Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Google has been found guilty of monopolizing digital advertising.  In a remedy phase, the court -- Judge Leonie Brinkeme of the US district court for the eastern district of Virginia.  -- is trying to determine whether to break up Google as a remedy.   Story in Tuesday's WSJ, p. B1, went over this thoroughly.  Congratulations to Katherine Blunt and Dave Michaels for sharing the byline.   Another court recently found that (a) Google is also liable for monopolizing search engines but (b) no sch drastic remedy as a court-ordered divestiture of any of Google's assets of divisions is necessary there.  Why not? Because AI is rendering the issue of search engines moot.  That was Judge Amit P. Mehta of the US district court for the District of Columbia.  He said in essence hat people don't "search" anymore.  They ask AI, instead. And in the space of AI engines, Google doesn't have any special prominence. In the space of digital advert...

  Now that those of us with a lively but an amateur interest in cosmology have sort-of gotten our heads around the idea of a black hole, we have to wrestle with an odd variant, the "naked black hole" -- i.e the black hole that can be observed from outside. We amateurs understand or think we understand that the inner workings of a black hole cannot be observed from outside its boundary, formally known as its "event horizon". Hence the adjective "black". Yet the James Webb telescope seems now to be saying -- yes, maybe we can. Perhaps sometimes we can observe the singularity, the point at the Senate where gravity becomes infinite and all laws seem to break down.  Here is one take on this. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/09/this-naked-black-hole-shouldnt-exist.html One thing that us amateurs think we know about black holes is that they form from the collapse of a star in upon itself.  Hossenfelder says that the naked black holes did not form that way, ...

Consider how Kubrick,the legendary movie director behind 2001: A Space Odyssey,  and other classic films, might have summarized the history of philosophy.  First scene: a stone monolith appears in ancient Ionia, and Thales begins to wonder whether there might be a single material substratum for all things. Thales throws a bone into the air, wondering if it will turn into water. The viewers of the movie seem to see the bone turn into a baguette, and ...  A long time thereafter, another monolith is discovered in France, and Descartes imagines that he could and should move beyond solipsism. He launches a project, called modern philosophy, which will explore the furthest regions of space and find a God who can guarantee that no evil demon is fooling us.  A computer named STRAUSS is then invented as an artificial lifeform that/who composes suitable music for inspiring moments like the appearance of monoliths.  But STRAUSS is conflicted because ... thus spoke Nietzsch...

Intriguing post on the Legal History Blog argues that serious historians should stop using the phrase "the founders".  This is how one uses the phrase in a sentence: It is not clear whether the founders approved of a broad reader of the commerce clause when they wrote it.    The problem with such a sentence is that it suggests a sort of chicken-entrails reading of the constitution that "the founders" wrote.  What they thought of the commerce clause depends on which one or which cluster you want to discuss. The clusters you might want to understand overlap and/or contrast in confusing ways, and using the phrase "the founders" as if it is itself a coherent cluster of individuals living and working in the US in the late 18th century adds nothing but confusion. In that particular case, we could also have used the phrase "the framers".  But part of the problem is that, complicated as "the framers" itself is as a concept, "the founders...

  I wrote rather much about day-to-day political matters last week.  Let us work our way out of it.  Today I will take up a political matter with an odd philosophical twist.  Tomorrow, I'll ask a philosophically freighted question about political history.  To begin with an oddity: the Secretary of Health has now sworn to a very strange account of why he fired a subordinate. Secy Kennedy says that he asked her, "Are you trustworthy?" and she replied, "No."  So he had to fire her. I'm curious whether anyone in the world believes this story.  First: who says in earnest (not by way of posing a hypothetical) that she is "not trustworthy"? Untrustworthy people generally desirous of keeping their jobs seek to pretend to be trustworthy just as liars pretend to be sincere.  Saying "I am untrustworthy" seems a very odd way of quitting. Why not just use the old standby, "I quit"?  Anyway, this hypothetical "yes" in response to th...

