To start off today's discussion, I refer the reader to my post in November discussing what "effective altruism" is and why I think we must judge that somewhere in its reasoning this philosophy goes horribly wrong. Effective Altruism: The short course (jamesian58.blogspot.com) I won't re-tread that ground but I will observe that the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews site has a review of a new book on the subject. The book is THE RULES OF RESCUE by Theron Pummer. The reviewer is Violetta Igneski. Pummer argues (in Igneski's paraphrase) that "we are not always required to provide the ..read more

  One day last week I was in my home office, typing away on work related matters, and (since the door was open) I half heard a news report about OJ Simpson. People in my line of work love doing resonant "anniversary" stories so, after a little thought, I believed that I knew what the story was: we must have reached the 30th anniversary of the killings or the trial verdict or something.  Well, that wasn't it. Simpson had died. [Of natural causes.] I have nothing to say about this, so I'll just leave you with some links.  Well, I guess I do have SOMEthing to say, at least at a m ..read more

  Nebraska is one of just two states that does NOT follow a winner-take-all rule with reference to the allocation of its electoral votes in a Presidential contest. [The other is Maine.]  Part of  Nebraska's allocation of electors works by congressional district. [It gives out two of its five votes on a statewide basis and the other three by virtue of the presidential votes of its three congressional districts.] The result of this is that Nebraska sometimes votes in the electoral college four to the Republican candidate, one to the Democratic, because of the blue political tint ..read more

The "green new deal" is a cliche. Now we hear of a national green bank.  As if Alexander Hamilton had hooked up with Rachel Carson. The Biden administration's long talk of a "national green bank"  came into focus last week with the announcement that the administration is providing $27 billion in climate finance funds to coalitions of nonprofit lenders. The funding comes out of funds already appropriated by last year's Inflation Reduction Act. Formally, the "bank" is known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.  The hope is that the GGRF will evolve into something like a tru ..read more

  In watching an episode of SOUTH PARK, years ago, we learned that the devil plans to give himself a big party.  This was Season 10, episode 11, back in 2006. I won't bother you with a plot outline, I only want to focus on one point, what seemed at the time a silly bit of word play that now, in 2024, seems positively a prefigurement. What it prefigures I will let you decide. But the plot has Satan planning for himself a big Halloween party on Earth on the analogy of the Sweet Sixteen parties that rich Daddies among humans throw for their girls, and that were the subject of a realit ..read more

... what does Whitehead have to say about the emergence of consciousness and its place in a largely hostile cosmos? Still working my way through his masterpiece, Process and Reality. I'm looking especially at Part III (The Theory of Prehensions), Chapter III, "The Transmission of Feelings,' Section IV, where our man seems to be working this through in real time himself.  "It is evident," he says, "that adversion and aversion ... only have importance in the case of high-grade organisms. They constitute the first step toward intellectual mentality, though in themselves they do not am ..read more

Court put on a bit of a show over the mifepristone litigation. Or, at least, the oral arguments were so widely and intensely followed it smelled a bit like a Barnum production.  There is much that one might say about this dispute.  But this is the first time you will have seen anything about it in this humble blog, so for today I will just stick to some of the basics.  Mifepristone is part of the standard medicinal protocol for  early-term abortions. Early here means within 70 days of a pregnant woman's last menstrual period. When it was first introduced in the Unit ..read more

I admire those scientists -- I mean actual credentialed working scientists -- who deign to spend a lot of time explaining science to layfolks like me. They are a differentiated bunch. Examples that come to mind are: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Polanyi, and -- my personal favorite -- Sabine Hossenfelder.  This must be roughly the tenth time she has inspired a post in this humble blog.  Let me introduce her credentials. Hossenfelder has a Ph.D. from Goethe University Frankfurt, for which she wrote a thesis on "Black Hole Relics in Large Extra Dimensions."  That ..read more

 I love physical keyboards.  This is why, for a long time, I stuck with the blackberry.  They had a cleverly designed keyboard that allowed for something of a sense that one was actually ... typing.  Like the old days.  Like in an office in a '40s movie. Click click clickity click.  I'm typing on a keyboard now, as I watch these letters and words come up on the screen of my desktop computer. A lot of people do without them.  People TALK to their computers now. I say bah and humbug to them, though I am without my old blackberry, so I use a virtual keyboard ..read more

I admit to having very mixed feelings about the whole TikTok issue. Let's review.  The US House of Representatives has passed, in what is nowadays an impressively bipartisan vote, (and with 352 yeas) a bill that would force Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or face a US ban.  A study last year out of Rutgers University indicated a "strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government." Perhaps more worrying, the broad use of TikTok is a means by which interests in ..read more