for the Republican nomination.  It is reasonable to ask: has anything like this happened in US history before? Well, nothing VERY much like this. Something similar would have happened if Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had shared a ticket in 1904. Then one could say, "Four years later, TR passed the baton to Taft and went into retirement. Four years after THAT, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the nomination of the Republican Party, and ended up running against him in the fall election as well." Except it didn't happen that way. TR's veep was the eminently forgettable Charles Fairbanks. Taft was that administration's Secretary of War. For that he gets the memorialization I have just given him by pasting his portrait at the top of this entry.  Another comparison that comes to mind: Henry Wallace's falling out with another Roosevelt, and e...

  The question "why is there a war in Ukraine at this moment?" can be answered simply, but the answer must be compound.  "There is a war because Russia invaded Ukraine and much of the western world is assisting Ukraine in its resistance to that invasion."  If the second half of that compound wasn't true the war triggered by the first half would likely have been a short one. There would be a larger country called 'Russia' by now, and perhaps that larger country's leaders would allow the captured province to call itself 'Ukraine.'  Since both parts of the compound are true, we not  only have a war we have a very particular war ... THIS war.  So if you want to push the question further, you ought really to push both parts further: why did Russia invade? and why did the western world react the way it has, with rare near-unanimity?    And those are both very good questions. To either of them a range of answers may be offered. I expect to come back...

My final comment is an observation and a related question.  The observation is that this bill, unlike others that have had a similar goal (both contested and uncontested) does not literally RAISE the ceiling. It SUSPENDS the ceiling. Although some new debt ceiling is supposed to go back on in January 2025, there is no number attached to that.  The question: does this mean that if no new number is agreed upon, Jan. 2015 (and a new inauguration) will come and go without any new cap?  Could this suspension be a back door abolition? So that the blue sky is the new "ceiling"?  Perhaps one of you readers wise in the ways of Washington will be able to explain this to me.  Thanks.   

  Oddly, the debt ceiling debate became linked in the mind both of legislators and the public with modifications to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-- i.e. "food stamps." The literal use of pieces of paper as food "stamps," has gone by the boards and SNAP transactions now involve plastic cards that look a lot like credit or debit cards. Politicians still once in a while spout off about how they saw someone buying (insert name of a luxury food item here) at the grocery store with food stamps and they were indignant because SNAP should be used for basic nutrition, blah blah blah.  I think the salience of that as an issue has declined in recent years. The plastic cards may have something to do with it. It is difficult to tell whether the person ahead of you in line is using "food stamps" at all. Heck, automated checkout kiosks probably worsen the opportunities for such on-site oversight even further, since you'd literally have to be looking o...

  A great old war movie cliche: protagonist, gesturing toward the front line, says something like, "it's quiet tonight. Way too quiet." The silence means an impending enemy attack.  The end of the 2023 debt ceiling crisis seemed a lot like that. Normal. Waaaay too normal. The President and party leaders of both Houses decided, after a lot of meetings by their senior staff, that a certain package was going to become law. Everybody who was in on the deal marshaled the amount of votes they had to marshal -- more than enough, in fact. The deal was done. It seemed just like the old days before Trump, before pandemic era craziness about how the vaccines are about to turn us all into zombies, before a riot in which the rioters threatened to lynch the Vice President of the United States, before a 15-rounds contest for Speaker of the House ... just like what would once have been considered normal politics.  No trillion-dollar platinum coin. No invocation of the 14th amendment. Not...

Some thoughts from a veteran of political-science classes of the late 1970s. We learned of the difference between two foreign-policy  realisms: classical and structural. Classical versus structural.  Classical realists took the policy maker himself to be the chief object of interest/study. Machiavelli was the font of this approach. James Burnham was a self-conscious adherent. A classical realist won't talk, without qualifications, of a state (a city, in the font's context) as having goals, but will think of the people and  factions who hold or are contending for power - a city's Prince or those who would be Prince -- have goals, and their goals become those of ‘the state’ when they achieve positions of command. Those decisions may involve deliberate absorption of the state by a neighbor, or even indifference as to whether the state survives or not.  Structural realism speaks of states as having goals, determined by their history and systemic features of their decisi...