Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  A little more than three years ago I wrote here about a book by Stephen Bates , of the University of Nevada, called AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020). It concerns a commission of intellectuals convened during the Second World War at the instigation of press maven Henry Luce to look into philosophical and practical questions concerning freedom of the press.  The aristocracy issued a report in 1947, four years after its creation, entitled A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE PRESS. As the title implies, much of it is taken up with the responsibilities an institutional press must bear in order to earn its continued freedom.   I'm writing about the Bates take on that report now because on another look at the book I've found an odd mistake. In his introduction (on p. 4) Bates mentions, in justifying his concern with the 1947 report, various indexes of its continuing influence through subsequent decades. One of these, "In a key First Amendment ruling, the Supreme Court quotes the commi...

  Pauline Kael (pictured) passed away on September 3, 2001.  It had been a slow news summer (a fact that was about to change in a very rude way in another week, but no matter), and Kael's death received a lot of attention. I'll add a bit more now at a quarter century distance.  One great Kael passage reads thus:  If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, i...

There is stuff on the surface of the moon that was put there at the end of the 1960s.   Stuff that was put there not by robots but by frail organically-evolved human beings. Put or left there by members of a species that only three score and six years before had been struggling with the basics of heavier-than-air flight.   A baby born at the time of the Kitty Hawk flight [where liftoff and touchdown were separated by all of 260 meters] would barely have qualified for social security by the time that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. THAT span represents one of the most extraordinary feats of recorded history.  Let us take a moment to be amazed. And understanding of the deniers.  It is still difficult to wrap one's head around. Perhaps it is just easier to deny.  Wow.        And yet it happened.  Wow. 

 Tim Curry?  Oh, noooo. A lot might be said about the late Tim Curry, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Amadeus, Spamalot, and so forth.  What I wish to say is simply that he passed away on August 25. The very same day that Dolly Parton shuffled off this mortal coil.  If [let us not ask why] you wish to leave the world weeping, you wish to get a big send-off, funeral orations, bloggers exhuming every discoverable fact about your life and death for a month to come -- if you wish any of that, dear reader, try to put some space between your death and that of a Dolly Parton.   She has taken all the oxygen out of the eulogistic room.  Rest in peace, TC. 

There actually exists an important company within the world of trucking named Descartes.  I say "within the world of trucking" because it is not strictly a trucking company.  It doesn't own trucks or hire drivers. It is, rather, a logistics technology company, offering techie services for fleet management.  Descartes is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario.  The newly contentious US/Canada border and trade issues have made Descartes important for folks like me, who write about matters financial. It may also have made its "logistics support" more important for many potential customers. So ... mazel tov.  Anyway: Descartes has recently bought up another company doing related work -- Tai Software, of California.  Descartes bought Tai for $100 million cash.  On an utterly related corporate point: there is a stable-materials company headquartered in Doylestown, Pennsylvania "The Horse, Inc." by name.  A company executing a good industry roll-up could acq...

  The human species has been sending signals into outer space since Marconi's day. After all, once radio waves are out there, they just keep going. Marconi's first crude experiments, at his family estate in Italy, took place in the middle 1890s -- so, 130 years ago.  Famously, less than 20 years later the radio operators of The Titanic stayed at their posts on that awful night in April 1912 tapping out Morse code distress signals.  In principle, an extraterrestrial intelligence one hundred and fourteen light years away from us could even now be picking up on those signals. What do such beings make of them?  Do they take them to be evidence that "we Fl'korgians are not alone!"?  There is a rhythm to them -- those signals from The Titanic -- that likely seems an intelligent construction. Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. Pause and repeat. Over and over.  My guess is that if the Fl'korgians have technology powerful enough to pick up on that pattern at th...