This is the second part in our four part discussion of the US Supreme Court's October 2019 term, recently concluded. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited of the decisions that SCOTUS released late in the October 2019 term was its interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, encompassing within the scope of that act the prohibition of a discharge of a homosexual or transgender person from employment on account of that identity. The decision is captioned Bostock v. Clayton County . Gerald Bostock was a coordinator of child welfare services for Clayton County, Georgia, a county of roughly a quarter million population. Justice Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the majority (six). This itself was a body blow to the religious conservatives who are a critical part of President Trump's political support. Many of those folks have long held the view that, "no, Trump is no great shakes as a human being, but at least he will deliver for us on judicial nominations." Gorsuch's opi...
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Another term of the US Supreme Court has come and gone and, as I have for years, I will say something about it in this blog in a set of four posts. Welcome to the first. There have been important decisions this term I will not discuss. For example, I won't get to a significant decision on jury trials, Ramos v. Louisiana, decided in April. Though the court has long considered that the right to a jury trial was incorporated in the 14th amendment and thus applied to the states, it had not considered whether the requirement that the jury be unanimous in any conviction vote was part of the principle at issue. This April, by a 6-3 vote (written, interestingly, by Gorsuch) it held answered that question in the affirmative. I could find little to say about this point, though, not easily found elsewhere, so I will leave it be here. Also: there was an important decision late this term about the SEC's use of disgorgement of profits as both remedy and punishment for securities frau...
Hello. I was hoping to present the first of a unit of four posts about the recently concluded term of the Supreme Court at this time. Instead: aren't these Yorkies cute? Due to the fact that SCOTUS has taken such a bloody long time finishing up -- and, indeed, such a long time in getting around to one of the cases for which this term may become known in the history books, the matter of discovery (and Congressional inquiry into) a President's tax returns -- I'm holding back on offering you that unit. As I write these words, Wednesday morning, the court has just issued two decisions (one of which I will be discussing, though only briefly, in the unit as planned). It has also announced that tomorrow, Thursday, will be the final day for decisions. So it will have to do something about the tax disclosure case tomorrow. That "something" will likely be big news tomorrow, as you read this, even if you are inclined to read my blog entries on day of posting. An...
I think we should all refer with some regularity to the President of the United States as "the Orange Dynast." The Orange Dynasty, in British history, is of course a colorful incident (pun intended, however lame) in the monarchical history of the mother country. This was the family that benefited by the second and permanent overthrow of the Stuarts. The founding fathers of the United States generally shared a view of the world in which the Orange dynasty were the "good guys." They were superior to the Stuarts, because the Stuarts claimed absolute monarchical authority whereas the Orange monarchs, William and Mary first, Anne later, acknowledged that they could reign only because Parliament ruled. Recall that Patrick Henry compared himself to two regicides ... Brutus and Cromwell. The Orange were also seen by our founders as superior to the Hanoverians, who replaced them, because after all the Hanoverians were imported Germans, not Brits or even harmless Dutch, a...
The phrase used as the headline of this post is the title of an essay by the philosopher Valia Allori. Professor Allori teaches philosophy at Northern Illinois University. Her article on QM and consciousness is available online. It will soon reach print as a contribution to an anthology on concepts of the world-soul, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. If I understand Allori properly, one important issue for her is: what counts as an observer for the purpose of collapsing the wave function? We say that the wave function incorporating the life or death of Schrödinger’ s cat collapses when someone opens the box and looks. That seems to mean that someone has to become conscious of the cat in order for the cat to be definitively alive or dead. If I were sleep-walking and opened the box, then in my sleepwalking condition looked inside: would the live and the dead cat still be in a superposition? What if a robot opens the box lid, with equipment designed to re...
They used to call it the "new criticism," but that isn't a name that wears well. I think of it as formalism. It is simply the formalism distinctive to the mid-20th century in literary studies. The New Criticism (1941) was a book by John Crowe Ransom that gave its name to a literary/theoretical movement. Besides Ransom the important figures in the movement included Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, and a two headed beast, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. Salient features of the movement are these: close reading and explication of the text. This would seem obviously something a good critic must do, but it was a rebuke to romantic scholars who showed off their contextualizing erudition and engaged in emotional effusions at the expense of this focus on the text. a deliberate detachment from the issue of what the author of a text MEANT to say. What matters is what he did say, the text before us, not intentions that other sorts of scholars might divine from...
I was attempting to explain the creation of money by the Federal Reserve to this young person -- at least he projects youth, one can never know on the internets -- and I was having trouble, He had the idea that the only way the Federal Reserve could inject money into the economy was by borrowing it from somewhere. I think he thought of 'money' in overly physicalist terms, like a stack of bills and/or coins. I'll try the explanation again here. The Federal Reserve injects money into the economy by, in essence, creating it as a matter of law. Most money has no physical form at all. It is the set of the numbers we assign to bank accounts. The Bureau of Engraving creates paper money, but that is only a small portion of the total supply of dollars (I've heard around 8%). But that is the tail not the dog. The dog in this situation consists of the idea of money, and numbers that are re-assigned at the tap of keys or the swipe of a plastic card fr...