Hammurabi

Hammurabi made some good laws, and so did Solon, but at the time European ancestors were hunkered in their ice caves barricaded against the howling dark and dreaming of aurochs haunches, and by the time they found out about them several thousand years later, those laws had long disappeared even in the places they were made.

It's very tempting to accept the broad hint from that trouble maker Yeshua bin Youssef in the parable of the Good Samaritan that whatever laws the local warlords make, or allow to be made, is really irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is how you deal with the person next to you in the bus/train/tube or in the street.

History is about to be dropped from the core curriculum in British schools, apparently. That makes it more difficult for anyone to check on anything, of course, and so I welcome today's article in the Daily Mail logging the scam artists (probably rather encouraging for Americans, plagued by multiple scandals, to read) who've been running England for the last twenty years. History will soon be more difficult to come by:

"The only mystery is how they got away with it for so long. The consortium took over GB Limited with a large sweetener from the previous management. They also inherited a healthy bank balance and a huge fund of public goodwill.









Even though none of them had any experience of running such an enterprise, they were cheered to the rafters on their arrival. In retrospect, entrusting the operation to a failed lawyer, a psychologically-flawed Scottish sociopath, a temperamental television researcher and a chippy ship's steward was always going to be a huge risk."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1213463/Meet-Phoney-Four-ripped-GB-Ltd.html#ixzz0RGKZKNQY