Lekdijk Bovendams, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Yale University acquired a 17th century Dutch bond as an acquisition for its rare book & manuscript collection, but that is not stopping Yale from collecting the interest due on the perpetual bond.

Bloomberg Business:

Yale University will receive 136.20 euros ($153) in interest on a perpetual bond issued in 1648 from Dutch water authority de Stichtse Rijnlanden.

The 1,000 guilder-bond ($509), which is written on goatskin, is among five of the world’s oldest bonds that still pay interest, according to Clarion Wegerif, a spokeswoman for the water authority. The money will be paid out on Monday.

Yale contacted the agency to collect the interest, Wegerif said in a phone interview from Houten, the Netherlands. “We’ll be handing out a symbolic check and wire the rest.”

Yale, which has an endowment of $23.9 billion, paid 24,000 euros to acquire the bond in 2003 as an artifact. The university hasn’t been paid interest since the acquisition, according to the agency. The bond was issued to pay for a small pier in the Netherlands’s Lek river.

ZeroHedge:

Hat tip to Robert Laird.

Joshua Green notes that last night’s debate finally found an effective way to make Donald Trump shut up, just start a serious discussion about policy.

The broad and beleaguered field of Republican presidential candidates, all but ignored during the raucous Summer of Trump, finally found a way to silence the GOP front-runner: they talked about policy. Wednesday’s CNN debate at the Ronald Reagan presidential library began with all the bluster and histrionics we’ve come to expect from Donald Trump. He sucker-punched Rand Paul right out of the gate. He bickered with Jeb Bush. He mugged, squinted, and brooded. And then he did something no one anticipated. He fell silent.

In a wild melee that moderators struggled to control, the 11 candidates jockeyed and sparred throughout. But unlike the low-calorie Fox News debate in Cleveland, CNN’s torturous three-hour affair veered into policy issues for long stretches—stretches during which Trump entirely disappeared.

While his more polished and policy-fluent opponents delved deeply into discussions about issues ranging from how best to fight Islamic terrorism to their assessment of Supreme Court judges to marijuana legalization, Trump barely participated. When he did chime in, he had little to contribute beyond insults and boasts about how his own personal toughness and negotiating prowess would reshape the geopolitical order. Asked how, for instance, he would get the Russians out of Syria, Trump replied, “I would get along with a lot of the world leaders that this country is not getting along with.”

Trump didn’t exactly flop. His bluster and showmanship carried him through, for the most part. And the crush of candidates straining for attention filled the awkward pauses and silences left by his inability to speak in any meaningful depth about subjects besides immigration and his own wealth.

Read the whole thing.

Chancellor Livingston administers the Oath of Office to Washington.

Stephen L. Carter is intelligent enough to recognize that County Clerk Kim Davis’s stand cannot simply be dismissed by saying that “she ought to do her job.” Kim Davis is, in fact, doing her job when she disobeys Justice Roberts.

I’m reluctant to disagree with my Bloomberg View colleague Noah Feldman, but after a bit of reflection and research, I’ve concluded that he got things slightly wrong in his recent column about Kim Davis. Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was held in contempt for defying a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, has argued that her religious freedom is being violated. What caught Feldman’s attention was her claim that her oath of office, which ends with “so help me God,” entitles her to invoke a higher law when necessary. Feldman thinks she’s mistaken. I wish she were; I fear she’s not. …

[When the 18th century theologian William] Paley takes up the subject of the oath of allegiance to the monarch — an oath also taken in the name of God, and a closer approximation to an oath of office. That oath, Paley argues, does not apply when the king’s own misbehavior “makes resistance beneficial to the community” or when the commands of the sovereign “are unauthorized by law.”

For Paley, as for many others of the day, the oath of allegiance was never a promise to obey all laws. It was a promise to obey the just ones. …

This is the sense of oath-taking that Davis is invoking: that in the case of a conflict between God’s law and man’s, the oath itself requires her obedience to the higher.

Davis’s argument for relying on her oath of office as justification for disregarding the law of the land is well grounded in history.

It’s also dangerous.

Two major BS-ers.

Simon Critcheley remembers with appreciation his old Philosophy teacher, Frank Cioffi.

Some years later, I went back into his office to ask permission to switch from one course to another. “Which courses?” he said indifferently. “I’m meant to be reading Foucault, but I want to do a course on Derrida.” “Man” he replied “that’s like going from horseshit to bullshit.” In fact, as others can confirm, the latter word was his most common term of reference and it also expresses his approach to philosophy: No BS.

