Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The coalition that put Donald Trump into office twice is coming unravelled. That judgment is of the jigsaw-perceiving sort.  One of its pieces is the recent Republican Party primary in Iowa.  https://www.wsaw.com/video/2026/06/03/lahn-wins-iowa-gop-governor-race-turek-takes-democratic-senate-primary/   "Make America Healthy Again," a loose grouping itself, of people who read Ivan Illich and those who just want to be able to drink unprocessed (raw) milk without governmental interference, of people who are sure vaccines cause autism and those who believe pesticides are destroying the food, from the granola eaters on the left to the granola eaters on the right including some who have made that transition personally -- MAHA ending up (as that acronym suggests) more-or-less aligned with MAGA during the last presidential election campaign. This year, in the mid-terms, that alignment has come apart.  In the Iowa Republican primary for Governor, MAHA backed Zack Lahn, w...

One of the benefits of my recent travels was that I picked up a copy of CANDID CHRONICLE, an advertiser-supported pro-marijuana weekly published in the form of a tabloid newspaper. This week's lead story was headlined, "The least sexy part of the cannabis industry," and it concerned laboratory testing. Consumers want their weed tested for many reasons: chief among them, to find out whether and how much pesticide it contains. The laboratories and the equipment used to do this work are, indeed, an un-sexy subject, but make for very lucrative markets. The article informed readers that they shouldn't rely on any lab that does not have ISO 17025 accreditation, an assurance of technical competence. A good thought. I will only add that since this isn't a singles' ad, the "ISO" doesn't stand for "in search of." It means "International Organization for Standards," even though that seems not to have the order of letters right. ...

Random reading.... In the February issue of HARPER'S, Rebecca Solnit works to relate the Second World War to ... every environmental disaster since. The following may be the money quote. "In crucial, material ways, the technological modernization of World War II never ended. Pesticides, nuclear engineering, and plastics -- all developed during the militarization of industrial production -- are now part of a war by other means. All three industries sought profitable postwar applications and found them in agriculture, in energy production, and in the creation of untold disposable plastic items, the ubiquity of which was aided by he rise of advertising and marketing." The reference to pesticides there brought me up short. Are pesticides the consequence of that war in the same  sense as nuclear engineering? Sulfur was used as a pesticide by the Chinese back around 1,000 BC. My understanding is that the modern and highly marketable nature of pesticides dates back to ...