The UN’s Palestinian refugee agency has stopped providing health services in the besieged city, says chief.

Israel’s war on Gaza updates: ‘Over 1 million’ flee Rafah as Israel attacks | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

JUN 1 - Mayor Adams Breaks Ground on $18 Million Marlboro Agricultural Education Center in Brooklyn

Mayor Adams Breaks Ground on $18 Million Marlboro Agrigultural Education Center in Brooklyn | City of New York

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WBCD) – Shovels hit the ground at 3765 Leeds Avenue, officially marking the start of construction for the future Tri-County Biological Science Center in North Charleston. “Having our own DNA lab is going to improve our criminal justice system in ways that are nearly ...

Leaders break ground on Tri-County Biological Science Center | WCBD News 2

President Joe Biden on Friday outlined terms of a potential new cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, just hours after Israeli forces moved into central parts of Rafah.

Biden outlines cease-fire proposal after Israel expands ground offensive in Rafah

Officials marked the commencement of the Cooper Avenue road-widening initiative with a groundbreaking ceremony at the intersection of Reece and MacArthur roads on May 24. The event signaled the beginning of a project slated to extend through the remainder of the year and much of 2025.

DVIDS - News - Fort Meade Officials Break Ground on Cooper Avenue Road-Widening Project

As the Ukraine war enters its third year, the infantry of 59th Brigade are confronting a bleak reality: they&#x27;re running out of soldiers and ammunition to resist their Russian invaders. Another commander in the 59th Brigade, who only gave his first name Hryhoriy, described relentless attacks ...

Ukraine outnumbered, outgunned, ground down by relentless Russia

Example video title will go here for this video

Police searching for teens who threw elderly woman to the ground, stole her money

Ground News

groundnews

This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.
Authors:
(1) Jeremiah Milbauer, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (email: {jmilbaue | sherryw}@cs.cmu.edu);
(2) Ziqi Ding, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (e-mail: {ziqiding | zhijinw}@andrew.cmu.edu)
(3) Tongshuang Wu, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. Table of Links Abstract and Introduction
Related Work
The NEWSSENSE Framework
Pilot Study
System Overview
Discussion
Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References
A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction 2 Related Work This section covers related research across media analytics, sensemaking, and natural language processing. Though some core ideas of this work have been explored in the past, to our knowledge they have never been combined in a single system. Media Bias and Analytics Research on media bias includes academic research to study social media sharing patterns (Roberts et al., 2021; Bakshy et al., 2015) and bias within media publications (Flaxman et al., 2016; Hamborg et al., 2019; Groseclose and Milyo, 2005). Commercial products exist in this area as well, such as the media bias charts of AllSides [5], which classifies political slant into one of five categories, and Ad Fontes Media [6], which models both political slant and factual credibility. Research on news and social content aggregation has focused primarily on headline detection, timeline construction and clustering (Bouras and Tsogkas, 2012; Laban and Hearst, 2017), and event detection (Atefeh and Khreich, 2015; Kumaran and Allan, 2004). There exist user-oriented products in this space, such as Google News Stories [7], and Ground.news [8]. Some outlets, such as Propublica, aggregate their news stories into timelines [9]. Reading Interfaces and Sensemaking Recent work on reading interfaces has primarily focused on scientific literature, augmenting documents with information about cited papers (Lo et al., 2023; Kang et al., 2022), or augmenting references within the documents themselves (Head et al., 2021). For the News domain specifically, Laban and Hearst (2017) aggregates articles and extracts key quotes to construct a timeline for a given story. We are also aware of an abstract describing work to combine multiple article headlines and ledes into a single digestible form, though no follow-up is available (Glassman et al., 2020). Fact Verification and NLI Natural Language Inference is a task focused on classifying the relationship between a pair of sentences as either “neutral", “entailment", or “contradiction." Datasets such as SNLI (Bowman et al., 2015) and MNLI (Williams et al., 2017) have become major benchmarks for natural language processing research. Recent work has also considered document-level NLI (Koreeda and Manning, 2021; Chen et al., 2022), as well as cross-document reasoning based in NLI (Schuster et al., 2022), and scalable pairwise reasoning (Milbauer et al., 2023). There is also a growing body of work on NLP systems for fact verification and attribution. Recent datasets include FEVER (Thorne et al., 2018) and VitaminC (Schuster et al., 2021), as well as datasets focused on real-world examples of updating, editing, and citing claims in domains like news and Wikipedia (Petroni et al., 2022; Spangher et al., 2022; Iv et al., 2022). [5] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratingmethods [6] https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ [7] https://news.google.com [8] https://ground.news/ [9] https://www.propublica.org/series This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: (1) Jeremiah Milbauer, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (email: {jmilbaue | sherryw}@cs.cmu.edu); (2) Ziqi Ding, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (e-mail: {ziqiding | zhijinw}@andrew.cmu.edu) (3) Tongshuang Wu, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: Authors: (1) Jeremiah Milbauer, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (email: {jmilbaue | sherryw}@cs.cmu.edu); (2) Ziqi Ding, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (e-mail: {ziqiding | zhijinw}@andrew.cmu.edu) (3) Tongshuang Wu, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. Table of Links Abstract and Introduction Related Work The NEWSSENSE Framework Pilot Study System Overview Discussion Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction Abstract and Introduction Abstract and Introduction Related Work Related Work The NEWSSENSE Framework The NEWSSENSE Framework Pilot Study Pilot Study System Overview System Overview Discussion Discussion Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction 2 Related Work This section covers related research across media analytics, sensemaking, and natural language processing. Though some core ideas of this work have been explored in the past, to our knowledge they have never been combined in a single system. Media Bias and Analytics Research on media bias includes academic research to study social media sharing patterns (Roberts et al., 2021; Bakshy et al., 2015) and bias within media publications (Flaxman et al., 2016; Hamborg et al., 2019; Groseclose and Milyo, 2005). Commercial products exist in this area as well, such as the media bias charts of AllSides [5], which classifies political slant into one of five categories, and Ad Fontes Media [6], which models both political slant and factual credibility. Research on news and social content aggregation has focused primarily on headline detection, timeline construction and clustering (Bouras and Tsogkas, 2012; Laban and Hearst, 2017), and event detection (Atefeh and Khreich, 2015; Kumaran and Allan, 2004). There exist user-oriented products in this space, such as Google News Stories [7], and Ground.news [8]. Some outlets, such as Propublica, aggregate their news stories into timelines [9]. Reading Interfaces and Sensemaking Recent work on reading interfaces has primarily focused on scientific literature, augmenting documents with information about cited papers (Lo et al., 2023; Kang et al., 2022), or augmenting references within the documents themselves (Head et al., 2021). Reading Interfaces and Sensemaking For the News domain specifically, Laban and Hearst (2017) aggregates articles and extracts key quotes to construct a timeline for a given story. We are also aware of an abstract describing work to combine multiple article headlines and ledes into a single digestible form, though no follow-up is available (Glassman et al., 2020). Fact Verification and NLI Natural Language Inference is a task focused on classifying the relationship between a pair of sentences as either “neutral", “entailment", or “contradiction." Datasets such as SNLI (Bowman et al., 2015) and MNLI (Williams et al., 2017) have become major benchmarks for natural language processing research. Recent work has also considered document-level NLI (Koreeda and Manning, 2021; Chen et al., 2022), as well as cross-document reasoning based in NLI (Schuster et al., 2022), and scalable pairwise reasoning (Milbauer et al., 2023). Fact Verification and NLI There is also a growing body of work on NLP systems for fact verification and attribution. Recent datasets include FEVER (Thorne et al., 2018) and VitaminC (Schuster et al., 2021), as well as datasets focused on real-world examples of updating, editing, and citing claims in domains like news and Wikipedia (Petroni et al., 2022; Spangher et al., 2022; Iv et al., 2022). [5] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratingmethods [6] https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ [7] https://news.google.com [8] https://ground.news/ [9] https://www.propublica.org/series

