Month: October 2022

“Poets should always study law, as [Sir Walter] Scott did, but if more of them did so, there would be less poetry written.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“The clergy live by our sins, the medical faculty by our diseases, and the law gentry by our misfortunes.” – Sir Walter Scott, Antiquary

“Law’s like laudanum, it’s much more easy to use it as a quack does, than to learn to apply it like a physician.” – Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering

“In [Sir Walter] Scott’s first criminal case, he defended a poacher, and whispered to his client, as he heard the verdict, — not guilty —‘You’re a lucky scoundrel.’ ‘I am just of your mind,’ was the reply, ‘and I’ll send you a hare in the morn.’ ” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“Fascists are a lot like lead in your drinking water. There is no acceptable safe level.” – Justin King, “Let’s talk about Ukraine’s personnel problem”

“Women play an important role in Judges, to an extent not seen in the Bible since the early chapters of Exodus. While they barely appear in Joshua, in Judges they are present in every major narrative save that of Ehud. And the way they are painted seems to act as a moral barometer for the state of Israelite society as it was conceived of by the writers. Some female characters show strength and independence (Achsah, Deborah, Jael, and Abimelech’s killer), but others appear as the victims of violence within and beyond the patriarchal system (Jephthah’s daughter, the concubine of Gibeah, and the Benjaminite women at the end of the book—all of whom are unnamed), and even as the enemy or corrupt figures (Delilah and the Levite’s mother). These narratives do not merely reflect a patriarchal society. More often than not, they serve to set the male characters in relief, demonstrating the shortcomings of the leaders in Judges. Achsah is not shy about asserting her rights; Deborah has the self-assurance that Barak does not; Jael succeeds in the absence of her husband; Jephthah’s nameless daughter survives in cultural memory despite her early end; Delilah outsmarts the superhumanly strong Samson; and the numberless female victims in the last three chapters of the book serve to indict first a single Levite, then the tribe of Benjamin, and finally the entire people, for their crimes of abandonment, murder, rape, and abduction. If Samson and his ilk symbolize a badly faltering Israel, the female characters in the book function to sharply etch the consequences of the people’s actions.” – Everett Fox, The Early Prophets

“Although the cosmological constant cold dark matter model is very successful in explaining almost all observations, it has some theoretical issues within its backbone structure. These include the mysterious physical origin of the two largest contributions to the energy content of the late-time Universe: cold dark matter and the cosmological constant, together with the unsatisfactory predictability and test-ability of the inflation theory. Therefore, it is important to explore alternative explanations for the late-time acceleration of the Universe. There have been several proposals . . . hints remain from the Dark Energy Survey and several previous galaxy surveys that the Universe today is a few percent less clumpy than predicted. . . . On the other hand, massive binary black holes as standard sirens have the disadvantage that the redshift needs to be measured independently of the gravitational wave observations. If we identify the host galaxy then it should be possible to determine with joint events whether long-wavelength gravitational wave and short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation have the same number of spacetime dimensions. . . . Also, there have been studies considering the propagation from the inspiraling of compact binary systems within the context of teleparallel gravity theories . . . meanwhile it is important to mention that these studies are in the context of a scenario where the general relativity cosmological model is considered as an effective fluid in the standard perturbations equations.” – Sebastian Bahamonde, et al., “Teleparallel Gravity: From Theory to Cosmology”

“Ridicule is stronger than argument, caricature more powerful than a bald recital of sober facts.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with and all are tripped up first or last.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life

“When Daniel Quilp was found drowned, and the coroner’s jury found it a case of suicide, he was buried with a stake through his heart, in the centre of four lonely roads. This was a very old custom in England, but there seems to be no legal authority for it. Perhaps the place was so selected that, by the continual passage of the living, the burial-place might be trodden down and forgotten. It has been suggested that the stake was driven through the heart to keep the ghost from walking.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“What can the individual soldier do to be a good representative of the United Nations? Conduct himself in a military manner at all times. Do not eat or destroy native food. Be friendly with the young children. Be courteous with the old. Be firm and just. Do not be the coward type who mistreats people who cannot defend themselves. Do not ridicule or interfere with local customs, religions, or ceremonies. Do not molest the Korean girls. Do not barter or trade with the local merchants until permission is granted. Do not deface or disturb graves or shrines. Do not enter Korean homes other than those designated.” – “Northern Korea and RCT 31,” By Order of Colonel MacLean, October 24, 1950