Critcheley has some good observations on the hubris of Scientism, but he then proves that he is still has not learned how to recognize BS by denouncing climate-change deniers as obscurantists.

Read the whole thing.

Janis Joplin’s “History of the Universe” Porsche 356.

Petrolicious:

Formerly on long-term display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on loan from Joplin’s family, it’ll be auctioned at RM Sotheby’s Driven By Disruption sale in New York on December 10. Are you cool enough to drive The Queen of Psychedelic Soul’s Porsche?

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Sotheby’s RM:

1965 Porsche 356 C 1600 Cabriolet by Reutter

Chassis no. 160371

One of the most important icons of rock ‘n’ roll history, this Porsche was purchased in 1968 by Janis Joplin, who immediately engaged Dave Richards, a friend and roadie with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, to customize the car with a kaleidoscopic mural. Described by Richards to represent ‘The History of the Universe’, the dramatic artwork included such graphics as butterflies and jellyfish, as well as a portrait of Joplin with members of the band. The finished product was as colorful as the singer’s personality and certainly representative of the era – a one-of-a-kind flamboyant symbol of San Francisco’s psychedelic rock age. The car quickly became identified with Joplin, who was frequently seen driving it in period.

Following Joplin’s untimely passing in 1970, the Porsche has remained in her family’s ownership ever since, was restored in the 1990s and has been on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland for two decades. It is offered at RM’s New York auction on December 10th by her family and will be on display in Sotheby’s 10th floor gallery in the days leading up to the sale.

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I just discovered that “Bother,” said Pooh is a humor meme. Robert Adams has collected lots of examples.

“Bother,” said Pooh as he continued machinegunning the life rafts.

“Bother,” said Pooh as he tried on his new Rooskin coat.

There is a decades-old custom followed by most candidates for the presidency of wearing American flag pins on their left coat lapel. Of course, wearing an American flag lapel pin doesn’t mean very much. It doesn’t really prove that you are genuinely patriotic or genuinely love America.

But failure to follow that trivial practice tends to be noticed and to provoke comment. Barack Obama ran into questions from reporters about not wearing one back in 2007. Obama initially characteristically sneered at the custom, but pressure mounted and by the next Spring of the election year, Candidate Obama fell into line and began wearing the flag pin.

In the run-up to this election, we have another representative of the radical left-wing of the democrat party who is obviously more comfortable denouncing America for institutionalized injustice than participating in conventional displays of patriotic symbols. Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (as you can see in the above photo) has been substituting a gold lapel pin in the place of that conventional US flag.

Naturally, one wondered: Is it a small gold hammer-and-sickle? Is he wearing (sentimentally) the symbol of the IWW (Wobblies)? Looking into it, I found that I was not the first to inquire. And the correct answer may be given here.

Bernie Sanders is deliberately side-stepping the flag lapel pin issue, by wearing instead the gold badge which identifies him in the Capitol building to security as a US Senator.

After all, how could we expect Senator Sanders to wear the flag of a country like ours. Senator Sanders denounced America as unjust in a speech he delivered just yesterday evening.

[I]n my view, it would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today.

In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. ..

[T]here is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

What would Sanders do if he were present for the playing on the national anthem?

Lot 3767: “Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915 CSRG”, better known as the Chauchat

James D. Julia is selling a Chauchat in the course of their October 5-7 Firearms Auction and has released today another of the highly informative Forgotten Weapons videos devoted to this famous, but widely despised, particular weapon of WWI.

Wikipedia article.

17:48 video

William Moalosi, a farmer and former hunting guide in Sankuyo, Botswana

The New York Times discovers that the 2004 hunting ban in Botswana is not popular with that country’s villagers.

SANKUYO, Botswana — Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow.

Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk.

The hunting ban has also meant a precipitous drop in income. Over the years, villagers had used money from trophy hunters, mostly Americans, to install toilets and water pipes, build houses for the poorest, and give scholarships to the young and pensions to the old. …

[I]n Sankuyo and other rural communities living near the wild animals, many are calling for a return to hunting. African governments have also condemned, some with increasing anger, Western moves to ban trophy hunting.

“Before, when there was hunting, we wanted to protect those animals because we knew we earned something out of them,” said Jimmy Baitsholedi Ntema, a villager in his 60s. “Now we don’t benefit at all from the animals. The elephants and buffaloes leave after destroying our plowing fields during the day. Then, at night, the lions come into our kraals.”

Read the whole thing.