From Nuisance to News Sense: Related Work

This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.
Authors:
(1) Jeremiah Milbauer, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (email: {jmilbaue | sherryw}@cs.cmu.edu);
(2) Ziqi Ding, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (e-mail: {ziqiding | zhijinw}@andrew.cmu.edu)
(3) Tongshuang Wu, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. Table of Links Abstract and Introduction
Related Work
The NEWSSENSE Framework
Pilot Study
System Overview
Discussion
Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References
A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction Abstract Reading and understanding the stories in the news is increasingly difficult. Reporting on stories evolves rapidly, politicized news venues offer different perspectives (and sometimes different facts), and misinformation is rampant. However, Existing solutions merely aggregate an overwhelming amount of information from heterogenous sources, such as different news outlets, social media, and news bias rating agencies. We present NEWSSENSE, a novel sensemaking tool and reading interface designed to collect and integrate information from multiple news articles on a central topic. NEWSSENSE augments a central, grounding article of the user’s choice by linking it to related articles from different sources, providing inline highlights on how specific claims in the chosen article are either supported or contradicted by information from other articles. Using NEWSSENSE, users can seamlessly digest and cross-check multiple information sources without disturbing their natural reading flow. Our pilot study shows that NewsSense has the potential to help users identify key information, verify the credibility of news articles, and explore different perspectives. We opensource NewsSense at github.com/jmilbauer/NewsSense, and a demo video is hosted at youtu.be/2D5LYbsQJak. 1 Introduction Why is it so hard, and so exhausting, to read the news? In the quest for knowledge, news readers today must contend with a rapidly evolving 24-hour news cycle, multiple news venues competing for attention and clicks, and the challenge of integrating fact-based reporting, opinion pieces, and social media commentary (Lazer et al., 2018; Benkler et al., 2018; Farkas and Schou, 2019). With news becoming increasingly politicized (Faris et al., 2017) readers also face the challenge of identifying and avoiding misinformation, disinformation, and hyperbolic “clickbait" as they try to remain informed about the world around them. Various solutions have been proposed to assist with users’ news reading. For example, media watchdog companies have created media bias charts to represent political leaning and credibility of news sources [1] [2]. However, these resources force users to rely on potentially untrustworthy third-party designations of media bias, which treat each news source as a whole, without digging into specific articles or topics. While novel automatic fact checking (Thorne et al., 2018) and fake news detection (Zhou and Zafarani, 2020; Chen et al., 2015) systems can provide verification per-article, these approaches typically rely on a preordained corpus of verified facts which cannot keep up with the always-evolving facts, and may not reflect user preferences or multilateral perspectives. Aggregating articles from heterogeneous sources seem a more promising direction for cross-checking new facts (without predetermined groundtruths) and collecting different perspectives, but existing attempts are still too coarse and overwhelming. For example, both Google News’ “Stories" [3] feature and Ground.news [4] collect articles about the same events but display them in the form of exhaustive lists – Users are still forced to read and compare each article on its own. We argue that instead of simply collecting and aggregating news articles, information and claims from multiple sources should be integrated in a way that allows users to identify fine-grained claim-level bias, spin, controversy, or evidence. We present NEWSSENSE, a novel framework for sensemaking within a cluster of documents, to address the three key problems of news reading – bias, factuality, and article overload – in a single streamlined interface. NEWSSENSE leverages existing modular NLP techniques to identify and link claims made across a cluster of news articles, such that these articles become references for each other. NEWSSENSE also displays the linking information using an interactive reading interface, which allows users to easily explore the cross-document connections without being overwhelmed. In pilot user studies, we see that the NEWSSENSE framework has the potential to help users identify key information, verify the credibility of news articles, and explore different perspectives. While NEWSSENSE is primarily implemented for news articles, our framework can be easily generalized to other assisted reading and cross-checking scenarios (e.g., compare multiple manuscripts in literature reviews). The key contributions of NEWSSENSE are: A pipeline for analyzing the connections between a collection of documents.


A two-stage method for efficiently computing cross-document links between claims that support or contradict each other, enabling “reference-free” fact checking.


A framework for visualizing cross-document connections, and integrating claims from multiple documents into a single reading experience. We conclude by discussing the generality and potential social benefits of NEWSSENSE. [1] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratingmethods [2] https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ [3] https://news.google.com/stories/ [4] https://ground.news This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: (1) Jeremiah Milbauer, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (email: {jmilbaue | sherryw}@cs.cmu.edu); (2) Ziqi Ding, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (e-mail: {ziqiding | zhijinw}@andrew.cmu.edu) (3) Tongshuang Wu, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: Authors: (1) Jeremiah Milbauer, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (email: {jmilbaue | sherryw}@cs.cmu.edu); (2) Ziqi Ding, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA (e-mail: {ziqiding | zhijinw}@andrew.cmu.edu) (3) Tongshuang Wu, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. Table of Links Abstract and Introduction Related Work The NEWSSENSE Framework Pilot Study System Overview Discussion Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction Abstract and Introduction Abstract and Introduction Related Work Related Work The NEWSSENSE Framework The NEWSSENSE Framework Pilot Study Pilot Study System Overview System Overview Discussion Discussion Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References Conclusion, Limitations and Ethics, and References A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction A. Appendix: Prompt for Claim Extraction Abstract Reading and understanding the stories in the news is increasingly difficult. Reporting on stories evolves rapidly, politicized news venues offer different perspectives (and sometimes different facts), and misinformation is rampant. However, Existing solutions merely aggregate an overwhelming amount of information from heterogenous sources, such as different news outlets, social media, and news bias rating agencies. We present NEWSSENSE, a novel sensemaking tool and reading interface designed to collect and integrate information from multiple news articles on a central topic. NEWSSENSE augments a central, grounding article of the user’s choice by linking it to related articles from different sources, providing inline highlights on how specific claims in the chosen article are either supported or contradicted by information from other articles. Using NEWSSENSE, users can seamlessly digest and cross-check multiple information sources without disturbing their natural reading flow. Our pilot study shows that NewsSense has the potential to help users identify key information, verify the credibility of news articles, and explore different perspectives. We opensource NewsSense at github.com/jmilbauer/NewsSense, and a demo video is hosted at youtu.be/2D5LYbsQJak. aggregate integrate 1 Introduction Why is it so hard, and so exhausting, to read the news? In the quest for knowledge, news readers today must contend with a rapidly evolving 24-hour news cycle, multiple news venues competing for attention and clicks, and the challenge of integrating fact-based reporting, opinion pieces, and social media commentary (Lazer et al., 2018; Benkler et al., 2018; Farkas and Schou, 2019). With news becoming increasingly politicized (Faris et al., 2017) readers also face the challenge of identifying and avoiding misinformation, disinformation, and hyperbolic “clickbait" as they try to remain informed about the world around them. Various solutions have been proposed to assist with users’ news reading. For example, media watchdog companies have created media bias charts to represent political leaning and credibility of news sources [1] [2]. However, these resources force users to rely on potentially untrustworthy third-party designations of media bias, which treat each news source as a whole, without digging into specific articles or topics. news source While novel automatic fact checking (Thorne et al., 2018) and fake news detection (Zhou and Zafarani, 2020; Chen et al., 2015) systems can provide verification per-article, these approaches typically rely on a preordained corpus of verified facts which cannot keep up with the always-evolving facts, and may not reflect user preferences or multilateral perspectives. Aggregating articles from heterogeneous sources seem a more promising direction for cross-checking new facts (without predetermined groundtruths) and collecting different perspectives, but existing attempts are still too coarse and overwhelming. For example, both Google News’ “Stories" [3] feature and Ground.news [4] collect articles about the same events but display them in the form of exhaustive lists – Users are still forced to read and compare each article on its own. We argue that instead of simply collecting and aggregating news articles, information and claims from multiple sources should be integrated in a way that allows users to identify fine-grained claim-level bias, spin, controversy, or evidence. integrated We present NEWSSENSE, a novel framework for sensemaking within a cluster of documents, to address the three key problems of news reading – bias, factuality, and article overload – in a single streamlined interface. NEWSSENSE leverages existing modular NLP techniques to identify and link claims made across a cluster of news articles , such that these articles become references for each other. NEWSSENSE also displays the linking information using an interactive reading interface , which allows users to easily explore the cross-document connections without being overwhelmed. In pilot user studies, we see that the NEWSSENSE framework has the potential to help users identify key information, verify the credibility of news articles, and explore different perspectives. a cluster of news articles interactive reading interface While NEWSSENSE is primarily implemented for news articles, our framework can be easily generalized to other assisted reading and cross-checking scenarios (e.g., compare multiple manuscripts in literature reviews). The key contributions of NEWSSENSE are: A pipeline for analyzing the connections between a collection of documents. A two-stage method for efficiently computing cross-document links between claims that support or contradict each other, enabling “reference-free” fact checking. A framework for visualizing cross-document connections, and integrating claims from multiple documents into a single reading experience. A pipeline for analyzing the connections between a collection of documents. A pipeline for analyzing the connections between a collection of documents. A two-stage method for efficiently computing cross-document links between claims that support or contradict each other, enabling “reference-free” fact checking. A two-stage method for efficiently computing cross-document links between claims that support or contradict each other, enabling “reference-free” fact checking. A framework for visualizing cross-document connections, and integrating claims from multiple documents into a single reading experience. A framework for visualizing cross-document connections, and integrating claims from multiple documents into a single reading experience. We conclude by discussing the generality and potential social benefits of NEWSSENSE. [1] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratingmethods [2] https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ [3] https://news.google.com/stories/ [4] https://ground.news