Those of you who receive my newsletter, Center and Margins , will likely at the beginning of October receive an essay (on the 'Center' side) that overlaps with the material below.  But the overlap is not repetition, and may indeed be a sort of parallax.  ---------------------------- On the Epstein matter in general, Trump is simply saying what he deems he has to say. Politically, this is a toughy for him. After all, perhaps even more than immigration/border issues, revulsion about pedophilia and elite conspiracy are what has gotten him where he is. During his first campaign, in 2016, the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton family advisor, were leaked to the public (through Russian efforts) and one circle of theorists decided they were all written in a secret code that when decoded detailed Podesta’s involvement with a child-abuse ring. There is no evidence of this, the ‘code’ was something the theorists made up. This soon led to a bizarre story about the basement of a Washingto...

Back in February, President Trump nominated a fellow named Landon Heid to an obscure-seeming post, assistant secretary for export administration at the Department of Commerce.  The post requires Senate confirmation.  POTUS has withdrawn Heid's nomination for that post in recent days. Why? Ah, that is the question.  Heid -- the fellow in the foreground of the photo here -- is a 'China hawk' (there is that avian metaphor again that we discussed in another context in yesterday's post). Heidi has long supported restrictions on the export of computer chips to the People's Republic of China in a targeted way aimed at limiting China's ability to make use of certain cutting-edge computing capabilities.  The withdrawal of his name may, then, be a victory for China doves over China hawks within a administration deeply divided on just those lines.  There is some speculation that the nomination has been withdrawn because Trump doesn't want to go down that road any longe...

  Thus far, Governor Lisa Cook has been winning in the courts.  She remains a Governor and so a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Board, entitled to a part in the deliberations of the September meeting, yesterday and today.  That fact is a small victory for sanity in an insane moment and is worth celebrating.  Also, we hereby note that going into the meeting the general expectation has been and so far as I know remains that there will be a smallish cut in the Fed rate, (probably 25 basis points, or one-quarter of a percent),  BUT that it will be a "hawkish cut". The Fed will issue a statement about the cut, saying sternly that it is NOT the beginning of a series of cuts but a one-off and that the rate of inflation is a grave concern.  For review: Fed policy commentators have long since used the language of "doves" and "hawks" long used by military-policy pundits.  In the case of the Federal Reserve, the old foe is inflation and interest rates ...

We will spend this week discussing four policy issues now facing the world and its governments that are getting surprisingly little mainstream media attention because the Charlie Kirk shooting has sucked all the air out of the newsroom. Artificial intelligence as an industry, US monetary policy, US/Chinese relations and ... Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book. First up, AI: I believe we are seeing the bursting of an AI bubble.  AI companies are not even remotely worth the values implied by their present equity prices, any more than dotcom companies were worth their stock prices in 1998. And (as then) the bursting of the bubble will have consequences for the world beyond the industry concerned.  Case in point in very recent days, and one that you dear reader likely have not heard of: Mistral.  This is not a publicly listed company anywhere so calculations of its equity value depend on sporadic deals. On September 10 the Wall Street Journal reported that the value of a French ...

  As comic book guy might say, "Worst. Acronym. Ever." MoND refers to a theory in physics, especially cosmology and astrophysics, that suggests that there is no real need to posit "dark matter". The case for dark matter has always been that the amount of observable matter in galaxies is not enough to understand how fast galaxies rotate.  Either our views of gravity or our views of mass must change to cover these rotations. MoND opts for changing the view of gravity, rather than postulating vast quantities of mass.  Here is Sabine Hossenfelder's explanation of the point.  https://backreaction.blogspot.com/?fbclid=IwAR0Eild3WJDSYbL1NjgSjMsmenRUf6wbPy9HQE7DEkIrfLnlxHbvzp0g9Xc    Advocates of Modified Newtonian Dynamics propose changes of the Newtonian theory of gravity. Of course, the Einstein revolution did already modify Newton.  The point though was that another differently-motivated modification will be necessary, and that scientists from six score ye...

Continuing our discussion from yesterday about the two government sponsored entities that support the housing mortgage markets known as Fannie and Freddie. Let us be a little more formal about names than we yet have been.  "Fannie [Mae]" is a common nickname derived from the name "Federal National Mortgage Association" founded in 1938. "Freddie [Mac]" is the corresponding brotherly name coming from the "Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association" founded in 1970.  The word "Federal" in each case indicates some connection to the US government, as does the word "sponsored" from "Government Sponsored Entities" when they are called the GSE siblings. The connection to the US Treasury has always been at least implicit -- they were considered too big to fail, so as a matter of psychology anyway their securitizations of mortgages were and are in greater demand than non-sponsored competitors' securitizations.  At any rate, th...

