Robert “Bob” Hilary Kane died on April 20, 2024, at the age of 85, after a brief illness. He spent his final moments surrounded by family and friends at his home in Guilford, CT.  Kane had moved to Guilford in 2022, and I've read that until very recently he remained a regular at his  grandchildren’s sporting events and noted for his daily walk on the town green. In lieu of flowers, his family suggests people contribute what they can to his preferred charities: The Union of Concerned Scientists, The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, The National All ..read more

  According to one prominent political-science theory, a candidate of the party that is incumbent in the White House is nearly certain to win an election if he possesses at least six of 13 possible "keys". He does not need all, or most, or even a majority. He needs six.  Each key is a binary question, allowing only yes or no answer, though sometimes the answer will require an exercise of judgment, not mere arithmetic or observation.  For clarity -- for many of these keys the ABSENCE of something is taken as a positive.  So a "yes" answer has the form, "yes, it is true t ..read more

  35 years separate the great dust bowl storm of 1935 from the break-up of the Beatles in 1970.  I remember the Beatles news and I'm sure that at the time I would have said at the time that boring depression era history was ancient and best forgotten. The same span of time, though, separates the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 from, say, the passage of the Tik-Tok ban legislation of 2024. This 35 year period FLEW by.  The Berlin Wall thing was the week before yesterday.  Probably has nothing to do with why Einstein thought time was relative, but strikes me as proof of the ..read more

  The Future of Humanity Institute has shut down.  Oh, what a rough sentence to write! An organization devoted to ensuring that we as a species has a future ... now officially has only a past.  FHI was a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Oxford. And apparently one of the recurrent themes in the Institute's research was the "Fermi paradox." This is the idea that, on the one hand, there SHOULD BE technologically sophisticated aliens Out There, but that on the other hand we don't hear from them.  As FHI bigwig Robin Hanson has put it: there must be a f ..read more

 A philosopher and theologian of some importance passed away on April 17.  I refer to Robert M. Adams, long affiliated with the UNC Chapel Hill and with Rutgers. Adams gave the Gifford lectures at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1998-99.  This alone makes him worthy of note. The Gifford lectures have become legendary as a regular contribution by one or another significant scholar, each presented originally as a lecture series over the course of an academic year though put eventually into book form.  The mandate from the will of the late Lord Gifford is that th ..read more

A couple years ago someone asked on QUORA whether W.D. Ross believe in an "absolute moral principle."  I recently looked up that old question and my response to it, because I suspected it might shed some light on the matter of effective altruism I have discussed here of late. I responded to the question about Ross as follows: ---------------------------------- I don’t believe that Ross would want you to think of any moral principle as absolute. His point was, to put it simply, that there are a plurality of moral principles and that they must be balanced against one another. If you wan ..read more

Old-fashioned union activism is loosed upon us again.  The UAW. Wow.  The UAW has won an organizational vote at a VW plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2024/04/19/tennessee-workers-vote-to-join-uaw-union/73382830007/   Once upon a time, when my own age figured in the single digits, there were the "Big Three" auto makers in Detroit Michigan and they dominated the auto industry not just in the US but in the world. So much so that union-management relations came to seem a domestic US centric affair.  During the Kennedy admin ..read more

  Let us return to as subject broached last week, the US Supreme Court's decision in MACQUARIE INFRASTRUCTURE v. MOAB PARTNERS.  As I noted, the case involves the private (tort) use of an SEC rule, 10b-5, and it says that the omission of material facts by the issuer of securities will NOT present a cause of action in tort by a buyer of the securities unless the omission is such as to render statements that actually WERE made by the company misleading.   Today I'd like to say something about the specific underlying issue. Some of Macquarrie's most valuable assets are termi ..read more

  Macquarie Infrastructure v. Moab Partners -- a unanimous decision came down from our Supreme Court last week.  The opinion, written by Justice Sotomayor, says in essence that securities fraud, regarded as an actionable private tort, is a tort of malfeasance, not of nonfeasance.   Let us abstract from the particular facts a bit. Consider any case in which a plaintiff believes that he was sold stock by the issuing corporation at an unrealistically high price. He has sued. Asked why he bought it at such a price, the plaintiff might say, "They didn't tell me about X, a fa ..read more

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