The Art of Tetman Callis

“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

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

“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

[Read more →]

“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

[Read more →]

“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”

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

“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

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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.”

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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, […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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”

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]

“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 […]

[Read more →]