  What is up with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Let's not be afraid to get a little wonky.  These are the two "government sponsored entities" (GSEs) that between them backstop much of the home mortgage business in the United States. They don't issue mortgages: in essence they play mortgages as a secondary market.  That doesn't mean they are unimportant.  Rather, it means that institutions that do issue mortgages depend on the presence of Fannie and Freddie as a risk mitigator. Better than keeping the whole of the risk of every home on their own books!   The history is important as we contemplate the Trump II administration's plans for the GSEs. But I won't go through the whole history of the two of them, which would of necessity begin in the New Deal and then spend a fair amount of time with Richard Nixon. I will do neither.  I will, though, say something about the crisis of 2008. Then in tomorrow's entry I will speak to 2025's reform impetus. At any...

  Virginia always provides a test for a new President. Indeed, Virginia's Governorship may not run for a second term -- so there is never an incumbent advantage. As a consequence the race for the post often has a fascinatingly hot contest the year after the election of a new President to work out of the Oval office right across the river.   In 2005, a year after the clear victory of George W. Bush's re-election campaign (so much clearer than the way W ended up with his first term -- but we will speak naught of that) -- Democrat Tim Kaine (pictured) won the Governor's seat in Richmond.  In 2004, W had received 53.68% of the popular vote in the state, while Dem. John Kerry received just 45.48%.  Kaine's victory a year later indicated the political tides were shifting, and that Bush's post-9/11 momentum was spent.  Likewise, in 2021, a year after the victory of Joseph Biden over Donald Trump, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial contest. Th...

Let us return to Henry James and to a work of his I have mentioned and quoted earlier in this blog, The Sacred Fount.   At a certain point the lead character, the first-person pronoun protagonist, starts to doubt that all his ratiocinations about the relationships of the other people in his social circle have a firm hold on reality.  This is how he expresses that doubt to himself.  "I could toss the ball myself. I could catch it and send it back, and familiarity had now made this exercise -- in my own inner precincts --easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John's clumsier curiosity made me tremble for the impurity of my creation.  If there had been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of my discernment, it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the menace of some incalculable catastrophe or some public ugliness."    

  "Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised." From The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891).  I imagine you reply, "ochlocracy"? Now probably an archaism, it literally means "mob rule." I have to say I love Wilde's ironic echo of Gettysburg here.   

  I'm writing this post well ahead of its appearance -- I'm writing on the evening of August 29, soon after the US Federal Circuit has upheld a decision in May by the Court of International Trade that the tariffs imposed by President Trump's executive orders in and since what the administration called "Liberation Day" (April 2), are without statutory mandates and so are in violation of the constitution's requirement that Congress determine taxes.  Full text of decision is freely available here: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINION.8-29-2025_2566151.pdf  The matter was heard en banc -- that is, the whole of the "bank" of the circuit, rather than the usual three-judge panel.  The whole bank broke down 7 to 4.  I of course applaud the result.  Trump has long been "liberated" from any sense of economic reality or constitutional obligation but we ought to resist when he seeks to "liberate" the rest of us.  I ha...

Who is Fr iedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, someone on Quora asked. I answered: Schelling was part of the group of post-Kant German philosophers, who in effect worked to continue metaphysics while acknowledging the force of the Kantian argument that metaphysics is impossible. Think of it as a search for loopholes in a somewhat convoluted prohibition. The key post-Kantian metaphysicians are distinguished by the different loopholes they found or claimed to have found in Kant’s reasoning. In Schelling’s case this involved going back to the “deities of Samothrace”. The ancient Greeks to whom we’ve been paying attention all these centuries weren’t the right ones —we have to go back and look to other ancient Greeks! the mystical ones! Nietzsche made a very similar move in his BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. --------------------   Quite a superficial response.  Not quite as wise-arsed as some of my contributions there, but not as well thought through as others. Why, you might ask. would a new...