Laughter in the court

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary (‘the OED’) the word eleemosynary, which is largely used to frighten law students, made its debut in English in around 1640 and is derived from the medieval Latin word eleēmosynārius which means ‘alms’. The OED defines eleemosynary to mean: ‘Of or pertaining to alms or almsgiving; charitable’.

Its utilisation by trust lawyers as a replacement for the word ‘charitable’ was made necessary because the effect of the law of charities is that the word ‘charitable’ in law bears little resemblance to the concept it bears in ordinary English. It might perhaps have promoted clarity for lawyers to have used the word ‘eleemosynary’ to refer to the technical sense of the concept and to have left the word ‘charitable’ with its ordinary meaning, but it is too late now to rescue the language from this misfortune.”

Mr. Justice Perram, The Hunger Project Australia v Commissioner of Taxation [2013] 

Clanricarde rules

One of the suggested reasons for bombing Syria is to punish the regime; which seems to face the problem so perceptively pointed out by Lord Clanricarde (second marquess, fifteenth earl) around 1880.

With the rise of [Irish] land agitation after the bad harvests of 1879, [his] unyielding attitude, coupled with his unsociable personality and his position as the stereotypical absentee landlord .... made him a major target; his financial resources enabled him to resist effectively. His obduracy brought him into conflict even with some of his land agents; he is alleged to have told one: ‘If my tenants think they can intimidate me by shooting you, they are very much mistaken’.

Assad is, I'm sure, able to take the deaths of any number of his soldiers, public servants, and citizens with an appropriately philosophical stoicism. 

God in chains

So all the information in the entire electronic communications system of the world is now being bugged and searched.  We have what is by orders of magnitude the largest data bank ever conceived, giving us Laplacian knowledge about our society at every point in time.  I've occasionally speculated on the kind of data cornucopia we could have if we weren't obsessed with privacy - and now we've got it.

And what are we doing with it?  If you believe the government, they're looking for terrorists; if you listen to just-proven-correct paranoiacs, they're looking for opposition; in any case, how terribly trivial.

We have a corpus that contains the answers to almost any question about human beings.  We have the oracle in front of us.  And all we can ask it is "Who is going to plant a bomb where?"
it's been pointed out that this is expensive and inefficient - it would pay us to dismantle it unless it was stopping one 9/11 a month - but not much attention has been paid to the opportunity costs.  We're not asking how many people with prescriptions for drugs A and B and C but not Q visit emergency rooms, or what proportion of users of different mobile phones have convictions for domestic violence, or which mobile phones correspond to an unusual number of burgled houses, or..... why isn't there an industry for thinking up questions? 

Privacy's dead, and we're not getting anything worthwhile out of it.

Darwinzilla

Now that we know, as they didn't in the fifties, that dinosaurs like T Rex used their tails to balance when running - tails off the ground - that should change our portrayal of Godzilla.  Horizontal above the legs.

The tumult and the shouting dies

Unfortunate monarchs day at Heritage.  I make a bid on Lot 62758 -

despite the predicted sale price being between two and three times my bid; you never know....
and look longingly at

the execution of Marie Antoinette.......

Truth or Dare

Two medals I bid on unsuccessfully, representing the very American bombast-takedown combination. 
First, a patriotic token from 1837 or 1857, with the inscription
"Millions for defence - not one cent for tribute"

against an obverse of Liberty,

And second, a realistic reappraisal dated 1863;

"Millions for contractors -

Not one cent for the widows".

Copperhead copper, anti-Lincoln pro-slavery propaganda, but so good. And so currently applicable.

The Millions for Defence quote is linked by Wikipedia to a report on a diplomatic brouhaha between France and America caused, or at least protracted, by Talleyrand's demands for bribes.  Interesting.  But the slogan obviously lived on. In a time when a million dollars meant something.

From the Flat Earth Wiki:

Gravity

Gravity is a fundamental force in Round Earth Theory and is the theoretical attraction between physical objects with mass, the force being proportional to their given mass. Many Flat Earth models omit Gravity entirely.

You can see how that would simplify things in one way, but it does surely make it more complicated in others.  Particularly when read together with

Stars

The sun, moon, and stars are all rotating around a central point over the North Pole. The underlying cause for this rotation is a vast cornucopia of stellar systems orbiting around its center of attraction - an imaginary point of shared attraction. This is an extrapolated and more complex binary star movement. Think of a binary (two) star system which moves around an invisible common barycenter. Now add a third body which shares that common center of attraction. Now a fourth. When we add enough bodies the system looks like a swirling multiple system.
...
Each star in a cluster is attracted to one another through gravitational vectors.....

And then there's

Antimoon

The Antimoon is a moon of nearly identical size to the normal moon. It is theorized that the Antimoon passes between the Earth and the Moon to account for the waxing and waning effects of the moon. The Antimoon is very dark and undetectable by any means except when it passes in front of the moon.
 
At which point, I have to say, I'm getting a suspicion that this fellow is having a lend of me....