The Art of Tetman Callis

Some of the stories and poems may be inappropriate for persons under 16

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Entries from July 2014

Sort of like a cattle prod

July 31st, 2014 · No Comments

“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Rickety though it may be

July 30th, 2014 · No Comments

“The president of the United States takes an oath to support the Constitution. His ‘king’ is a legal document, a symbol of law, rather than any human authority. In this country, ultimate power is supposed to rest with the people; more concretely, it lies in the legal structure of society, and in the laws themselves. […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

King Ought and the Prince of Is

July 29th, 2014 · No Comments

“Every society has an authority structure. Every society has high and low. No society comes even close to pure equality. There were and are many kinds of authority, many forms of hierarchy, in this country. Millions of Americans are deeply religious, and are faithful to the word of their churches. Learning, skill, and money all […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

And this is discounting HIPAA violations

July 28th, 2014 · No Comments

“My entire life I believed that we’re the good guys, that we’re the world’s leader when it comes to human rights. But that’s no longer who we are, and it saddens me. It scares me. We’re like the Russians in the 1950s and 1960s, like Chile in the 1970s, like Argentina in the 1980s. People […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

The village where the drug war is fought

July 27th, 2014 · No Comments

“The key element in any legal system is behavior—what people actually do. Otherwise rules are nothing but words, and the structures are a ghost town, not a living city.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Politics & Law

United States is a plural term

July 26th, 2014 · No Comments

“The central fact of American federalism is worth repeating: the United States is by and large an economic union, by and large a social union, but not a legal union, or at least not completely. State laws are, or can be, rather similar, but this is, first, because the states choose to harmonize their laws, […]

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law

It’s okay if you keep some things to yourself

July 25th, 2014 · No Comments

“Don’t be that jerk who complains when Aunt Barbara asks what you write about. Don’t say, ‘that question is impossible to answer!’ If you can’t answer what you write about then you don’t know what you write about, and that’s like not knowing what color hair you have. Do this right now (now!): figure out […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

The progression of change

July 24th, 2014 · No Comments

“If you brought back to life a nineteenth-century judge, he would be dumbfounded to learn about that state of civil-rights law today. He would even be amazed at what has happened in tort law, how far the courts have gone in making companies pay for damages caused by badly designed products, such as defective cold […]

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law

Does the legislature know about this?

July 23rd, 2014 · No Comments

“In the United States, social issues often dress themselves up in legal costume and muscle their way into court. There are few countries in the world where abortion policy is decided, in the first instance, by judges. In few countries would courts draw the boundary lines of school districts or demand wholesale reform in state […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

Eastlake Terrace

July 22nd, 2014 · No Comments

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Tags: Verandah

Ghosts in the machines

July 22nd, 2014 · No Comments

“Technology is a great lawmaker and a great leveler. The railroad in many ways and in many fields practically rewrote the law books of the United States in the nineteenth century…. Accident law—the heart of the legal field we call torts—is basically the offspring of the nineteenth-century railroad; in the twentieth century, the automobile largely […]

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Tags: Economics · Politics & Law

Open wide

July 21st, 2014 · No Comments

“The doctor’s main concern is to identify all the resistances that are prejudicial to the effectiveness of the curative force, and to eliminate them as much as possible. Doctors have undoubtedly, since the start of the profession, helped the patient and will continue to do so forever. But undoubtedly, too, the doctor’s action very often […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

We’ll never get out of here alive

July 20th, 2014 · No Comments

“What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.” – Sir Arthur […]

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

Many get stuck in the tunnel

July 19th, 2014 · No Comments

“Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

The blind men and the elephant

July 18th, 2014 · No Comments

“If we are to give an account of the grandiose nature of religion, we must bear in mind what it undertakes to do for human beings. It gives them information about the origin and coming into existence of the universe, it assures them of its protection and of ultimate happiness in the ups and downs […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Shields are up (blinders are on)

July 17th, 2014 · No Comments

“Of the three powers which may dispute the basic position of science, religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy. Art is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion. Except for a few people who are spoken of as being ‘possessed’ by art, it makes […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Makes sense

July 16th, 2014 · No Comments

“Crime is common. Logic is rare.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Clocking in

July 15th, 2014 · No Comments

“No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive, or […]

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit

One can be only so stupid

July 14th, 2014 · No Comments

“The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion” (ed. Gay) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Proposing amendments to the laws of God

July 13th, 2014 · No Comments

“Since it is an awkward task to separate what God Himself has demanded from what can be traced to the authority of an all-powerful parliament or a high judiciary, it would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

So wide, you can’t get around it

July 12th, 2014 · No Comments

“Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Ricochet rabbits

July 11th, 2014 · No Comments

“The less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgement of the future. And there is the further difficulty that precisely in a judgement of this kind the subjective expectations of the individual play a part which it is difficult to assess; and these turn […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Mengele was a geneticist

July 10th, 2014 · No Comments

“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

You’ll learn lessons you’ll never forget

July 9th, 2014 · No Comments

“Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the great educator; and it is by the love of those nearest him that the incomplete human being is induced to respect the decrees of necessity and to spare himself the punishment that follows any infringement of them.” – Sigmund Freud, “Some Character Types” (ed. […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

You’ll never believe what I saw today

July 8th, 2014 · No Comments

“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Red-Headed League” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Round up the usual suspects

July 7th, 2014 · No Comments

“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Assuming facts not in evidence is objectionable

July 6th, 2014 · No Comments

“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Arriba los manos

July 5th, 2014 · 2 Comments

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Potter’s Field

July 4th, 2014 · No Comments

“A book is a huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names are effaced and can no longer be read. Sometimes on the other hand we remember a name well enough but do not know whether anything of the individual who bore it survives in our pages. That girl with the […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Damned, by god

July 3rd, 2014 · No Comments

“Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit