Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 I'll all in favor of the new proposed club, but of course only if the Satan they have in mind is the one frequently portrayed in South Park. Goat horns, cloven hooves, a goatee, and a skull over his penis Any other Satan is conceptually confused and a school would be impugning its pedagogical mission by giving it any credibility. 

  I recently encountered a tweet that said, "teachers should be able to tell a child simply, 'that's something you should discuss with your parents.'" This was intended to defend Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill. But ... seriously? Imagine a child (of any age) who brings a question about sex/gender orientation to a teacher. Isn't it a good guess that he (I'll say 'he' for convenience) has in fact tried to discuss it at home already and has been shut down there?   He's likely been treated to some version of "So long as you're under MY roof, Mister, you will not say such things ever again."  Or maybe, "You'll understand when you're older."  A teacher is not a confused child's first resort in such matters. Anyone who thinks he is going to benefit from "that's something you should discuss with your parents" is living in a fantasy world a lot stranger than the one DeSantis wants to pu

  Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Dunn said that he did not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19 for religious reasons. He did not identify a specific religion whose belief system leads him to this. But let us suppose it is Dunnism, and he is the Pope of it. He naturally doesn't want to be forced to excommunicate himself.   Six Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court said, "tough luck, soldier, you're in a chain of command." the other three --  Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch -- said that Dunn should NOT be relieved of his command for this reason. His religious rights should trump the chain of command.  (And yes, I know I'm using the word 'trump' there as a verb and that one could interpret that punningly as a reference to the guy who appointed Gorsuch. Grow up, folks. I use "trumpet" for such purposes. And you can spell it if you like with a silent "s" in front.)  What I would like to point out, though, is that in 2022 when on

  I'm looking at "Business and Human Rights," a new book by Florian Wettstein. With a mammoth title like that: what more specific can we say about its subject?  Well, apparently the subject named in that title, BHR for short, is an academic discipline now, encompassing ethical, legal, and managerial perspectives. And this new book is intended as a textbook, for use in BHR courses.  The author, Wettstein, is a luminary in the field. He is the editor-in-chief of the Business and Human Rights Journal, apparently published out of Switzerland, where Wettstein is a professor at St Gallen University.  There is another body of literature about "corporate social responsibility" or CSR, but Wettstein seems to be eager to consider CSR and BHR separately, and to consider BHR (as the title of the book hints) at much more length.    Here is a random quote from the book's discussion of indigenous peoples around the world as examples of targets of corporate nastiness.  &quo

  A word on Power Point presentations.  It has come to my attention that young people, digital world natives, look down on Power Point as a matter of graphic design.  My initial response to queries (or, rather, to ridicule from the young-uns) has been simply that I don't want to buy anything expensive. Power Point comes with the box.  But now I'm told there are other free resources, including one with the amusing name GIMP. GIMP means GNU Image Manipulation Program. Let's not get into what GNU means.  So I appeal to the readers of this humble blog. Is GIMP effective? Is it easy to learn how to use? Do people who have used it come to prefer it to PowerPoint? I await your wisdom.

  No reasoning here. Just prediction, as the headline says. I'm looking into a crystal ball.  Let's see if I get this one right. It won't take long. The Republicans hold their primary in the U.S. Senate race on May 3. That's only two weeks away now.  The Dems hold one on May 3 too. But that campaign is a more decorous affair and the vote counting will probably be boring too.  Let's look to the Republicans.  My prediction is in an envelope. It has been inside a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnell's porch since noon today. Am I the only one left who remembers the talents of Carnac the Magnificent? Anyway, the prediction?  The Hillbilly elegy guy wins the primary. J.D. Vance. You heard it here. Sim sala bim. 