From Nuisance to News Sense: Abstract and Introduction

Inside Musk's Social Circle: Yes-men, Media Personalities, and (a lot of) right-wing VCs

Dentro del círculo social de Musk: sí-hombres, personalidades de los medios y (muchos) capitalistas de riesgo de derecha

À l'intérieur du cercle social de Musk : les hommes du oui, les personnalités des médias et (beaucoup) les VC de droite

मस्क के सोशल सर्कल के अंदर: हाँ-पुरुष, मीडिया हस्तियां, और (बहुत सारे) दक्षिणपंथी वीसी

Musk のソーシャル サークルの内部: イエスメン、メディアパーソナリティ、および (多くの) 右翼 VC

Dentro do Círculo Social de Musk: sim-men, personalidades da mídia e (muitos) VCs de direita

Bên trong vòng kết nối xã hội của Musk: Yes-men, Media Personalies, và (rất nhiều) nhà đầu tư mạo hiểm cánh hữu

马斯克的社交圈内幕：应声虫、媒体名人和（很多）右翼风投

THE GIANT RATS

Bias has always been a factor in the way we interpret the world. However, we also spend more time-consuming media than ever before, inhibiting trust in our personal experiences and clouding our perception of the truth. Given that it is so difficult to discern what is genuine from reality, it is crucial for us to have tools that can detect biases in the information we regularly consume. On top of the inherent bias rife throughout various media sources, public trust in the veracity of news organizations is dwindling. Today, __ __claim to have at least some faith in the information obtained from news organizations. Even while it is still a majority, this is the lowest percentage share from Pew Research studies on media bias over the previous five years. 58% of individuals in the US Let’s look at how various AI techniques can help weed out media bias and provide a healthier perspective on how we stay across the news. What We Know So Far Historically, finding political bias in media, for example, is regarded as a job for natural language processing (NLP)—essentially, the analysis and processing of text. A subfield of artificial intelligence (AI), NLP, aims to create algorithms that can imitate human intellect. Machine learning (ML), which involves training computers to learn from experience, is frequently regarded as a subfield and technique of AI and creating AI systems. An NLP model is commonly used to predict political prejudice, for example, using ML. To build a successful machine learning model, you need a pre/labeled dataset with the inputs and outputs required. With regards to detecting media bias this would involve the text and bias values. from 100 media news sources. MIT recently conducted a study involving 3,078,624 articles Interestingly, when looking into the MIT study, it became clear that NLP analysis posed several issues with the data analysis. One of the biggest problems came from picking up on phrases that could be taken out of context. Usually, the reader of either a left-leaning or right-leaning publication would be expected to take certain phrases positively or negatively. The clearest example MIT cited was the phrase ‘defund the police’, where it could easily feature on either end of the political spectrum but would need context to be an indicator of political stance. The general conclusion from various studies is that news is generally biased towards bad news. The classic adage that states: ‘The front page of the newspaper features the worst news from the day's events throughout the world’ is largely true. Brutal murders, pandemics, natural disasters, and corruption are all deemed the most newsworthy items. Any left-right political prejudice pales in comparison to this general negative bias. New Developments Paving the Way for Better Analysis There is still room for improvement, but many companies have been making great strides in identifying media bias. The Bipartisan Press recently tested various NLP models and found that was one of the most effective models currently available. It was born out of Google’s Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), where it trains the system to anticipate purposefully hidden content inside samples of unannotated language. Facebook’s RoBERTa that both of these models could classify bias by website domain. For instance, they were able to correctly suggest that Fox News and the Washington Examiner leaned to the right, whereas CNN and the New York Times leaned to the left. However, as with MIT’s analysis, there were some issues—both models were not able to recognize ideologically-charged phrases such as “we need more gun control”. Furthermore, some bias values were attributed purely to the mention of names such as Clinton or Trump. The Bipartisan Press astonishingly found There are now apps, such as NOOZ.AI and Ground.news, which can integrate opinion analysis (personal feelings, views, beliefs, or judgments in a journalist’s writing), sentiment analysis (a journalist’s positivity or negativity to the general news content or the specific topic they write about), and revision analysis (investigation on the evolution of a news story and its manipulation of opinion and sentiment over time). This has the potential to give a more comprehensive overview of media bias. Organizations looking to promote clear and transparent media in the future should seek to increase the dataset. This should help to expose an ML model to a much broader range of topics, which would in turn increase accuracy in theory. The analysis could also be improved by filtering out content within newspapers and websites that isn’t relevant, such as adverts and other pieces of content which may not be related to news media whatsoever. Thanks to our unlimited access to social media and news websites, we are constantly aware of what is happening worldwide and can instantly respond to any event. However, not all of this information is impartial or even pertinent to our requirements. The speed with which events are reported leaves us with little time to scrutinize sources, exercise critical thought, or conduct thoughtful evaluation. This is why utilizing AI to identify bias is so crucial in society nowadays. Hopefully, we can continue holding journalists accountable and be better informed about the truth in the process.

