RT @ianvisits: But how does being a Bishop and a Knight at the same time affect how he moves in a game of chess?

Don’t think I have ever seen such pride as yesterday evening when a student presented me with a clearly completed, but heavily chewed set of worksheets and announced ‘I’m sorry, but my dog actually did eat my homework’.

Carrots are the best low calorie snack.

Student referred to films from the 90s as ‘classic cinema’ and I’m feeling incredibly old.

Just to mix things up, it would be funny to receive a rejection letter that said ‘the quality of the pool of applicants this year was average, but we didn’t like the look of your application’.

This has got the best the most hilarious sponsored ad ever. For the low low price of £14 per month you can learn how to be a leader with George W Bush *and* fight propaganda with Noam Chomsky! 2 for the price of 1!

Feel like Arthur Dent encountering the ancient missile defence systems of Magrathea.

Finally managed to get an emulator to play an ancient mac game from the early 90s only to be thwarted by not having the registration key provided by a company that doesn’t exist anymore.

Legal (not practical) question: is the legal basis of owning shares in a limited company contractual? Does a shareholder essentially own a contractual obligation to pay out dividends etc?.

I guess this is what happens when the central shared moral parable is also a real set of historical events.

I’m not saying a gradual, slippery slope model for the rise of authoritarianism isn’t possible. Maybe look at post Soviet Russia. But Nazi Germany isn’t it.

They only even tried democratic politics after a failed military coup!.

Always find it weird how this completely ahistorical account of the rise of the Nazis has become so widespread it’s become a truism.

The population’s self understanding of living in a broadly ‘normal’ liberal democracy has- and will continue- to shape how courts behave and what is regarded as the constitution. I don’t think things like Miller II could be explained otherwise.

The courts’ understanding of parliamentary sovereignty clearly has changed significantly since Dicey’s time, and were this not the case the Human Rights Act and the European Communities Act would not have worked in the way they did.

Worth noting that Dicey’s argument about parliamentary sovereignty was always an empirical one about how the courts had behaved post 1689, not an absolute truth.

I don’t like Boris Johnson at all, but it’s not clear to me that he or the government performed badly compared to peer countries on the metrics that anyone is talking about. We need to ask bigger questions than the covid inquiry is asking.

1 wasn’t in the gift of the U.K, 2 may or may not have worked and wasn’t on the table politically, or done anywhere in the west. The big thing the government did do differently to compatible states is vaccine and therapeutic research… which it did pretty well?.

2. There could have been a maximum suppression strategy prior to the introduction of vaccines.

Find myself weirdly disinterested the covid inquiry. There are essentially two big things which could have been done differently:.1. Aggressive attempts to contain covid locally (ie in China) could have been made earlier.