In the matter of BROWN v BOARD, Justice Earl Warren was sensibly desirous of ensuring that the Court would speak with only one voice. He wrote the opinion, and the only opinion, for all nine Justices. Warren knew of course that there would be blow-back from the politicians of the former confederacy -- and not only from them -- and that it would be good if the politicians engaging in blowing back at this opinion were not aided by any divisions within the court itself.  He seems to have had some trouble persuading Justice Robert Jackson of this necessity. Jackson was dying at the time but was participating in deliberations and worked on several drafts of what he expected to be a concurring opinion.  I suspect that Jackson thought he would help Warren's cause by making Warren and the other seven judges seem moderate. He may have deliberately sought to outline a position that would seem to segregationists more extreme and outrageous, so they would react to Earl Warren's position as

  I admit I had a suspicion that I would complete and read over my master timeline and say "aaaaah." But the timeline is complete (see yesterday's posting) and what I feel now is mostly a sense of relief.  No Big Zig-Zagging dialectic suggests itself, no from-status-to-contract big picture. No world cycle. No "aaaaaah."  So is life just one damned thing after another? Maybe I should make up a timeline of the efforts to answer THAT question.  For now I will just note a couple of obvious features of the Big Timeline: Events crowd together because of presentism. Early in the timeline, I skipped past millions of years from one post to the next -- then it was just thousands of years, then an approximately one-post-per-century pace. Finally it was a year-to-year listing. Of course I have several recent month-by -month timelines for recent years on this blog, but I decided not to include those. The impression conveyed by a sufficiently detached alien reading yesterday&

The headline is obviously hyperbolic, but this is an effort at a really cool timeline, combining several smaller timelines I've put in this blog, making some revisions along the way.  Before the Bipedal Apes The earliest primates, called the Plesiadapiformes, are said to have speciated out of the Euarchonta very soon after the dinosaur-eliminating Comet struck, about  66 million years ago (MA). Soon after (63 MA) the Plesiadapiformes differentiated into the so-called wet-nosed and the dry-nosed primates. We will ignore the wet-nosed in what follows. The dry nosed are represented on today's earth by both the Great Apes and us humans. One distinctive feature of the dry-nosed branching? It can't metabolize vitamin C. We, and millions of years of ancestors, have had to include fruits bearing that vitamin in our diets.  Interesting, susceptibility to alcohol seems to be a trait of the primate group as a whole. After observing many other primates' love for fermenting fruits,

  think it would be great to come up with ideas that people were still trying to improve upon in a century.  That is the situation with Einstein's structure of ideas, especially the general theory of relativity. Physicists are probing its limits not in the hope that they can somehow over come it and erase it from the blackboard of history -- that won't happen --but in the expectation that in time somebody will do to Einstein what he did to Newton. Roughly speaking, Einstein showed that Newton was right about a special case within a broader situation. Outside of this special case (a stable framework for observations, within which objects move at slow velocities) things work in non-Newtonian ways. Could even Einstein's understanding of physics turn out to be a special case within a broader situation. It is almost certain that this WILL happen. The question is: where do the Einsteinian rules break down? Find that out, and come up with the broader theory, and your name my frie

  Yesterday I listed, though without much discussion, ten of the U.S. Senate races this year that, collectively, will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate beginning in January of next year.  That is of course critical for the fending-off of autocracy in America. I have to say this though it offends old instincts and quite justifiable habits of thought: lovers of liberty must hope and even work for a Democratic win where they can here. "Here" refers to the very specific issue of control of the U.S. Senate as of January 2023.   Those of us who are concerned about the central-planning temptations of the Democrats, or just aspire to move forward to anarchism in one way or another, can go back to struggling with the Dems later. But our goal here has to be the fending-off of autocracy (let's not call it "democracy" ugh -- let us not even call it a "republican system" though it would be nice if the capital-R Republicans remembered that concept). Th

  There are ten Big Senate Races this year. That is, there are four races in which the Democrats have a seat and a plausible shot at losing it, and there are six races in which Republicans are in the same position.  I believe it is now likely that, whatever happens in the House of Representatives in November, in the U.S. Senate the Democrats will retain at least 50 votes.  In large part this is due to the personal failings of Mar-a-Lago's favorite obese golfer. The former President has been making endorsements (and dis-endorsements) on the basis of spite, not on the basis of any policy platform other than a magical decertification of an election two years ago. And not on the basis of any coherent plan to get the Republican numbers up. He is ruining Mitch McConnell's prospects of becoming majority leader again and don't the two members of THAT lovely couple deserve each other? Anyway, the ten races everyone is watching with regard to the Senate are these (alphabetically orde