Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

For a long time, much of the political appeal of  President Donald Trump has come from his professed opposition to “forever wars.”   One of his many explicit statements to this effect dates from his State of the Union address in 2019.  He said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”  If you need a link for that: behold. Given his goal to make America “great again,” this language clearly amounts to a commitment to use his position as commander-in-chief to keep the United States out of endless wars. Yet here we are, with Trump once again the commander-in-chief and with his commitment to war with Iran open-ended. He began the attack on Iran at the end of February and throughout March he has put his renunciation of his earlier view front-and-center. He has used his own proprietary social-media platform, “Truth Social,” to explain to us that “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries fin...

  Ladies and gentlemen, behold the much-discussed Strait of Hormuz. The white space above is water, the greenish space is land.  To the left, the Persian Gulf -- to the right (east), the Gulf of Oman.  To the north, Iran.  To the south, Oman. At its tightest point, there are just 21 nautical miles between Oman and Iran. That is even smaller than the mileage between England and France at the narrowest part of the Channel. Within that span, only an even smaller portion is actually useful for large vessels such as oil tankers, about two lanes, each two miles wide, separated from each other by a 2 mile buffer zone.   Until a few days ago, roughly 20% of the world's oil supply was passing with regularity through the Strait of Hormuz.  The name of the strait comes from nearby Hormuz Island, and the name of that island may come from a corruption of the name Ahuramazda, the Supreme deity in Zoroastrian religion.   The closure of that strait for any l...

  Killing schoolchildren is wrong.  Let's start with that for today's comment on this war.  (This is the first of a set of four comments on the US and Israeli war with Iran this week, looking at it from four different points of view: economic, political, constitutional and, today ... human. )  As the war began, children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School were already in the two story building dedicated to their education, a building in the town of Minab, one with walls painted with pink flowers. A missile slammed into that building midmorning, leaving rubble and dead bodies.  Survivors of the first strike gathered in a hall, and there became victims of a second strike. In  all there were apparently 175 people killed, 108 of them children.  The first response of the President of the United States was,  "In my opinion and based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. They're very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions."  The secon...

  " Time as a whole and in its parts bears to Space as a whole and its corresponding parts a relation analogous to the relation of mind to its equivalent bodily or nervous basis; or to put the matter shortly that Time is the mind of Space and Space the body of Time....[We]  are examples of a pattern which is universal and is followed not only by things but by Space-Time itself." Let this be your random quote for the day, from ...  Samuel Alexander, SPACE, TIME AND DEITY (1927). Like other great books, that one began as a set of Gifford Lectures ... specifically as Glasgow Gifford lectures. The Gifford lectures were established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford. The will requires that they "promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term." They are given are four ancient Scottish universities: St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. To be asked to give a Gifford lecture has become in the fullness of time a signa...

There's an old story about Ernest Hemingway. Faced with a bad case of writer's block he overcame it by telling himself, when faced with the dreaded blank page, to begin by writing something simple and true. I often remind myself of this, especially when faced with the difficulty of writing about a complicated subject.  When complexity IS the block, start with something simple and true. Not long ago, for my monthly newsletter, the first issue of the new year 2026, I had given myself the challenge of writing a brief item about artificial intelligence. Then I froze.  I'm not an expert on the field.  I know of coding only what a late 1970s course on APL could teach me.  [If you really ARE into computer science, you're giggling at that sentence.)  So I started with this sort of intentional simplicity.  "The year 2025 may go down in history with a lot of labels." It may indeed. Getting just a little braver having taken that step, I continued, "But I, for one, w...

  And this could be big... in a bad way.  Most adults remember the period 2007-08.  The great global financial crisis of those years arose because mortgages and mortgage derivatives were the horse that the whole of the developed world's economies rode upon. That horse was over-loaded and in due course it died. What is the horse now?  On some accounts, a certain sort of software firm, one in the business of selling "software as a service", or SaaS for short, has taken on that role.  Equities in these companies, the "app" economy if you will, are the new mortgages. Loans to those companies are the new mortgage derivatives. It is all, again, an overburdened horse.   But what will general artificial intelligence (GAI) do to them?  Could its very generality make most of the specific apps that are so important today seem obsolete and pointless? How much wealth will be destroyed if that is the case?  Do we face a SaaSpocalypse?  The St Louis ba...