“The city holds all property which it owns as trustee for the public, although certain classes or kinds of property, such as the public streets, the public squares, the courthouse, and the jail cannot be taken on execution against it, for reasons which are plain to be seen. Such property is so necessary for the present and daily use of the city as the representative of the public, as well as for the use of the public itself, that to allow it to be taken on execution against the city would interfere so substantially with the immediate wants and rights of the public whose trustee the city is, and also with the due performance of the duties which are imposed upon the city by virtue of its incorporation, that it ought not to be tolerated. Other property which the city might hold, not being so situated, might be taken on execution against it, but it nevertheless holds that very property as trustee. It holds it for the purpose of discharging in a general way the duties which it owes to the public—that is, to the inhabitants of the city. The citizens or inhabitants of a city, not the common council or local legislature, constitute the ‘corporation’ of the city. The corporation as such has no human wants to be supplied. It cannot eat or drink or wear clothing or live in houses. It must as to all its property be the representative or trustee of somebody or of some aggregation of persons, and it must therefore hold its property for the same use, call that use either public or private. It is a use for the benefit of individuals. A municipal corporation is the trustee of the inhabitants of that corporation, and it holds all its property in a general and substantial, although not in a strictly technical, sense in trust for them. They are the people of the state inhabiting that particular subdivision of its territory, a fluctuating class constantly passing out of the scope of the trust by removal and death and as constantly renewed by fresh accretions of population. The property which a municipal corporation holds is for their use, and is held for their benefit. Any of the property held by a city does not belong to the mayor, or to any or all of the members of the common council, nor to the common people as individual property. If any of those functionaries should appropriate the property or its avails to his own use, he would be guilty of embezzlement, and if one of the people not clothed with official station should do the like, he would be guilty of larceny. So we see that whatever property a municipal corporation holds, it holds it in trust for its inhabitants—in other words, for the public—and the only difference in the trust existing in the case of a public highway or a public square and other cases is that, in the one case, the property cannot be taken in execution against the city, while in other cases, it may be. The right of the city is less absolute in the one case than in the other, but it owns all the property in the same capacity and character as a corporation, and in trust for the inhabitants thereof.” – Unites States Supreme Court Associate Justice Rufus W. Peckham, Werlein v. New Orleans, 177 U.S. 390 (1900)
Month: January 2023
“Should a mouse that a cat just swallowed be considered as a part of the cat? The concept of a ‘definite position’ is also only approximately defined: how far should a cat be displaced in order for it to be considered to be in a different position? If the displacement is much smaller than the quantum uncertainty, it must be considered to be in the same place, because in this case the quantum state of the cat is almost the same and the displacement is undetectable in principle. But this is only an absolute bound, because our ability to distinguish various locations of the cat is far from this quantum limit. Furthermore, the state of an object (e.g. alive or dead) is meaningful only if the object is considered for a period of time.” – Lev Vaidman, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”
“I think about how angry I was that my dad didn’t take better care of himself. How he never went to a doctor, let himself become grossly overweight, smoked three packs a day, drank like a fish and never exercised. But then I think about how his colleague mentioned that, days before dying, my dad had said he lived a good life and that he was satisfied. I realize that there is a certain value in my father’s way of life. He ate, smoked and drank as he pleased, and one day he just suddenly and quickly died. Given some of the other choices I’d witnessed, it turns out that enjoying yourself and then dying quickly is not such a hard way to go.” – Mark Oliver Everett, Things the Grandchildren Should Know
“My Mama always said that at a certain age your soul shows on your face.” – nightmoth (@ Wonkette, July 28, 2022)
“It’s in surmounting perfection, or ignoring it, that you show what you’re capable of and what you refuse to be told you can’t do.” – Daniel Levin Becker, “Rhetoric and Rhyme: On Rap”
“It is consoling to think that the emotions that music arouses in us have something to do with the makeup of the universe.” – David P. Goldman, “The Divine Music of Mathematics”
“Books once kept the boundaries between writer and reader distinct. Unless you met an author under the controlled circumstances of a public event, you’d never get a chance to say hello, much less insult their intelligence and demand they go to therapy. Now, you and 300 other furious strangers can tell an author to kill herself before she’s finished her first coffee. Technology is a miracle.” – Kate Harding, “Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?”
“Denial, when one was accused, was a life force and would trump any desire to confess. An admission of guilt would knock the strength right out of you—making it easier for your arms to be twisted behind you and the handcuffs put on.” – Lorrie Moore, “Wings”
A clumsy mistake on my part led to my website having to be restored from backup; hence, the six-week gap that now exists in the posts. But I am here. I have been here all along.