The copyright clause of the US Constitution says: “Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Other than the Preamble, is this the only passage of the form “to do something general by doing something specific”?
Alas, Adam Greengard has wearied of writing/drawing No Outlet, the thinking dog’s comic strip. I’ll eagerly await his next project until, y’know, it slips my mind. (As one of his characters might say.)
Now and again one hears the phrase “Israel’s right to exist”. But I can’t recall ever encountering a statement of either the substance or the grounds for such a ‘right’. Are there states that exist without right (other than all of them), or states that have a right to exist but do not exist? If the form of government is altered, but not the boundaries, is a right violated?
“To his Koi Mistress” by Troy McClure.
Okay, not really, because there’s no way I could do justice to the premise.
Andrew Bulhak observes:
(The identity of heroes/villains in films can be telling; for example, there’s Four Feathers, which glorifies the British Empire (which can be seen as a rather prestigious model to proponents of a a global American empire) and its doings in the Middle East, only a few years after pre-9/11 film The Patriot painted the British as the original Nazis (somewhat slanderously, apparently). I wonder whether we’ll see any metaphorical films about straight-dealing, heroic apple-pie Romans (played by Ben Affleck or Brendan Fraser) doing battle with treacherous, Taliban-like Visigoths.)
Also from Andrew, a link to Earth Erotica, worth a chuckle
George Byrd, who has contributed to this space before, comments on the urine item below:
I recall reading somewhere that during the last years of the Civil War, some southern cities instituted regular collection of urine from chamber pots, from which they extracted nitrates for gunpowder manufacture.
I don’t know whether it is true or not, but if true, it would be “a use for the stuff”.