Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Not for the first time, I am thinking today about this odd song. The lyrics tell a story about two people, a couple, who are so bored with each other that they try to cheat on each other but, through lucky happenstance, end up making a rendezvous with ... each other.  Oh, what jolly fun. It is tricky to figure out the logistics, though. Our (male) protagonist is reading a poem placed in the personal ads. He replies to it, with a poem of his own, that ends, "I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon and cut through all this red tape/ At a bar named O'Malley's, Where we'll plaaaaan our escape." So, on the day this second poem appears in the newspaper, our two discontented settled-down folks must both see it.  Or there would be no meeting at O'Malley's.  They take the day after THAT to be the relevant "tomorrow."   They live together (that is obvious from the opening lines, where the man is lying in bed reading the paper while his wife lies besides...

  I said something in my September 25th entry into this blog about THE WEIGHT. Specifically, I spoke about the movie's back-story, and the underlying reality of FDR's confiscation of privately held gold in a determined demonetization of the historically value-measuring metal.  And I said that I enjoyed the movie.  But I didn't say much more about what happens in the movie, or what I liked about it (other than the subject matter). Here are some further points.  First, the back story didn't really matter all that much to the action.  A gaggle of sympathetic convicts had to get gold from point A to point B in order to win their freedom.  Without knowing or caring about the history you can 'get' that.  The distance between A and B was in rugged terrain, in the mountains of Oregon.  Our heroes encounter and overcome obstacles to their success, both natural and human, and the movie's style is half-way between prison break on the one hand and heist movi...

The newly released movie THE WEIGHT, starring Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe and Julia Jones looks at an aspect of the Depression in 1933 now largely lost to history --the off book and sometimes violent machinations over gold as the Roosevelt administration both de-monetized and confiscated the stuff.    What usually IS remembered is that the administration de-monetized gold. The shiny stuff would no longer back the Federal Reserve notes. (Eleven years later, the Bretton Woods Accord introduced some backdoor re-monetization -- but that is another story.) More to the movie's point, or at least to its backstory and a couple of expository speeches, Roosevelt figured he could not allow a lot of gold to remain in private hands. Had it stayed there, it could have been freely exchanged and it could well have become a de facto money, or at least a dangerous competitive risk to the fiat paper money by which it was supposed to have been replaced.  So, private persons were ordered to tu...

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ------------------------------------ I won't try to explain it but I think the phrase "the world" as used in this lovely quote means something other than "everything that is the case."  I think the sentiment is simultaneously Platonic and anti-Platonic.  The world means "the cave." To be "broke" means to agree to take an interest in the trivial shadow-show on the wall of the cave. To "be brave" is to insist on searching for the light of the sky.   "The cave breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.  But those that will not watch the shadow show it kills. It kills the ...

Looking over a pamphlet produced by the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, William Galvin, concerning 2026 ballot questions. One here is fascinating, and not something of which I have heard in any of the press coverage of the coming vote. Question 7, "Single Family Homes." Apparently, there is a view that local zoning has been too restrictive for the construction of single family residences on small lots, and this is contributing to the housing shortage in general. So, enough yes votes on question 7 will create a new law that will instruct municipalities not to ban, or require a special permit for, the use of land or structures for a single-family residence in any zoning district that allows residences, with some caveats.    The idea is that in affluent suburban communities in general, families with Big Homes and Big Lots of land around them don't want neighbors with smaller homes on smaller lots.  It ruins the property values.   If the zoning ordin...

It is amusing, and sad, that the academic world now has its own variant of the Nigerian Prince scam. You've surely seen the latter, dear reader, "Greetings. I am the widow of a wealthy Nigerian Prince. Please help me unlock my husband's vast fortune, which I will split with you.  All I need is some of your valuable US bank account data...."   Book Carnival seems a lot like that.  For professors.    Scam watch: “Book Carnival” – Leiter Reports

The issue of "free will" is a multi-front forever war in philosophy.  What does the phrase mean?  Do humans have it?  Is it necessary for the coherence of important ideas about moral responsibility to presume that we have it? One of the fronts in the war involves conscious human intentions and their timing.  Do we really form conscious intentions to do X before we do X?  Or are conscious intentions just confabulated after the fact -- after our neurological unconscious has already reached a point of no return? And what notion of free will could survive a "yes" answer to that question?  In 1983, an important paper, by Benjamin Libet at al,  appearing in a scientific journal aptly entitled BRAIN, discussed experiments that seemed to show that humans make decisions before we are even aware of it.  This seemed to destroy any intuitively plausible role for free will, or for the operation of "will" at all.  But of late neurologists have been looking...

