Posts

Thomas Aquinas: An Overview

Frederick Copleston was my first guide through most of western philosophy. I read his whole series The History of Philosophy a couple of years before I traveled to India in the mid-1980s. Library copies. I bought my own nine-volume set much later when I could afford such things and I still go back to different sections of it every year to brush-up on something. Copleston introduced me to Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Ockham. In almost every case I met the philosopher through Copleston before I either read him directly or ran into some other major interpretation. William Barrett's Irrational Man was another early door into Nietzsche and Sartre, for example. But Copleston gave me the whole history, the Greeks to the mid-twentieth century. I made a New Year’s resolution to reacquaint myself with Thomas Aquinas. Don’t ask me why. There are a lot of great minds I could have chosen. But it has been a couple of decades since I last delved into his ph...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Missiles of October

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (11am Eastern Time) In October 1962 the missiles sat on launch pads in Cuba and the world waited to see whether they would fly. In October 2026 they fly every night. They come out of Yemen and fall on Riyadh, Dhahran, Abha and Medina. The Houthis are kicking ass. The Saudi-led coalition says they attacked Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport 20 times this month. The airport strikes between October 6 and 12 killed at least 20 people and injured more than 370. The important international airport is still closed. On Tuesday a Houthi missile set the executive headquarters of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran on fire. On Thursday Saudi air defenses intercepted a cruise missile over Medina, then a ballistic missile in the same area. Medina. The second holiest city in Islam. A summit between the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman), scheduled for Riyadh on October 24, has been postponed. Canada, Ja...
Post a Comment
Read more

Listening to Lutoslawski: Part Three

Image
Proof of purchase. [ Read Part One ] [ Read Part Two ] Sometime around 1988, Jennifer and I were spending regular weekends visiting friends in Atlanta. I usually managed to work in a trip to a music store. I was building my classical collection at the time, the standard stuff everybody owns, Beethoven and Mozart and Mahler and so on. I had started browsing the “modern” section for anything that looked new and interesting. I didn't know anyone connected to contemporary classical music. The internet was not even a thing back then. Couldn’t ask AI. I had to stumble around in the music on my own. One weekend I stumbled upon a CD with a balding, aged man on the cover. Lutoslawski Conducts Lutoslawski . Philips. The Berlin Philharmonic. It looked like a recent work, only a few years removed from me. I had no idea who Lutoslawski was. I am fairly sure I could not have pronounced his name. But it was the Berlin Philharmonic which I knew well. A top-tier distributor. I gave it a try. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Riyadh and The Midterms Join the Battlefield

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (4 pm Eastern Time) The Houthis hit the passenger terminals at Riyadh's international airport yesterday. Saudi authorities report 12 dead and 309 injured, the deadliest attack on any Gulf Arab country since the war began. It was the third strike on King Khalid International Airport in a week. The Wall Street Journal reports direct hits on two buildings of the domestic terminal complex. This evening another projectile struck Terminal 4, a passenger terminal, injuring more people. The toll is still rising.  India says one of its citizens has died of wounds from yesterday's attack. The Houthis have declared Saudi airspace a zone of military operations and warned everyone away from Saudi airports, and their media chief boasted that they had shut down Riyadh's international airport. Every major player in the region (minus Iran) condemns the attack. Suddenly, the airport is the center point of this sprawling war. I wonder whether the Houthis achieved ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Well, That Sucked: 2026 Atlanta Braves Lose NLDS, Again

Image
Michael Harris II pats his chest after a run scoring double in Game Two. It turned out to be the offensive highlight of the series for the Braves. [ Read about the 2026 Braves season. ] [ Read about winning the Wild-Card Series. ] The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Atlanta Braves 3 games to 1 in the NLDS. We came home from LA with a split, our two best starters rested, and a real chance to win this series. Then we scored two runs in two games at home. Pitiful.  The wimpy 2022 and 2023   postseason bats still haunt me.  Eight runs in four games. 18 hits. One hit in 23 at-bats with runners in scoring position. My WinZone charts spent the season showing how hard it is to win when you score three runs or less. We decided to spend the entire Division Series in that column. We won once. What did we expect? I was feeling pretty good after Game Two. Cocky, even. Nobody seemed to think we could beat LA, but we had just split two games out there without starting Sale or Mahle. We h...
Post a Comment
Read more

One Word or Two: A Political War Story

[Read my AI: A Dangerous Vision series.] On September 3, Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. On September 16, Sanders walked Geoffrey Hinton and Max Tegmark into a briefing for senators. On September 22, Donald Trump told the United Nations that American documents, and hopefully the world's, would stop saying artificial intelligence. They would say super intelligence. The word artificial, he explained, makes intelligence sound fake. The next day Sanders formally introduced his bill. Six days after that Trump signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence." It seems we have a war over spelling and meaning at precisely this moment in human history. Look at the spelling. Sanders writes superintelligence, one word, the way the people who coined it wrote it. Trump writes Super Intelligence, two words, capitalized, abbreviated SI. One word is a more artful rendering, not necessarily better, howev...
Post a Comment
Read more