Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

One feature of Buddhism that seems odd when one first learns of it is this juxtaposition of ideas: (1) reincarnation is real; (2) the soul is not real.  Your ordinary westerner learner this starts up a bit and says, "Waaaaiiitt a minute here. Without a soul, what is it that gets into the new body? What IS reincarnated?" And that is a good question.  Not because it doesn't have a good answer but because it has a very revealing answer: what is re-born is a process, not a substance. Reincarnation is the continuance of a chain of causes and effects.  It is rather like a flame that passes from a lit match to the wick of the candle. Something real did happen when, as we say, the candle "caught" the fire. But that doesn't make fire a substance.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to an airport to pass out pamphlets explaining this. 

My recent reading includes AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020), by Stephen Bates. I won't say much about it today: but I will give you some bibliographic particulars. Let's do this is question-and-answer form. Who is Stephen Bates? An associate professor at the University of Nevada, in Las Vegas, teaching journalism and media studies. Is this his first book? No, it's his fifth. Perhaps his best known before this was THE POISONER (2014) about a notorious Victorian-era serial killer, William Palmer.  Okay. What is the new book about? Chiefly it is about the Hutchins Commission and its report. This was a Commission created by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, at the behest of his friend Henry Luce, then a press baron with roughly the power and wealth of a Hearst or a Murdoch. Hutchins collected some renowned philosophers, theologians, and Big Thinkers to think about the issue of a free press -- what it means and how it should be nurtured. It pr...

THESE are names that it is easy to get confused.  Blackstone is an alternatives asset manager that is also a publicly owned corporation (Nasdaq: BX). It recently exceeded $1 trillion in assets under management (AUM) for the first time. This means that its AUM figure is higher than the gross domestic product of the Netherlands.  Black stone was founded in 1985 with $400,000 in capital. If my arithmetuic is right, one needs to multiply 400 K by 2,500 to get a trillion. What a ride.  Yes, there are asset managers that have grown larger and quicker.  BlackRock for example has a larger AUM than its near namesake Blackstone. Indeed, BlackRock had close to $8.6 trillion the last time I checked. But most such others, including BlackRock, are in the high volume, low margin business of managing ETFs. . But Blackstone is a proper investment house: real estate, hedge funds, credit.  Blackwater? It has a name that sounds like it ought to be doing the same thing as the other...

just found something in the Guardian's style guide that had never before occurred to me. The entry on the use of the names of people quoted refers to the situation in which it is thought necessary, in a news report, to introduce someone to ones readers with a description beyond the name. In a story about a football [soccer!] game, one might write, "Paul Heckingbottom, the Sheffield United manager, said...."  Why the commas, though? Here is the interesting bit. Why not just "Paul Heckingbottom the Sheffield United manager said..."?  TIL that commas around the name indicate that there is only one person with this function. If the team were managed by committee, and each member of the committee had the title "manager," then one might well write "Paul Heckingbottom the Sheffield United manager said...." More plausibly, and shifting to political coverage, "The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said" is proper. But there are a lot of former L...

  What was the significance, what is the current significance, of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in March of this year?  For a few nervous weeks thereafter, it appeared that this might be the spark that sets off the forest fire, the catalyst for a 2008 style banking crisis. But with four months between that moment and our own, we can say with some safety that that was NOT the case.  One ripple, though, was this: the failure of SVB had a rather severe impact on the west coast venture-capital world which SVB and its parent company, SVB Financial Group, served. The bank and its parent and sister entities were founded precisely to serve that world.  Yet the broader economy survived. I do believe that venture capitalists serve valuable economic functions. But they are not day-to-day functions, and the rest of the system can get along without them for a time. The VC spending in the United States fell by half in the second quarter of 2023, largely due to the absence of ...

  Until a few minutes ago I was under the impression that I had already written something in here about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in March of this year. I can't find any such post now. So ... maybe not. I see a brief reference to it in an item about an FDIC regulation, but that's it. Anyway, my apologies if I didn't. I'm am sure I have masses of lurking readers whom I've disappointed. Here is a very short statement of what happened. I will say something about its significance tomorrow. Just the facts today.  In the early days of March there was a run on SVB. The Federal Reserve's long campaign of interest rate hikes, combined with bad managerial decisions, had caused bank losses that made depositors nervous -- hence a bank run right out of the Potterville playbook. People  need their liquidity.  On the morning of March 10, a Friday, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation seized SVB and put it int he receivership of the Federal...