“The American soldier has seldom been a good ambassador. If the nation he is in does not come up to his standards, he usually takes the attitude that the people of that nation are lazy, dumb, backward or that they desire everything that we have in the United States. In many instances this is not true.” – “Northern Korea and RCT 31,” By Order of Colonel MacLean, October 24, 1950

“Civilians in the villages reported that the enemy, after forcing them to give them food and burning their homes, fled to the east. One enemy soldier was seen taking off his uniform and burying it, replacing it with white clothing. An attempt was made to capture the man, he started running which caused him to be killed.” – Captain John E. Hasper, 31st Infantry RCT Unit Report, September 30, 1950

“The Family is an institution that’s allowed to be bigger and more important than the people it’s meant to protect. It’s meant to be everything, to everyone, all at once: a sanctuary, a home, a source of moral authority, a replacement for social infrastructure when the state fails. The harsher and more alienating the outside world gets, the more important The Family becomes as an idea—whether or not you’re part of one. Family is meant to be a refuge from structural violence and a reason to survive it. So what do we do with the fact that family isn’t always the safest place for everyone? What happens when the home that was supposed to be a refuge turns into a trap?” – Laurie Penny, “ ‘Encanto’ is a Beautiful, Brilliant, Broken Mess.”

“Sex and drugs and violence are simple, but working through generational pain is the real grown-up shit.” – Laurie Penny, “ ‘Encanto’ is a Beautiful, Brilliant, Broken Mess.”

“Who controls the questions controls the answers. Who controls the answers controls reality.” – Luciano Floridi, “The New Grey Power”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

“There are old pilots and bold pilots but no old bold pilots.” – Peter Johnson, Retired Airline Pilot, Quora

“Only those who have allowed their own personality (and in particular their resentment, sadism, and hunger for power) to cloud their vision will fail to grasp the plain moral facts. One such plain moral fact is that it is better to be kind than to torture. Only such people will try to evade plain epistemological and metaphysical facts through sneaky philosophical maneuvers.” – Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

“We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by these describing activities of human beings—cannot. The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks.” – Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

“At the very core of the Fourth Amendment stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. A warrantless search is the quintessential intrusion and is presumptively unreasonable. The government can rebut that presumption by showing that the police, despite lacking a warrant, were permitted to undertake the search by someone with authority. Such consent need not come from the target of the search. It may come from a third party who possesses common authority over the premises or effects sought to be inspected. Common authority does not refer to some kind of technical property interest. It arises simply from mutual use of the property by persons generally having joint access or control for most purposes, so that it is reasonable to recognize that any of the co-inhabitants has the right to permit the inspection in his own right and that the others have assumed the risk that one of their number might permit the common area to be searched. Even a person who does not actually use the property can authorize a search if it is reasonable for the police to believe she uses it. Such apparent authority is sufficient to sustain a search because the Fourth Amendment requires only that officers’ factual determinations in such situations always be reasonable, not that they always be correct.” – United States of America v. Davon Peyton (internal quotes and cites omitted)

“Although representations of traumatic events (such as flashbulb memories) are not wholly immune to error and distortion, evidence suggests that negative and stressful experiences lead to a reduction of the structural plasticity. This may support the idea that the normal function of memory is to form constructive, plastic memories since, in cases of traumatic memories, the memory system as a whole loses plasticity and is, as a result, far less efficient. If our memories would not be modified according to the present or prospective future, a discrepancy would emerge. If memories were to represent the past exactly, representation of the past would not let us absorb changes. Since the present itself is in perpetual change, the memory of the past must have the same dynamic nature.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”

“The fact that episodic memory is fragmentary and fragile suggests that its adaptiveness may derive less from its role as an accurate record of personal history than from providing a ‘vocabulary’ from which to construct planned future events (and perhaps to embellish events of the past). It may be part of a more general toolbox that allowed us to escape from the present and develop foresight, and perhaps create a sense of personal identity. Indeed, our ability to revisit the past may be only a design feature of our ability to conceive of the future.” – Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, “The evolution of foresight: what is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?”