The Media Bias Problem: How AI Is Here to Help

O GREAT KING, BY THE POWER OF YOUR TREASURY, YOU CAN BEAT BITCOIN! News is just in that the mint of a very important, historic sovereign nation has just hired a company in a separate nation to help it launch its own “Blockchain not Bitcoin” attempt to ride the Bitcoin wave. This is extraordinary in several ways, and allows a general principle to be explored. First off, this mint doesn't understand how Bitcoin works. That is clear. They've made the common error of believing what computer illiterates in well regarded newspapers mistakenly repeat verbatim about Bitcoin; . And this is only the first of their many errors in this project. that you can have “Blockchain without Bitcoin” Even if their technical and economic assumptions were correct, there is no way that their private money system can beat the market. The Russians and the Chinese will domination of a global e-money by a single foreign nation coded by a second party. They will at a minimum, launch their own central bank AltC0in, or more likely, settle on Bitcoin as the civilized global standard. These people have made the fundamental error of thinking that they can beat the market. It is the same error the Americans made thinking that everyone would use CDMA instead of GSM. never accept This new money will never be international. No one will trust a system that requires advance permission from and which is controlled by a government to use it, that can exclude any actor based on arbitrary rules of a hostile government when Bitcoin is available. There is no logical reason to trust anyone when Bitcoin exists; any system that is tainted by the requirement of trust , and will make rational actors choose Bitcoin over those other, broken systems every time. is inferior to Bitcoin There are other problems with this new project, some of which will be of concern to the State. With a software simulation of money, the company providing the service , with absolute control over the money and its operation, . In order to the mint, you must directly control the levers of the machinery, you cannot outsource that control to other men, and ; these foreigners de facto control everything if no one in the mint can understand how anything works. They seem to have forgotten what the word “Sovereign” means. is the mint not the mint be certainly never to men from a foreign country If you’re going to outsource the creation of a new e-money, and cede control over its development to foreigners, why not go all the way and give it to the global experts: You get all the benefits of the hundreds of developers working on Bitcoin, and access to the global Bitcoin network, its first mover advantage, huge ecosystem and its network effects. You are already willing to give up control, so you may as well give it up for and not for . Bitcoin Core? something nothing Computer Illiteracy This is another example of the global Computer Literacy Crisis, where the aparatchicks don’t understand how anything works, and are rendered helpless, delegating all responsibility to software developers who are now one of the top global powers on Earth as a class. We saw this with government departments around the globe accepting Microsoft Windows as “the standard” for decades, with the late realization that this gives control (and back-door NSA espionage access) to a foreign company. Much better to use Linux that belongs to no one, is transparent and infinitely more secure and controllable. Just like Bitcoin. For 7 years I've been talking about the book “Good Money” by George Selgin. _Edit description_www.amazon.com Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775… If your are interested in Bitcoin and why “private Blockchain” is junk, you should read this book. What is fascinating about this news of a sovereign mint hiring a foreign company to create a system for them is that the private money vs State money is turned on its head in the Bitcoin era. In the 1700s button makers switched to minting coins for private use, because the Royal Mint couldn't supply the demand for small change. Now, government mints are turning to bespoke “Blockchain not Bitcoin Tokens” while money of the world. The picture is entirely reversed; the state is minting private money to fill an (imaginary) need while Bitcoin is the money everyone uses but has trouble getting a hold of. that aims to solve that problem. Bitcoin becomes the sovereign Azteco is a service Like many projects with no hope of traction because they are fundamentally flawed, this new platform has put its software up on GitHub, hoping to attract developers to work on it for free. This will not happen. First of all, the number of developers with the skill to hack cryptocurrencies in C is extremely small, and all of them are working on Bitcoin. They're all doing so mostly without compensation, for the good of society, just like Linux kernel developers do. There is no way you are going to persuade these ethical men to stop working on Bitcoin and to devote that time to a bogus “permissioned ledger” project run by a company on behalf of a nation state. _We made the following submission to the British Government’s “Digital currencies: Call for Information”. There is at…_medium.com Our submission to the British Government’s “Digital currencies: Call for Information” Bitcoin devs simply aren't going to split their limited time between projects like Corda or any anti-Bitcoin project. And of course, Corda has conceded defeat and given up on “ ” an other fanciful hand-waving nonsense. making blockchains programmable “GitHub Open Source” isn't a magic wand that will cause men to flock to your repo and software to be written for you for nothing, and no, you can’t hire developers to do this work either; . Developers at this skill, experience and knowledge level are an , and they are all working on Bitcoin, and will contract to work on unethical software, for any amount of money. there are none available extremely rare breed never Every year the State wastes time on vanity projects they can’t even understand, Bitcoin grows, spreads and strengthens. The number of new, fundamental features coming to Bitcoin is not matched by any other project, and how these will synergise is anyone’s guess. are one example of space savings and efficiency that will impact all users. Schnorr signatures From The Elements Project, new features coming to Bitcoin SegWit will activate, on Litecoin first and then Bitcoin. Then everything will change. https://elementsproject.org/elements/ Every software project has a use case. The developers are eager to make their case so they can gain users. When they won’t make the case clearly, something is very wrong. There is no use case for a sovereign nation to launch its own alt coin that is inferior to Bitcoin. Its like launching a new mobile phone network standard; no manufacturer is going to incorporate another set of protocols, chips, transceiver and antennae into its phone to accommodate you, and yet, this is exactly what these people believe they can do with Bitcoin. All are now running to and not betting against it. rational nation State actors embrace and profit from the inevitable domination by Bitcoin We can be sure of this. No “permissioned”, “BlockChain”, alt-coin reality denying project launched by a Nation State that has outsourced development of its software to a private company in a foreign land can to outperform Bitcoin on any level. Incredibly, the lessons of the doomed and fundamentally flawed Canadian “ ” have not been learned yet. This is a good thing, believe it or not. The longer Bitcoin’s enemies think they can reinvent the wheel and beat Bitcoin, the better it is for Bitcoin. By the time they figure all of this out, it will be too late. In fact, it already is too late. ever hope Mint Chip KYC/AML is dying There has been some very good news on the Bitcoin perception front. Another judge, this time in of all jurisdictions, , has ruled that Bitcoin is not Money. New York I several times . wrote about this previously Any business in Bitcoin, if it is run by competent men, should now destroy their “compliance” data and stop all KYC/AML work immediately. They can rely on these two judgements as pretext, and if any prosecutor or three letter agency wants to take them to court, they should accept the challenge, because they will win. Coinbase, for example, has been who transferred Bitcoin from 2013 to 2015. They are going to fight this in court, and it may cost them millions to defend this outrageous attack. Instead of going to court to defend handing over customer data, Coinbase should permanently the data, and fight in court to prove Bitcoin is not money, and not subject to any law any more than Linden Labs “Linden Dollars” are. asked for a database dump of all their customers destroy Doing this, they will forever be unable to hand over data they don’t have, and will not be asked for it again. They will streamline their service, and increase their profitability. Or burn rate. Either way, the way out of their current problems is to embrace these two judgements and amplify them so that the entire industry is both protected and relieved of onerous administrative burdens simultaneously. Stopping KYC/AML will increase on ramp speeds, increase profits, increase Bitcoin throughput and midwife “The Transformation”. You are already in a fight with the State, who are using your own data against you; data that you did not have to collect in the first place, that you volunteered to collect, expecting a pat on the head. Doing this will also turn you from an unethical company into an ethical one. Its a no brainer. For the Lulz Finally, for some lulz. People love predicting the collapse of things. Its like a perverted spectator sport, where you’re betting on which gladiator is going to die first. and even the and these predictions failed. We all remember . No surprise then, when people pop up to predict that Bitcoin will have a “complete and total collapse” for no given reason whatsoever. Y2K hysteria Twitter internet have been predicted to “collapse” Clifford Stoll What we can see emerging is the fact that the vast majority of men have reached their intellectual limit in 2017. Most of the things are incomprehensible to them. Bitcoin is one of those most things. As time goes on, this problem is going to get much worse. Its like the familiar tale of Artificial Intelligence making new versions of itself that man has no capacity to understand. _One American and one Soviet supercomputer collaborate to develop an intersystem language that only they can understand_www.criticalcommons.org Two supercomputers invent an "intersystem language" The problem isn't that people don’t understand new technology. This has always been true since man started forging steel, and of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The problem is that these ignorant people insist on forcing other people who do understand the new tools, to conform to their mistaken ideas of how they should work with them and present it to the market. Bitcoin has been suffering this for a few years now, but with the recent court decisions, Japanese “Legitimization” (remember when everyone kept saying “legitimacy” is what Bitcoin needs? Now its “adoption” and “Scale”) and increase market penetration through great services like Local Bitcoins, it is now clear that Bitcoin will win. No matter what you want. Last Word Finally, some good news. , notorious milliner, Bitcoin thinker, expert analyst, conference organizer, East West bridger, Ubisoft expander, organizer of the “Scaling Bitcoin” event and meme manipulator extraordinary, has just been . Samson Mow hired by Blockstream Not Samson Mow, but something else..something…very very…odd. Normally hirings of this sort would not be worth comment, but this one is given what is under discussion in this piece. Some were calling for this very useful man to be over his very amusing tweets and totally accurate analysis. This is not good thinking. fired Because people conflated Bitcoin with money, there is an underlying assumption that the men involved in Bitcoin must emulate the behaviour of stuffy, stiff, humourless bankers. Nothing could be further from the truth. We know that Bitcoin is not money and in properly designed businesses, no one needs to be trusted; Bitcoin itself is the infallible guarantor. All the social signals that men used to use to assess trust (ties, logos, and all the trappings of banking) have been replaced with software. This leaves people behind the levers to “let it all hang out” and be totally honest, because t_he software is what you trust, not the men who wrote it_. This is another benefit of Bitcoin, that is slowly starting to emerge. The people stuck in the 20th Century are the same ones who never encrypted their email and think that Bitcoin is for buying Starbucks on chain. They're the ones doing the speech policing, and calling internet culture “toxic”. Samson Mow being hired is an explicit rejection of these wrong ideas; he is being hired because he , and nothing else. Bitcoin is not about illusions, it is about . merits the job MATHEMATICAL FACTS Fresh ground mint tea, Green Madeline. ↴

