Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  My father has been deceased since May 2003, about 2 months subsequent to his 70th birthday.  But I still somehow receive quarterly issues of his alumni magazine, from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.  The Winter '22 issue featured "gifts from the ancient world," a story about cuneiform tablets to be found in an "unassuming storage box on the second floor" of the institute's library. The  box and the tablets are there because the first president of S.I.T., Dr. Henry Morton, was an amateur archaeologist, with a special interest in the Mesopotamian City of Uruk, from more that 4 thousand years ago.  The story lists contents both fascinating and random. "Four of the tablets in the collection detail produce and livestock transactions (including taxes payable in sheep and other animals) two are temple records, two are offerings by pilgrims to Ishtar...." Not many stories cause me to mutter, "I really ought to visit Hoboken soon.

 One of the purposes of the severe economic sanctions is to make it impossible for Russia to make the interest payments on their outstanding bonds. Once they default, presumably, their ability to borrow dries up quite quickly, and they'd have no source of funding to continue a long war.  I am in sympathy with that design, and would love to see such a default. Unfortunately, I cannot report it yet.  Russian sovereign bond payment received by JPMorgan and processed -source | Reuters

  Senator (Reverend) Raphael Warnock's efforts to abolish the gas tax are fascinating for a lot of reasons. One of them is that Warnock almost certainly doesn't want to put it that way. He calls for a "suspension" of the gas tax, presumably until the wartime scarcity has been eliminated and we can get back to the pre-Ukraine-crisis normal.  If that is what he thinks, he things sloppily. The price hikes are likely to be sticky, staying in place long after the immediate crisis, especially if the epidemiological news stays good. (It is epidemiology that drove prices down in the first place.)  If I'm right and the prices are sticky, will the gas tax holidays stay sticky post-Ukraine crisis?  Another fascinating point: Warnock put himself into an implicit alliance with Governor Kemp here . People in political trouble nearing an election have to pose as tax cutters, even if only for a little while. This is Murica, dammit.     

I wrote about Ms Raskin in my Feb. 24 post here. Biden has sought to make her vice chair of the  Federal Reserve for supervision.  I said that some Republicans were making any unholy fuss about this appointment, for two bad reasons and one not-so-bad reason. The bad reasons are: (first) she is the wife of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D - Md) against whom the Republicans have grudges, and  (second) she believes she could use the levers of bank supervision to do something positive about carbon emissions/climate change issues.  Those are bad reasons because first, personal grudges make mad policy and, second, there isn't much she could do about that subject, except advance the cause of transparency, which doesn't sound awful to me.  The not-so-bad reason involves crony capitalism. Raskin has been a long-term occupant of the revolving door between the banking industry and its regulators, cashing in as part of the former on her experiences and contacts within the latter. This appointment woul

  Why do I want a timeline for everything. Why am I planning, as I believe I have mentioned, to put all my particular timelines together into one Giganto-randa timeline? Because I suspect putting it all together will reveal to me patterns I don't yet understand in how I see these things.  But for now, I just power forward. In yesterday's entry, Part A, I ended with an item from  2003: the deposition of Saddam Hussein. I pick up from there. 2004: The Orange Revolution in Ukraine topples a Russian stooge. 2005: The Provo IRA calls an end to its armed campaign in Northern Ireland. 2006: The creation of Wikileaks. An artifact of the digital era, Wikileaks was founded in Iceland by an organization called Sunshine Press, with the hope of pouring sunshine into some dark places. It would be led by Julian Assange.   2007: Subprime crisis afflicts the secondary mortgage markets, especially in the US. An unexpectedly large fraction of the mortgages originated in the preceding couple of ye

  Today and tomorrow I will present a timeline of the last 38 years. Just one event per year. With little organization. Just think of this as a lot of stuff that happened. If we try to think of them as the "most important events" of their respective years, some of the choices will seem a tad eccentric.  1984, The Sino-British Joint Declaration sets out plans for a transition of Hong Kong to PRC sovereignty. 1985, Microsoft releases Window 1.0 1986, The launch of the Fox Broadcasting Co. 1987. The US FDA approves the marketing of Prozac. 1988. This was the year of the peak of the insider trading scandal that made Rudolph Giuliani a person of importance.  Drexel Burnham pleaded guilty this year.  1989. This was the year of the SATANIC VERSES controversy involving the Ayatollah Khomeini and Salman Rushdie. 1990. East and West Germany re-unite after decades of separation. 1991. The Soviet Union dissolves itself. 1992. The European Union comes into being, as a stronger and more po

