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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
My Stuff
https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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Philosopher's Stone
Blog Archive
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2020
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December
(29)
- IDLE THOUGHTS
- RACE
- NUMBERS
- A PATHETIC PLEA FOR SYMPATHY
- THANK YOU ALL
- A PAUSE TO LOOK BACK AND REFLECT
- A WORD OF THANKS
- SPOILER ALERT
- IN CASE I HAD ANY DOUBTS ABOUT MY ADDICTION
- FURTHER REPONSE
- A MEDITATION ON SOME COMMENTS
- BY COMPARISON
- A RESPONSE TO SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS
- A BIT OF CLARIFICATION
- HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
- A BRIEF RESPONSE TO A MULTI-PART COMMENT
- RHE RETURN OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS
- THINGS YOU LEARN FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD...
- NOW, NOW, DON'T DESPAIR
- DOWN MEMORY LANE
- A LIFE
- FYI
- A REQUEST TO THE USUAL SUSPECTS
- PARIS: THE HARDEST JIGSAW PUZZLE SUSIE AND I HAVE...
- THINGS DON'T LOOK GOOD
- CLOSE CALL
- WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE "PARIS"
- THIS AND THAT
- LAST MINUTE GIG
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December
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
23 comments:
Congratulations, but there’s a window missing in the upper left-hand corner of the yellow building in the upper left-hand corner.
(I have now exceeded my daily quota by one comment.)
Magnifique!
I thought Paris was a much bigger place.
Yes Jerry, but the evil wizard Il Duce Trump is miniaturizing everything which displeases him – the law, the Supreme Court, and yes, even Paris – take that you pompous snail eaters, think that climate change is real do you, won’t pay your fair share of NATO’s expenses, will you, well Sham, Bam, Allakazam, you’re all a bunch of dwarves, like that absinthe drinking, wise aleck Toulouse.
155, ORIG. TEXAS V. PENNSYLVANIA, ET AL. The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot. Statement of Justice Alito, with whom Justice Thomas joins: In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___ (Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.
This, hopefully should be it, but like a zombie in a horror movie, Il Duce keeps finding some way to stay “alive,” while appearing dead.
As I said, no standing. I just wish the Court had also slapped sanctions on the Texas Atty. general for his frivolous filing.
Impressive puzzle, but I can say I have done (attempted) harder. An inmate doing heavy time would have trouble with some of the puzzles I've done.
looking forward to your 5 or 6 pointless comments out a quota on Saturday, MS! I was pretty impressed a picture of a jigsaw puzzle made you word associate from Paris - Trump - legal junk... The acuity of an idle, idle mind.
Not quite idle, Anonymous. Actually, I am in the process of writing a legal brief responding to a motion in federal court, something that I am confident you would have no clue how to do, and from which I take occasional breaks for relief from reading complicated legal decisions and incorporating them into the brief by reading the latest comments on Prof. Wolff’s blog. While none of my comments are particularly weighty, they do not resort to the kind of gratuitous insults in which you seem to take particular pleasure.
Here's a bit of news that may have gotten lost amid more pressing or prominent headlines: On Nov. 16, a missile fired from a US Navy destroyer shot down an ICBM (launched by the US military as part of this test), only the third time the US "missile defense" program has achieved this sort of thing. This the sort of development that, in the somewhat antiseptic parlance of strategic analysis, can be "destabilizing," further undermining the notion of "mutual assured destruction" that, along with a bunch of other factors, has made a nuclear conflict unlikely to be started deliberately.
I saw a good analysis of this for the layperson some days ago but neglected to bookmark it and can't retrieve it now. However, here is a somewhat more technical analysis from the Carnegie Endowment.
LFC,
I am assuming the ICBM was unarmed, right? With Il Duce as our Commander in Chief, the guy who claims to know more than the scientists about the corona virus and climate change, who refused to wear a face mask for months, and who stared directly into a solar eclipse without protective glasses, anything is possible. “Sorry Hawaii, I thought the missile was unarmed.”
Back to my brief (whilst repeatedly listening to Beethoven's 7th Symphony for inspiration).
That'd be the final tragedy and comedy of 2020 and the Trump administration...'successfully' defending against an ICBM that was mistakenly armed, thus detonating a nuke over a pandemic-swept nation. Lol. And they'd still focus on spinning it as a positive demonstration of our defense capabilities while somehow blaming Obama and/or Clinton for the armed ICBM mishap.
Sorry, but I take what humor I can get these days.
MS (and Anon),
Yup it was unarmed.
You know I'd completely forgotten about the staring at the eclipse thing until you reminded me of it.
P.s.
Presumably if it had been armed but with only one warhead, or even if it had had multiple ones, and the intercepting missile had reached it early enough and performed properly, there would have been no detonation. The whole point of missile defense, insofar as there is one, is to take out the missile *and* prevent any kind of detonation. If you shoot down the missile but there's still some kind of detonation causing harm of any kind the interceptor has failed to do what it's supposed to, obviously.
How do you realistically prevent a detonation? I thought the idea was to hit the missile early enough so it detonates over the ocean, for example, instead of over the mainland.
LFC,
I have the same question as Anonymous at 11:11 PM – how can you intercept a missile with a missile and not have some sort of detonation? Isn’t this contrary to Newton’s third law or something?
Hmm. I'm going to plead the late hour here, but the honest answer is I'm just ignorant of the technical details of missile defense. Some kind of detonation may be unavoidable, I don't know, but a massive nuclear explosion, or any kind of nuclear explosion, over the ocean, while much preferable to one over land, is still not good for all kinds of obvious reasons.
I'm not an expert either, but I think it's right that you mainly just want it to detonate before it gets over its intended target.
But I remember from a physics class I believe that it can also depend a lot on the payload of the device. A Uranium-based device would basically detonate quite easily, with enough energy going into the warhead to create a chain reaction. Plutonium on the other hand requires a specific mechanism for detonation which is a lot more difficult to trigger or engineer properly.
My understanding (I am not an expert) is that atomic bombs require a very precise chemical explosion to force the uranium or plutonium together into a critical mass at which point the chain reaction is able to occur setting off the high yield fission event called the nuclear bomb explosion. And that hydrogen or fusion nukes require the fission explosion to trigger the larger fusion explosion. So destroying the missile before that precise triggering explosion was activated would probably avert the the nuclear explosion or at least greatly reduce the power of that explosion. But it would still spread a bunch of radioactive material all over the place. Nasty things those nuclear weapons.
How did we end up on this topic from a post about a jigsaw puzzle?
Don’t blame me, for a change. LFC started it.
Post-script:
I think we should all thank Prof. Wolff and his wife. By putting together that complicated jig-saw puzzle, they reduced the amount of entropy in the universe, and we can all use a little entropy reduction in our lives right now.
My, " Little Oxford Dictionary", tells me that "entropy is a quantity expressing how much of a system's thermal energy is unavailable for conversion into mechanical work." Huh? Now there's a prose jig-saw puzzle.
My favorite jigsaw puzzle joke is about the guy bragging about it only took him a year to finish a puzzle that should have taken much much longer. After all, he says, pointing at the box, it says "3-5 years".
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