The Mint of King Cnut

On Combinations of Masters against the public

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . The Archdeacon Is Satisfied with the State of Affairs here The Archdeacon Is Satisfied with the State of Affairs The archdeacon, in his journey into Barchester, had been assured by Mr. Harding that all their prognostications about Mr. Slope and Eleanor were groundless. Mr. Harding, however, had found it very difficult to shake his son-in-law's faith in his own acuteness. The matter had, to Dr. Grantly, been so plainly corroborated by such patent evidence, borne out by such endless circumstances, that he at first refused to take as true the positive statement which Mr. Harding made to him of Eleanor's own disavowal of the impeachment. But at last he yielded in a qualified way. He brought himself to admit that he would at the present regard his past convictions as a mistake, but in doing this he so guarded himself that if, at any future time, Eleanor should come forth to the world as Mrs. Slope, he might still be able to say: "There, I told you so. Remember what you said and what I said; and remember also for coming years, that I was right in this matter—as in all others." He carried, however, his concession so far as to bring himself to undertake to call at Eleanor's house, and he did call accordingly, while the father and daughter were yet in the middle of their conference. Mr. Harding had had so much to hear and to say that he had forgotten to advise Eleanor of the honour that awaited her, and she heard her brother-in-law's voice in the hall while she was quite unprepared to see him. "There's the archdeacon," she said, springing up. "Yes, my dear. He told me to tell you that he would come and see you; but to tell the truth I had forgotten all about it." Eleanor fled away, regardless of all her father's entreaties. She could not now, in the first hours of her joy, bring herself to bear all the archdeacon's retractions, apologies, and congratulations. He would have so much to say, and would be so tedious in saying it; consequently, the archdeacon, when he was shown into the drawing-room, found no one there but Mr. Harding. "You must excuse Eleanor," said Mr. Harding. "Is anything the matter?" asked the doctor, who at once anticipated that the whole truth about Mr. Slope had at last come out. "Well, something is the matter. I wonder now whether you will be much surprised." The archdeacon saw by his father-in-law's manner that after all he had nothing to tell him about Mr. Slope. "No," said he, "certainly not—nothing will ever surprise me again." Very many men now-a-days besides the archdeacon adopt or affect to adopt the doctrine; but nevertheless, to judge from their appearance, they are just as subject to sudden emotions as their grandfathers and grandmothers were before them. nil admirari "What do you think Mr. Arabin has done?" "Mr. Arabin! It's nothing about that daughter of Stanhope's, I hope?" "No, not that woman," said Mr. Harding, enjoying his joke in his sleeve. "Not that woman! Is he going to do anything about any woman? Why can't you speak out, if you have anything to say? There is nothing I hate so much as these sort of mysteries." "There shall be no mystery with you, Archdeacon, though of course it must go no further at present." "Well." "Except Susan. You must promise me you'll tell no one else." "Nonsense!" exclaimed the archdeacon, who was becoming angry in his suspense. "You can't have any secret about Mr. Arabin." "Only this—that he and Eleanor are engaged." It was quite clear to see, by the archdeacon's face, that he did not believe a word of it. "Mr. Arabin! It's impossible!" "Eleanor, at any rate, has just now told me so." "It's impossible," repeated the archdeacon. "Well, I can't say I think it impossible. It certainly took me by surprise, but that does not make it impossible." "She must be mistaken." Mr. Harding assured him that there was no mistake; that he would find, on returning home, that Mr. Arabin had been at Plumstead with the express object of making the same declaration; that even Miss Thorne knew all about it; and that, in fact, the thing was as clearly settled as any such arrangement between a lady and a gentleman could well be. "Good heavens!" said the archdeacon, walking up and down Eleanor's drawing-room. "Good heavens! Good heavens!" Now these exclamations certainly betokened faith. Mr. Harding properly gathered from it that, at last, Dr. Grantly did believe the fact. The first utterance clearly evinced a certain amount of distaste at the information he had received; the second simply indicated surprise; in the tone of the third Mr. Harding fancied that he could catch a certain gleam of satisfaction. The archdeacon had truly expressed the workings of his mind. He could not but be disgusted to find how utterly astray he had been in all his anticipations. Had he only been lucky enough to have suggested this marriage himself when he first brought Mr. Arabin into the country, his character for judgement and wisdom would have received an addition which would have classed him at any rate next to Solomon. And why had he not done so? Might he not have foreseen that Mr. Arabin would want a wife in his parsonage? He had foreseen that Eleanor would want a husband, but should he not also have perceived that Mr. Arabin was a man much more likely to attract her than Mr. Slope? The archdeacon found that he had been at fault and, of course, could not immediately get over his discomfiture. Then his surprise was intense. How sly this pair of young turtle-doves had been with him. How egregiously they had hoaxed him. He had preached to Eleanor against her fancied attachment to Mr. Slope at the very time that she was in love with his own protégé, Mr. Arabin, and had absolutely taken that same Mr. Arabin into his confidence with reference to his dread of Mr. Slope's alliance. It was very natural that the archdeacon should feel surprise. But there was also great ground for satisfaction. Looking at the match by itself, it was the very thing to help the doctor out of his difficulties. In the first place, the assurance that he should never have Mr. Slope for his brother-in-law was in itself a great comfort. Then Mr. Arabin was, of all men, the one with whom it would best suit him to be so intimately connected. But the crowning comfort was the blow which this marriage would give to Mr. Slope. He had now certainly lost his wife; rumour was beginning to whisper that he might possibly lose his position in the palace; and if Mr. Harding would only be true, the great danger of all would be surmounted. In such case it might be expected that Mr. Slope would own himself vanquished, and take himself altogether away from Barchester. And so the archdeacon would again be able to breathe pure air. "Well, well," said he. "Good heavens! Good heavens!" and the tone of the fifth exclamation made Mr. Harding fully aware that content was reigning in the archdeacon's bosom. And then slowly, gradually, and craftily Mr. Harding propounded his own new scheme. Why should not Mr. Arabin be the new dean? Slowly, gradually, and thoughtfully Dr. Grantly fell into his father-in-law's views. Much as he liked Mr. Arabin, sincere as was his admiration for that gentleman's ecclesiastical abilities, he would not have sanctioned a measure which would rob his father-in-law of his fairly earned promotion, were it at all practicable to induce his father-in-law to accept the promotion which he had earned. But the archdeacon