Nineveh and Tyre, Part II
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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2d ago
Friday, I shared some thoughts about Rudyard Kipling's poem RECESSIONAL.  I quoted especially this verse: Far-called, our navies melt away;   On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Today I would like to talk briefly about the two Biblical references, Nineveh and Tyre.  Nineveh figures in the story of Jonah. Jonah was ordered to deliver God's wrathful message of impending destruction to Nineveh, a city near the one we know as Mosul.&nbs ..read more
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Nineveh and Tyre Part I
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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1w ago
  Rudyard Kipling, in his poem Recessional (1897) famously prophesied a time in which the British Empire would be no more, hard though this may have been to imagine in 1897, the diamond anniversary of the reign of Victoria.  It consists of five stanzas of six lines each, and each stanza has a straightforward ABABCC rhyme scheme. The third sticks to my mind right now.  Far-called, our navies melt away;   On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest w ..read more
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From Holmes Sr.
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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1w ago
The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr The true US Declaration of Independence from our Mother Country may be found in these words ..read more
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True story
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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1w ago
  ... the Love of my Life wanted to get to the nail salon for a scheduled appointment a few days back. We also needed to pick up some dry cleaning.  I suggested I knew a convenient route, we could do the latter on the way to getting to the former.  I might mention that her hair salon is a couple of towns away, and it happens to be in the town I grew up in. I can be a bit cocky about the best routes for getting to places there.  On the day in question.... she had to be there by 12:30 PM.  That was mission critical.  I told her as we left our driveway we could pic ..read more
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POLITICO gets something everyone else missed
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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1w ago
  THIS is a fine and perceptive scoop.  May have been the best single piece of 'morning after' journalism on the Super Tuesday primary. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/05/super-tuesday-2024/cryptos-big-night-00145274 Congrats to Jasper Goodman.  Personally, I think it is still an open question whether Bitcoin and all its kin, cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets, are a permanent feature of the American and world financial landscape or whether they are going to vanish away.  They may be doomed to become as hard-to-find as an etch-a-sketch.  BUT ... if you a ..read more
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The coming AI collapse
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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1w ago
Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original.  Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct.  After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently,“We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting m ..read more
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Whitehead's cosmology -- and a tee shirt
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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2w ago
 So, what's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the tee shirt we live?  I have written of late in this blog about Alfred North Whitehead's book, Process and Reality. But I have written chiefly of what he says there about other philosophers.  Plato, Locke, Hume....Now I hope to get to the core of Whitehead's original thought. What does he say about ... process and reality? What is his cosmology?  I have to bring one more historic figure, Leibniz, into the mix even to say this next bit, though. Because you can think of Whitehead's core supposition as a monadology. Any one o ..read more
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Thoughts on telecom M&A trends
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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2w ago
Merger and acquisition activity in the telecommunications market slowed in 2023. Around the globe, such activity reached a mere $61 billion in deal volume, down 15% from 2022.  Furthermore, the deal value numbers may be misleadingly high, because a single deal -- an outlier -- made them look respectable. Telecomm Italian agreed to sell its fixed network business to KKR and that is a $23.3 billion deal, almost two fifths of the whole.   I'm sure the question on your collective mind right now is -- "Wait:  KKR is betting on old-school landlines?"  But let us move on ..read more
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A thought about Broadway
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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2w ago
A year ago, I saw the following question on Quora. "Why did Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a musical about Alexander Hamilton? Was he popular at the time of the Revolution or during his presidency?" I am going back to that old post now, chiefly because it helps me illustrate what a big-hearted soul I am.  I wrote a reply to that question (or, strictly, those questions) that barely even mentioned the fact that, no, Hamilton never had a "presidency".  Instead, since I am a big-hearted soul, I gave that gaffe a pass and focused on what makes Hamilton a gripping musical.    ..read more
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Whitehead: That famous Plato quote
Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed
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3w ago
It is probably the single best known sentence Alfred North Whitehead ever wrote. It appears in the third paragraph of chapter 1 of Part II of Process and Reality. "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." The next three sentences, though, give that one some important context. "I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for e ..read more
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