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

  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