had, on a former occasion, received proof of the obstinacy with which Mr. Harding could adhere to his own views in opposition to the advice of all his friends. He knew tolerably well that nothing would induce the meek, mild man before him to take the high place offered to him, if he thought it wrong to do so. Knowing this, he also said to himself more than once: "Why should not Mr. Arabin be Dean of Barchester?" It was at last arranged between them that they would together start to London by the earliest train on the following morning, making a little detour to Oxford on their journey. Dr. Gwynne's counsels, they imagined, might perhaps be of assistance to them. These matters settled, the archdeacon hurried off, that he might return to Plumstead and prepare for his journey. The day was extremely fine, and he came into the city in an open gig. As he was driving up the High Street he encountered Mr. Slope at a crossing. Had he not pulled up rather sharply, he would have run over him. The two had never spoken to each other since they had met on a memorable occasion in the bishop's study. They did not speak now, but they looked each other full in the face, and Mr. Slope's countenance was as impudent, as triumphant, as defiant as ever. Had Dr. Grantly not known to the contrary, he would have imagined that his enemy had won the deanship, the wife, and all the rich honours for which he had been striving. As it was, he had lost everything that he had in the world, and had just received his from the bishop. congé In leaving the town the archdeacon drove by the well-remembered entrance of Hiram's Hospital. There, at the gate, was a large, untidy farmer's wagon, laden with untidy-looking furniture; and there, inspecting the arrival, was good Mrs. Quiverful—not dressed in her Sunday best, not very clean in her apparel, not graceful as to her bonnet and shawl, or, indeed, with many feminine charms as to her whole appearance. She was busy at domestic work in her new house, and had just ventured out, expecting to see no one on the arrival of the family chattels. The archdeacon was down upon her before she knew where she was. Her acquaintance with Dr. Grantly or his family was very slight indeed. The archdeacon, as a matter of course, knew every clergyman in the archdeaconry—it may almost be said in the diocese—and had some acquaintance, more or less intimate, with their wives and families. With Mr. Quiverful he had been concerned on various matters of business, but of Mrs. Q. he had seen very little. Now, however, he was in too gracious a mood to pass her by unnoticed. The Quiverfuls, one and all, had looked for the bitterest hostility from Dr. Grantly; they knew his anxiety that Mr. Harding should return to his old home at the hospital, and they did not know that a new home had been offered to him at the deanery. Mrs. Quiverful was therefore not a little surprised, and not a little rejoiced also, at the tone in which she was addressed. "How do you do, Mrs. Quiverful, how do you do?" said he, stretching his left hand out of the gig as he spoke to her. "I am very glad to see you employed in so pleasant and useful a manner; very glad indeed." Mrs. Quiverful thanked him, and shook hands with him, and looked into his face suspiciously. She was not sure whether the congratulations and kindness were or were not ironical. "Pray tell Mr. Quiverful from me," he continued, "that I am rejoiced at his appointment. It's a comfortable place, Mrs. Quiverful, and a comfortable house, and I am very glad to see you in it. Good-bye—good-bye." And he drove on, leaving the lady well pleased and astonished at his good nature. On the whole things were going well with the archdeacon, and he could afford to be charitable to Mrs. Quiverful. He looked forth from his gig smilingly on all the world, and forgave everyone in Barchester their sins, excepting only Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope. Had he seen the bishop, he would have felt inclined to pat even him kindly on the head. He determined to go home by St. Ewold's. This would take him some three miles out of his way, but he felt that he could not leave Plumstead comfortably without saying one word of good-fellowship to Mr. Arabin. When he reached the parsonage, the vicar was still out, but from what he had heard, he did not doubt but that he would meet him on the road between their two houses. He was right in this, for about half-way home, at a narrow turn, he came upon Mr. Arabin, who was on horseback. "Well, well, well, well," said the archdeacon loudly, joyously, and with supreme good humour; "well, well, well, well; so, after all, we have no further cause to fear Mr. Slope." "I hear from Mrs. Grantly that they have offered the deanery to Mr. Harding," said the other. "Mr. Slope has lost more than the deanery I find," and then the archdeacon laughed jocosely. "Come, come, Arabin, you have kept your secret well enough. I know all about it now." "I have had no secret, Archdeacon," said the other with a quiet smile. "None at all—not for a day. It was only yesterday that I knew my own good fortune, and to-day I went over to Plumstead to ask your approval. From what Mrs. Grantly has said to me, I am led to hope that I shall have it." "With all my heart, with all my heart," said the archdeacon cordially, holding his friend fast by the hand. "It's just as I would have it. She is an excellent young woman; she will not come to you empty-handed; and I think she will make you a good wife. If she does her duty by you as her sister does by me, you'll be a happy man; that's all I can say." And as he finished speaking a tear might have been observed in each of the doctor's eyes. Mr. Arabin warmly returned the archdeacon's grasp, but he said little. His heart was too full for speaking, and he could not express the gratitude which he felt. Dr. Grantly understood him as well as though he had spoken for an hour. "And mind, Arabin," said he, "no one but myself shall tie the knot. We'll get Eleanor out to Plumstead, and it shall come off there. I'll make Susan stir herself, and we'll do it in style. I must be off to London to-morrow on special business. Harding goes with me. But I'll be back before your bride has got her wedding-dress ready." And so they parted. On his journey home the archdeacon occupied his mind with preparations for the marriage festivities. He made a great resolve that he would atone to Eleanor for all the injury he had done her by the munificence of his future treatment. He would show her what was the difference in his eyes between a Slope and an Arabin. On one other thing also he decided with a firm mind: if the affair of the dean should not be settled in Mr. Arabin's favour, nothing should prevent him putting a new front and bow-window to the dining-room at St. Ewold's parsonage. "So we're sold after all, Sue," said he to his wife, accosting her with a kiss as soon as he entered his house. He did not call his wife Sue above twice or thrice in a year, and these occasions were great high days. "Eleanor has had more sense than we gave her credit for," said Mrs. Grantly. And there was great content in Plumstead Rectory that evening. Mrs. Grantly promised her husband that she would now open her heart and take Mr. Arabin into it. Hitherto she had declined to do so. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Anthony Trollope (2002). Barchester Towers. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3409/pg3409-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