  A friend told me this joke sometime in the 1990s. Excuse the techno archaisms.  Various scientists combined their efforts to formulate in proper computer programming form the question "Does a God exist?".  They asked the question to the most sophisticated computer and software available.  The answer came back, "data insufficient."  The team then connected this computer to a lot of other powerful computers and beefed up its data storage. They asked the same question. The answer came back, "data insufficient." Then they combined all the electrical energy available on planet earth with all the knowledge, fed it all in with this computer as the center.  They asked again, "Does a God exist?" Comes the response.  "Yes ... now."    Seemed funny. So How Exactly CAN AI Kill Us All? Experts Explain What That Viral Anthropic Tweet Is Referring To

  No, he appears not to have said that.  A rumor has circulated online in recent days to the effect that President Trump has threatened to turn off the water to Niagara Falls, a natural landmark famously shared by the U.S. and Canada, unless Canada agreed to pay a "100% tariff." The rumor is generally accompanied by an ALLEGED screenshot of the "Truth Social" posting that in turn includes these words,   We have the control. We have the valves. We can reduce the flow, or shut it down completely, and we will if necessary. Canada has been taking advantage of the United States for decades, getting a world-famous natural resource basically for free while insulting our country and making it harder for American businesses.   Snopes has looked into it and has concluded that the screen shot is a fake and the rumor it supports is just false. Perhaps it was an effort at satire gone awry,  Anyway, for the curious, the chief executive of the United Staes does not "have...

  Not surprisingly, the US goes its own way on much journalistic lingo, using terms distinct from those employed in the same context by the rest of the English speaking world. Consider the "sidebar". Often, for a important story, there is material that is pertinent to an understanding of the story but that does not QUITE fit into it. A story, after all, is a narration, not a data dump.  Anyway, the additional material that bears upon a story is often carried separately, by its side, or within a outline (a "box") nearby.   In the US, this is called a "sidebar." In rest of Anglophone, it is a "boxout".  Consider also the "subhead". This is an often italicized bit of material below the headline but before the lead paragraph ("lede graf").  In the US -- subhead.  Rest of world -- standfirst.  And the "copy editor"? This is the last person between the journalist writing a story and the general public about to read it.  Th...

It has been twenty-five years since airplanes, hijacked by terrorists, struck each of the two towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and a third struck the Pentagon. A fourth flight crashed in a rural field in western Pennsylvania, apparently because passengers resisted the hijackers/terrorists.  One odd thing about the 25th year commemorations -- they arrive as our ears are still ringing with the 250th anniversary of our independence as a nation.  This means the period SINCE that terrorist attack represents one tenth of the period of our existence as a nation. THAT fractional amount will only increase with time. This makes me feel old. The point?  Just that once changes are underway they can proceed with dizzying speed and a quarter century zips away. Whoosh. Some of the changes that were set in place by the attacks of September 11 2001 are moving at dizzying speed even now.  The United States responded by declaring a "War on Terror." What this turned ...

A little more than a year and a half ago I offered on this blog a precis of a book by two political scientists, Buzan and Waever, that offered a round-the-world tour of security issues on a region by region basis as of 2003. Indeed, I wrote several posts on the subject through January and February of 2025. Today, I would like to quote from something that appears early in that work that seems to me to have held up well in 2026, twenty-three years after the Buzan and Waever publication. The issue is why "premodern states" are under pressure to conform to "international standards".  "For premodern states, the threat from globalisation is broadly defined by an inability to measure up to international standards of good governance. The danger is either that they will be demoted in the ranks of international society to some sort of trusteeship status, no longer recognised as legally equal and capable of self-government, or that they will simply be neglected and allow...

  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...

Aviation leasing and Aviation lending. The names sound similar, but aviation leasing represents a very different financing play from aviation lending.  Aviation lending means lending money with an interest in someone's airplanes as collateral. This has become a big deal of late. It is a very different play from investment int he equity of an airline. Airlines are very dubious investments. Three events in my lifetime have made THAT very clear: the deregulation of the industry in the US under President Carter, the close-down of the whole industry as a national security matter in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the severe limits placed on the industry around the world for epidemiological reasons during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In each case investors have taken beatings. But beneath the booms, the busts, and the crises, that afflict the companies, there are the assets. It is very easy to move these assets from one place to another -- since that is the point of them -- but 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...