  In anthropology, Hobbes was a thorough-going materialist. He didn’t believe in a ‘ghost within the machine,’ only in the machine. In metaphysics, again, he was a thorough-going materialist. This meant that he disbelieved in any notion of God that would involve a Being transcending in any way the material world. It is possible that he believed in a God in SOME sense, but he statements on the subject are confusing and subject to a lot of interpretive controversy. They may be confusing because he wanted them to be so: his Stuart patrons would hardly have smiled on open atheism. In epistemology, Hobbes was a nominalist and empiricist. “There is nothing universal but names,” he said, and that notion was in his mind a sword with which to slay nonsense. In ethics, Hobbes was of two views. In a state of nature, there is only generalization from psychological egoism. I want power. I have to expect that you, too, want power. What is right for me then is to dominate and perhaps to kill you. Wha

  In late January 2017, days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, I happened to be in San Diego, California for a conference. I was writing a lot about state-legal marijuana -- the industry's emergence as a business-news story rather than a law-reform story. And this conference involved a lot of the managers and investors of that then-new business. When checking in to the hotel hosting this conference, I couldn't help bringing up the subject of The Wall with the clerk.  "I must be just a couple of miles away from where the famous Wall is going to start," I said.  "Excuse me?" "You know, the Wall that will go from here out to Texas and the Gulf Coast...?" "Oh. Right. The famous Wall will start around THERE," he said, pointing south but still looking more bored than amused. Here is a bit of a postmortem on the project:  Trump border wall breached thousands of times by smugglers: report (msn.com)

Another timeline. I'm soon going to string all these together into one big mega-post that will speak to history, pre-history, and evolutionary biology beginning around 63 million years ago.  Right now we're looking at the late Bronze Age, the period from 4000 to 2000 BC.  I'm going to use "BC" rather than BCE here, for no better reason than that the AP style guide approves of it.  On second thought, I won't use BC or BCE here. I'll just assume you, dear reader, know that is what is meant in each of the (always approximate) years provided. So ... here we go. 4000 -- farming settlements first established in the Indus River Valley.  Another point around this time: horses have begun to be domesticated on the Eurasian steppes, modern-day Ukraine and west Kazakhstan. 3600 -- in the land between the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris, i.e. Sumer, copper begins to be mixed with tin to create Bronze, giving this era a name.  3500 -- the desertification of much of no

Note that they no longer complain that the news is "fake." Only that it is "old."  Mike Lindell walked into the White House with some papers near the end of the transition period. The papers were in plain sight the way he was holding them, and photos indicate that they concerned martial law.  Bob Costa's question was: where did he get them? Who prepared them?  Lindell's answer, so far as he gave one, was that "a bunch of lawyers" prepared them. Lindell also says he never read them.  So, he was walking into the White House with papers randomly given him by lawyers he doesn't know and whose work he didn't read? He didn't really say that, but that seems to be the story he wants to convey so laconically. I suspect he had some idea what was in there and who it came from.  Anyway, Lindell's melt-down when Costa pressed the point was epic. I love his emphasis on the "oldness" of the news. Its truth doesn't matter if the coup

Plato, Heraclitus, Thales, Pythagoras, and Parmenides all show up at the same conference. Zeno tried to get there but first he had to go half way, and to do that he first had to go a quarter way and to do that, etc.   Anyway, at the conference, Heraclitus said, "All that we sense is change." Plato, "You're right." Parmenides, "All that is changing is unreal." Plato, "You're right."  Pythagoras, "They can't both be right." Plato, "You're right." Thales. "You're all wet." 

I 'll take us up to about 4K BC today. As a general reflection: I read somewhere that a major civilization-enabling discovery was that animal husbandry and agriculture can be combined. You don't HAVE to have one family leading sheep around and slaughtering them, while another family raises corn. The same family can do both. I forget where I heard the theory of the synergy within family farms with animals, but I did think of it a lot while putting this together. What we know about this era seems to be largely about who was doing what with cultivated plants on the one hand and domesticated animals on the other. But let's get to the timeline. 8500 BC Pigs first domesticated in the Near East. 7600 BC By this time the domestication of pigs has reached China.  7000 BC, a specialized group of hunters in what is now known as Jordan created "desert kites" as traps for gazelles, and created a shrine for themselves near there. Fascinating thing: the shrine includes a small-s