  There were least two important decisions on Indian law this term. (And, yes, that remains the proper term for this field of law in the United States -- https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/american_indian_law.) The sovereign rights of the tribes (as "domestic dependent nations") were tested this year both as regards federal bankruptcy law and in connection with adoptions policy. The tribes came up 1 for 2. SCOTUS rejected their claims o f immunity from bankruptcy, but upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act.  The former was an 8 to 1 decision. The only dissent came from Justice Gorsuch, who has become known as the most pro-Indian Justice since William O. Douglas.  I am reminded of a statement that used to be attributed to Justice Douglas, re: his rule in deciding how to vote: "the individual over the government, the government over the corporation, the environment over everything, and give the Indians whatever they want."  In this instance, even Justice Douglas might well...

  Jack Daniels Properties, the corporate owner of trademarks associated with Jack Daniels, a brand of whiskey, won a high profile  intellectual property case this term. The case involved a dog toy in the shape of a bottle of whiskey, with markings that reference Jack Daniels in a way that ALSO references dog poop. For example, the pseudo-bottle bears a rhyming code name, "Bad Spaniels." Where  a bottle of JD whiskey bears the familiar description "Old No. 7 Brand Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey" the dog-toy doppelganger says " The old No 2 on your Tennessee carpet."  Whether you find punning poop jokes funny is a matter of taste.   The "Bad Spaniels" decision   is now a matter for the law books.   The district court granted summary judgment to the dog-toy makers.  The appeals court affirmed that judgment and JD appealed. The defenders of the brand won before SCOTUS, which offered its own reading of the law and remanded for  further cons...

  SCOTUS ended this term with aplomb, and with a bomb, the long-awaited ruling on student debt relief. The decision, which struck the Biden administration's debt relief program, came about, in formal terms, as an interpretation of the Higher Education Relief Opportunities Act.  Some in the US maintain that it would be both right and urgent to make college free in the United States. Forgive all college-generated debt, and nationalize the financing of college that will make lending for such purposes hereafter a non-issue. The Biden administrations plans fall very very short of that. To Biden this is a one-shot debt forgiveness, rather narrowly targeted. Only $20,000 of debt forgiveness for 30 million people. The idea is to give those people a one-time break, given the general impression that the lending has gotten out of control and the borrowers are suffering too great a burden. Also, this one-shot move can be justified as a post-Covid stimulus, akin to the checks that Presiden...

  Until recently I did four posts a day here. Now on most weeks I do only three. But I shall retain my old practice of doing a four-part discussion of the just-ended term of the US Supreme Court here each year in early July. The easiest way to do this is to write the introductory panel first, and the more granular three panels the following week.  I think THE story of this term is the triptych of gerrymandering cases. We will, accordingly, save discussion of that development until the end. There have also been striking decisions about everything from student loans to the separation of powers. Both of those and much else will be found here.  There have, on the other hand, been important decisions this term I will not discuss. For example, I won't discuss the end-of-term decision about affirmative action in higher education. However consequential, the arguments made by the parties, and the Justices, are not intellectually provoking, so I will let them be.  Furthermore,...

 Suppose you happen to be in Springfield, Mass., driving west on Sumner in a pouring rain. You want to get to route 291 heading east. Why? Well, let us never mind that.  You see Forest Park Ave. on your right. Should you turn there? Probably not. Drive a little further on Sumner. But if you do turn right on Forest Part Ave., not all is lost. Follow it. It will lead you to Fort Pleasant Ave. Take a slight right there (the only alternative will be a hard left -- to be avoided.)  Fort Pleasant will lead you shortly to the corner of Pine and Belmont. Take a slight left onto Belmont. In time you'll come to State Street on your right. You are now deep downtown.  Take that right. You'll pass Federal Street.  (DO NOT take Federal Street.) Soon after Federal, you will see a sign for St. James Street. Take THAT one.  That will lead you to route 291.  Well ... so will lots of other routes. Let's examine one utterly at random. Suppose you took Federal Street. Tha...

The business section of   The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Michael Kines on June 24. "Michael who?"  Indeed. A lot of people will react that way. But attention falls on Michael Kines because of the upcoming trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, which I have discussed here.  High Profile Trials to Watch for in 2023: Part One (jamesian58.blogspot.com)   Bankman-Fried is to FTX what Ken Lay was to Enron and what Bernie Madoff was to Madoff Investment Securities. People, including prosecutors, have unsurprisingly become very curious about Bankman-Fried's social/business networking. This brings us back to Kines.  Kines was a typical southern California schmoozer, show biz adjacent. He parlayed a brief period working for former President Bill Clinton into success as a Hollywood agent (in which capacity he apparently got to know everybody in that world, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Larry David, etc.). From that he moved into another status pos...