Blacks, Cops, and the State of Nature

This essay offers a new way to conceptualize the “police violence against Blacks” phenomenon. I argue that we should see the situation as an instance of what Thomas Hobbes called the state of nature, that is, a state without effective law. This understanding of the phenomenon stands in sharp contrast to that offered by Professor Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. Alexander sees the phenomenon as a continuation of centuries-old patterns of state-backed anti-Black racism. My account is that police are not under control of the state in their interactions with Blacks

Rorty’s Promise in Metaethics

Little attention is given to Richard Rorty’s metaethical views. No doubt this stems from the fact that most commentators are more interested in his metaphilosophical views; most see his metaethical views, offered in scattered passages, as just the downstream runoff from higher-level reflection. This article considers Rorty’s metaethics on their own merits, quite apart from whether his global picture works. I ultimately argue that Rorty’s metaethical outlook is attractive but beset by internal difficulties. Specifically, I contend that Rorty does not and cannot remain faithful to the methodological approach to metaethics for which he advocates. At the paper’s close, I gesture at a nearby methodological approach that best approximates Rorty’s metaethical methodology

Determination of Electronic Energy Levels of Molecules by Low-Energy Electron Impact Spectroscopy

This paper describes a new spectroscopic tool in which optically forbidden electronic transitions can usually be detected as clearly as optically allowed ones in a fairly routine manner. It uses the inelastic scattering of low-energy electrons by molecules as the means for determining their electronic energy levels

Risk Management in an Age of Change

The environment in which banks and other financial services industry firms operate was once very stable. It is now increasingly permeated with change. Enhanced performance demands make this change salient to high-level decision-makers. Many of the opportunities firms now face are path-dependent and this will continue to be so. For firms to make effective choices in such an environment, both competitive strategy and the strategy-making process must come to terms with opportunities which evolve over time. Old decision-making systems and attitudes are unhelpful in this and may even be impediments to good outcomes. Risk inevitably features in getting these decisions right. All strategic decisions induce and impose constraints on the types of risk banks traditionally monitor and manage. This needs to be explicitly considered and is generally not. Strategic decisions also impose a new type of risk, detailed here, which also needs to be analyzed, monitored, and controlled. All these activities require changes, discussed in detail, both in decision-making protocols and in the organizational structures and routines supporting decision-making.

Differences between Low-Energy Electron Impact Spectra at 0º and at Large Scattering Angle

The preceding Comment reports some low-energy electron-impact spectra of helium and ethylene, obtained by a very elegant technique, which are markedly different from the ones we obtained 1 under other experimental conditions. It is quite important to try to understand the reasons for the differences observed. These differences are essentially the following: (a) In our impact spectra of helium obtained with 50-eV electrons we observe pronounced peaks corresponding to the 2 ^3S state and to ionization whereas Simpson and Mielczarek do not. (b) In our spectra of ethylene at this same incident electron energy we observe two pronounced optically forbidden transitions an