The Archdeacon Is Satisfied with the State of Affairs

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . Sir Louis Goes Out to Dinner here Sir Louis Goes Out to Dinner The next day Joe did not make his appearance, and Sir Louis, with many execrations, was driven to the terrible necessity of dressing himself. Then came an unexpected difficulty: how were they to get up to the house? Walking out to dinner, though it was merely through the village and up the avenue, seemed to Sir Louis to be a thing impossible. Indeed, he was not well able to walk at all, and positively declared that he should never be able to make his way over the gravel in pumps. His mother would not have thought half as much of walking from Boxall Hill to Greshamsbury and back again. At last, the one village fly was sent for, and the matter was arranged. When they reached the house, it was easy to see that there was some unwonted bustle. In the drawing-room there was no one but Mr Mortimer Gazebee, who introduced himself to them both. Sir Louis, who knew that he was only an attorney, did not take much notice of him, but the doctor entered into conversation. "Have you heard that Mr Gresham has come home?" said Mr Gazebee. "Mr Gresham! I did not know that he had been away." "Mr Gresham, junior, I mean." No, indeed; the doctor had not heard. Frank had returned unexpectedly just before dinner, and he was now undergoing his father's smiles, his mother's embraces, and his sisters' questions. "Quite unexpectedly," said Mr Gazebee. "I don't know what has brought him back before his time. I suppose he found London too hot." "Deuced hot," said the baronet. "I found it so, at least. I don't know what keeps men in London when it's so hot; except those fellows who have business to do: they're paid for it." Mr Mortimer Gazebee looked at him. He was managing an estate which owed Sir Louis an enormous sum of money, and, therefore, he could not afford to despise the baronet; but he thought to himself, what a very abject fellow the man would be if he were not a baronet, and had not a large fortune! And then the squire came in. His broad, honest face was covered with a smile when he saw the doctor. "Thorne," he said, almost in a whisper, "you're the best fellow breathing; I have hardly deserved this." The doctor, as he took his old friend's hand, could not but be glad that he had followed Mary's counsel. "So Frank has come home?" "Oh, yes; quite unexpectedly. He was to have stayed a week longer in London. You would hardly know him if you met him. Sir Louis, I beg your pardon." And the squire went up to his other guest, who had remained somewhat sullenly standing in one corner of the room. He was the man of highest rank present, or to be present, and he expected to be treated as such. "I am happy to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance, Mr Gresham," said the baronet, intending to be very courteous. "Though we have not met before, I very often see your name in my accounts—ha! ha! ha!" and Sir Louis laughed as though he had said something very good. The meeting between Lady Arabella and the doctor was rather distressing to the former; but she managed to get over it. She shook hands with him graciously, and said that it was a fine day. The doctor said that it was fine, only perhaps a little rainy. And then they went into different parts of the room. When Frank came in, the doctor hardly did know him. His hair was darker than it had been, and so was his complexion; but his chief disguise was in a long silken beard, which hung down over his cravat. The doctor had hitherto not been much in favour of long beards, but he could not deny that Frank looked very well with the appendage. "Oh, doctor, I am so delighted to find you here," said he, coming up to him; "so very, very glad:" and, taking the doctor's arm, he led him away into a window, where they were alone. "And how is Mary?" said he, almost in a whisper. "Oh, I wish she were here! But, doctor, it shall all come in time. But tell me, doctor, there is no news about her, is there?" "News—what news?" "Oh, well; no news is good news: you will give her my love, won't you?" The doctor said that he would. What else could he say? It appeared quite clear to him that some of Mary's fears were groundless. Frank was again very much altered. It has been said, that though he was a boy at twenty-one, he was a man at twenty-two. But now, at twenty-three, he appeared to be almost a man of the world. His manners were easy, his voice under his control, and words were at his command: he was no longer either shy or noisy; but, perhaps, was open to the charge of seeming, at least, to be too conscious of his own merits. He was, indeed, very handsome; tall, manly, and powerfully built, his form was such as women's eyes have ever loved to look upon. "Ah, if he would but marry money!" said Lady Arabella to herself, taken up by a mother's natural admiration for her son. His sisters clung round him before dinner, all talking to him at once. How proud a family of girls are of one, big, tall, burly brother! "You don't mean to tell me, Frank, that you are going to eat soup with that beard?" said the squire, when they were seated round the table. He had not ceased to rally his son as to this patriarchal adornment; but, nevertheless, any one could have seen, with half an eye, that he was as proud of it as were the others. "Don't I, sir? All I require is a relay of napkins for every course:" and he went to work, covering it with every spoonful, as men with beards always do. "Well, if you like it!" said the squire, shrugging his shoulders. "But I do like it," said Frank. "Oh, papa, you wouldn't have him cut it off," said one of the twins. "It is so handsome." "I should like to work it into a chair-back instead of floss-silk," said the other twin. "Thank'ee, Sophy; I'll remember you for that." "Doesn't it look nice, and grand, and patriarchal?" said Beatrice, turning to her neighbour. "Patriarchal, certainly," said Mr Oriel. "I should grow one myself if I had not the fear of the archbishop before my eyes." What was next said to him was in a whisper, audible only to himself. "Doctor, did you know Wildman of the 9th? He was left as surgeon at Scutari for two years. Why, my beard to his is only a little down." "A little way down, you mean," said Mr Gazebee. "Yes," said Frank, resolutely set against laughing at Mr Gazebee's pun. "Why, his beard descends to his ankles, and he is obliged to tie it in a bag at night, because his feet get entangled in it when he is asleep!" "Oh, Frank!" said one of the girls. This was all very well for the squire, and Lady Arabella, and the girls. They were all delighted to praise Frank, and talk about him. Neither did it come amiss to Mr Oriel and the doctor, who had both a personal interest in the young hero. But Sir Louis did not like it at all. He was the only baronet in the room, and yet nobody took any notice of him. He was seated in the post of honour, next to Lady Arabella; but even Lady Arabella seemed to think more of her own son than of him. Seeing how he was ill-used, he meditated revenge; but not the less did it behove him to make some effort to attract attention. "Was your ladyship long in London, this season?" said he. Lady Arabella had not been in London at all this year, and it was a sore subject with her. "No," said she, very graciously; "circumstances have kept us at home." Sir Louis only understood one description of "circumstances." Circumstances, in his idea, meant the want of money, and he immediately took Lady Arabella's speech as a confession of poverty. "Ah, indeed! I am very sorry for that; that must be very distressing to a person like your ladyship. But things are mending, perhaps?" Lady Arabella did not in the least understand him. "Mending!" she said, in her peculiar tone of aristocratic indifference; and then turned to Mr Gazebee, who was on the other side of her. Sir Louis was not going to stand this. He was the first man in the room, and he knew his own importance. It was not to be borne that Lady Arabella should turn to talk to a dirty attorney, and leave him, a baronet, to eat his dinner without notice. If nothing else would move her, he would let her know who was the real owner of the Greshamsbury title-deeds. "I think I saw your ladyship out to-day, taking a ride." Lady Arabella had driven through the village in her pony-chair. "I never ride," said she, turning her head for one moment from Mr Gazebee. "In the one-horse carriage, I mean, my lady. I was delighted with the way you whipped him up round the corner." Whipped him up round the corner! Lady Arabella could make no answer to this; so she went on talking to Mr Gazebee. Sir Louis, repulsed, but not vanquished—resolved not to be vanquished by any Lady Arabella—turned his attention to his plate for a minute or two, and then recommenced. "The honour of a glass of wine with you, Lady Arabella," said he. "I never take wine at dinner," said Lady Arabella. The man was becoming intolerable to her, and she was beginning to fear that it would be necessary for her to fly the room to get rid of him. The baronet was again silent for a moment; but he was determined not to be put down. "This is a nice-looking country about here," said he. "Yes; very nice," said Mr Gazebee, endeavouring to relieve the lady of the mansion. "I hardly know which I like best; this, or my own place at Boxall Hill. You have the advantage here in trees, and those sort of things. But, as to the house, why, my box there is very comfortable, very. You'd hardly know the place now, Lady Arabella, if you haven't seen it since my governor bought it. How much do you think he spent about the house and grounds, pineries included, you know, and those sort of things?" Lady