“Memory is not only about the past, but is also about the future. Indeed, while memory serves as the ability to recall previous experiences, recall itself is not solely directed toward the past, but is guided by the present for the service of the future.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”

“The fact that memory involves a constructive process of piecing together fragmentary information (rather than something more akin to a direct replay of the past) raises the hypothesis that a veridical representation of the past is not the optimal functioning of human memory system. This raises further questions about whether memory may have other roles as well. Does memory’s flexibility give us benefits at the expense of accuracy and trustfulness? What is the function of memory if it does not store and retrieve exact experiential replicas? Accuracy is far from the only functional goal of memory. Recollecting meets other needs, such as reconstructing the past in a desirable way, fostering self-consistency, and remembering information so as to give a good impression in social settings. The reconstructive mechanism of episodic memory fulfills such needs.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”

“Memory, especially autobiographical memory, is a dynamic entity that perpetually changes. Autobiographical memories are vulnerable to multiple influences and prone to distortions and deceptions; they are never constant and never result in fully accurate representations. At the same time, however, these changes occur without us being aware of them. Even so, we still attribute belief to memories and view them as accurate representations of our past.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”

“The musical standards of popular music were originally developed by a competitive process. As one particular song scored a great success, hundreds of others sprang up imitating the successful one. The most successful hits types, and ‘ratios’ between elements were imitated, and the process culminated in the crystallization of standards. Under centralized conditions such as exist today these standards have become ‘frozen.’ That is, they have been taken over by cartelized agencies, the final results of a competitive process, and rigidly enforced upon material to be promoted. Noncompliance with the rules of the game became the basis for exclusion. The original patterns that are now standardized evolved in a more or less competitive way. Large-scale economic concentration institutionalized the standardization, and made it imperative.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”

“Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener’s attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call ‘natural’ music: that is, the sum total of all the conventions and material formulas in music to which he is accustomed and which he regards as the inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development might be which produced this natural language. This natural language for the American listener stems from his earliest musical experiences, the nursery rhymes, the hymns he sings in Sunday school, the little tunes he whistles on his way home from school. All these are vastly more important in the formation of musical language than his ability to distinguish the beginning of Brahms’s Third Symphony from that of his Second. Official musical culture is, to a large extent, a mere superstructure of this underlying musical language, namely, the major and minor tonalities and all the tonal relationships they imply. But these tonal relationships of the primitive musical language set barriers to whatever does not conform to them. Extravagances are tolerated only insofar as they can be recast into this so-called natural language.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”

“Stylization of the ever identical framework is only one aspect of standardization. Concentration and control in our culture hide themselves in their very manifestation. Unhidden they would provoke resistance. Therefore the illusion and, to a certain extent, even the reality of individual achievement must be maintained. The maintenance of it is grounded in material reality itself, for while administrative control over life processes is concentrated, ownership is still diffuse. In the sphere of luxury production, to which popular music belongs and in which no necessities of life are immediately involved, while, at the same time, the residues of individualism are most alive there in the form of ideological categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide standardization. The ‘backwardness’ of musical mass production, the fact that it is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms perfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural big business. If the individual handicraft elements of popular music were abolished altogether, a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to be evolved. Its elements are even now in existence. The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo- individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or ‘pre-digested.’ “ – Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”

“The notion of distraction can be properly understood only within its social setting and not in self-subsistent terms of individual psychology. Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its ‘nonproductive’ correlate in entertainment; that is, relaxation which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire. It induces relaxation because it is patterned and pre-digested. Its being patterned and pre-digested serves within the psychological household of the masses to spare them the effort of that participation (even in listening or observation) without which there can be no receptivity to art.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music”