Arabella shook her head. "Now guess, my lady," said he. But it was not to be supposed that Lady Arabella should guess on such a subject. "I never guess," said she, with a look of ineffable disgust. "What do you say, Mr Gazebee?" "Perhaps a hundred thousand pounds." "What! for a house! You can't know much about money, nor yet about building, I think, Mr Gazebee." "Not much," said Mr Gazebee, "as to such magnificent places as Boxall Hill." "Well, my lady, if you won't guess, I'll tell you. It cost twenty-two thousand four hundred and nineteen pounds four shillings and eightpence. I've all the accounts exact. Now, that's a tidy lot of money for a house for a man to live in." Sir Louis spoke this in a loud tone, which at least commanded the attention of the table. Lady Arabella, vanquished, bowed her head, and said that it was a large sum; Mr Gazebee went on sedulously eating his dinner; the squire was struck momentarily dumb in the middle of a long chat with the doctor; even Mr Oriel ceased to whisper; and the girls opened their eyes with astonishment. Before the end of his speech, Sir Louis's voice had become very loud. "Yes, indeed," said Frank; "a very tidy lot of money. I'd have generously dropped the four and eightpence if I'd been the architect." "It wasn't all one bill; but that's the tot. I can show the bills:" and Sir Louis, well pleased with his triumph, swallowed a glass of wine. Almost immediately after the cloth was removed, Lady Arabella escaped, and the gentlemen clustered together. Sir Louis found himself next to Mr Oriel, and began to make himself agreeable. "A very nice girl, Miss Beatrice; very nice." Now Mr Oriel was a modest man, and, when thus addressed as to his future wife, found it difficult to make any reply. "You parsons always have your own luck," said Sir Louis. "You get all the beauty, and generally all the money, too. Not much of the latter in this case, though—eh?" Mr Oriel was dumbfounded. He had never said a word to any creature as to Beatrice's dowry; and when Mr Gresham had told him, with sorrow, that his daughter's portion must be small, he had at once passed away from the subject as one that was hardly fit for conversation, even between him and his future father-in-law; and now he was abruptly questioned on the subject by a man he had never before seen in his life. Of course, he could make no answer. "The squire has muddled his matters most uncommonly," continued Sir Louis, filling his glass for the second time before he passed the bottle. "What do you suppose now he owes me alone; just at one lump, you know?" Mr Oriel had nothing for it but to run. He could make no answer, nor would he sit there to hear tidings as to Mr Gresham's embarrassments. So he fairly retreated, without having said one word to his neighbour, finding such discretion to be the only kind of valour left to him. "What, Oriel! off already?" said the squire. "Anything the matter?" "Oh, no; nothing particular. I'm not just quite—I think I'll go out for a few minutes." "See what it is to be in love," said the squire, half-whispering to Dr Thorne. "You're not in the same way, I hope?" Sir Louis then shifted his seat again, and found himself next to Frank. Mr Gazebee was opposite to him, and the doctor opposite to Frank. "Parson seems peekish, I think," said the baronet. "Peekish?" said the squire, inquisitively. "Rather down on his luck. He's decently well off himself, isn't he?" There was another pause, and nobody seemed inclined to answer the question. "I mean, he's got something more than his bare living." "Oh, yes," said Frank, laughing. "He's got what will buy him bread and cheese when the Rads shut up the Church:—unless, indeed, they shut up the Funds too." "Ah, there's nothing like land," said Sir Louis: "nothing like the dirty acres; is there, squire?" "Land is a very good investment, certainly," said Mr Gresham. "The best going," said the other, who was now, as people say when they mean to be good-natured, slightly under the influence of liquor. "The best going—eh, Gazebee?" Mr Gazebee gathered himself up, and turned away his head, looking out of the window. "You lawyers never like to give an opinion without money, ha! ha! ha! Do they, Mr Gresham? You and I have had to pay for plenty of them, and will have to pay for plenty more before they let us alone." Here Mr Gazebee got up, and followed Mr Oriel out of the room. He was not, of course, on such intimate terms in the house as was Mr Oriel; but he hoped to be forgiven by the ladies in consequence of the severity of the miseries to which he was subjected. He and Mr Oriel were soon to be seen through the dining-room window, walking about the grounds with the two eldest Miss Greshams. And Patience Oriel, who had also been of the party, was also to be seen with the twins. Frank looked at his father with almost a malicious smile, and began to think that he too might be better employed out among the walks. Did he think then of a former summer evening, when he had half broken Mary's heart by walking there too lovingly with Patience Oriel? Sir Louis, if he continued his brilliant career of success, would soon be left the cock of the walk. The squire, to be sure, could not bolt, nor could the doctor very well; but they might be equally vanquished, remaining there in their chairs. Dr Thorne, during all this time, was sitting with tingling ears. Indeed, it may be said that his whole body tingled. He was in a manner responsible for this horrid scene; but what could he do to stop it? He could not take Sir Louis up bodily and carry him away. One idea did occur to him. The fly had been ordered for ten o'clock. He could rush out and send for it instantly. "You're not going to leave me?" said the squire, in a voice of horror, as he saw the doctor rising from his chair. "Oh, no, no, no," said the doctor; and then he whispered the purpose of his mission. "I will be back in two minutes." The doctor would have given twenty pounds to have closed the scene at once; but he was not the man to desert his friend in such a strait as that. "He's a well-meaning fellow, the doctor," said Sir Louis, when his guardian was out of the room, "very; but he's not up to trap—not at all." "Up to trap—well, I should say he was; that is, if I know what trap means," said Frank. "Ah, but that's just the ticket. Do you know? Now I say Dr Thorne's not a man of the world." "He's about the best man I know, or ever heard of," said the squire. "And if any man ever had a good friend, you have got one in him; and so have I:" and the squire silently drank the doctor's health. "All very true, I dare say; but yet he's not up to trap. Now look here, squire—" "If you don't mind, sir," said Frank, "I've got something very particular—perhaps, however—" "Stay till Thorne returns, Frank." Frank did stay till Thorne returned, and then escaped. "Excuse me, doctor," said he, "but I've something very particular to say; I'll explain to-morrow." And then the three were left alone. Sir Louis was now becoming almost drunk, and was knocking his words together. The squire had already attempted to stop the bottle; but the baronet had contrived to get hold of a modicum of Madeira, and there was no preventing him from helping himself; at least, none at that moment. "As we were saying about lawyers," continued Sir Louis. "Let's see, what were we saying? Why, squire, it's just here. Those fellows will fleece us both if we don't mind what we are after." "Never mind about lawyers now," said Dr Thorne, angrily. "Ah, but I do mind; most particularly. That's all very well for you, doctor; you've nothing to lose. You've no great stake in the matter. Why, now, what sum of money of mine do you think those d–––– doctors are handling?" "D–––– doctors!" said the squire in a tone of dismay. "Lawyers, I mean, of course. Why, now, Gresham; we're all totted now, you see; you're down in my books, I take it, for pretty near a hundred thousand pounds." "Hold your tongue, sir," said the doctor, getting up. "Hold my tongue!" said Sir Louis. "Sir Louis Scatcherd," said the squire, slowly rising from his chair, "we will not, if you please, talk about business at the present moment. Perhaps we had better go to the ladies." This latter proposition had certainly not come from the squire's heart: going to the ladies was the very last thing for which Sir Louis was now fit. But the squire had said it as being the only recognised formal way he could think of for breaking up the symposium. "Oh, very well," hiccupped the baronet, "I'm always ready for the ladies," and he stretched out his hand to the decanter to get a last glass of Madeira. "No," said the doctor, rising stoutly, and speaking with a determined voice. "No; you will have no more wine:" and he took the decanter from him. "What's all this about?" said Sir Louis, with a drunken laugh. "Of course he cannot go into the drawing-room, Mr Gresham. If you will leave him here with me, I will stay with him till the fly comes. Pray tell Lady Arabella from me, how sorry I am that this has occurred." The squire would not leave his friend, and they sat together till the fly came. It was not long, for the doctor had dispatched his messenger with much haste. "I am so heartily ashamed of myself," said the doctor, almost with tears. The squire took him by the hand affectionately. "I've seen a tipsy man before to-night," said he. "Yes," said the doctor, "and so have I, but—" He did not express the rest of his thoughts. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Anthony Trollope (2002). Doctor Thorne. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3166/pg3166-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

Stories, News & Mentions about GROUNDNEWS

Groundnews’s Stories on HackerNoon

Groundnews's News & Mentions