I feel a lot like George entering the bowling alley in Pleasantville: "Rain. Real rain." I've missed it.
- Over at The Economist (and I'm a bit apprehensive about the ownership change), there's a Dorian Grey-like picture of an argument that will be current concerning print publishing in about a decade. A decade? Well, it's been going on in recorded music for about two years now, and there's that historical twelve-year gap... so, what are the cost, compensation, and risk factors of the various players in recorded music? And more to the point, how does the corresponding analysis look for print publishing — let alone e-books? Because unlike recorded music, the "method of consumption" transformation is far more significant for text.
- And so another martyr to TheocracyNow! has been made — one who, based on her public statements anyway, doesn't quite understand anything about what is going on. That's disturbing about a government official in and of itself, but hardly that surprising; the County Clerk in Champaign County, Illinois was unable to conceive of how the in-one's-face sign praising JC as the savior (emblazoned with stylized 48-star American flags, one might add, which was at least as ridiculous) just might be inappropriate in the office in which international students, staff, and faculty from the University of Illinois got their marriage licenses a decade ago.
The entire set of circumstances reflects a failure to accept the least-quoted of the Gospels and its command to purported followers of JC, and its not-quite-explicit-enough-for-morons rejection of theocracy:
They said, "Caesar's [face is on the coins]." Then he said to them, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."
Matthew 22:21. Unless, that is, one wants the Pharisees in charge. Again. And we in the West (think we) know what happened next...
- Due process has really been in the news this week, with the explicit rejection of the Deflategate penalty imposed on Tom Brady. (That will make my fantasy-league draft tomorrow a little easier.) What this says about the relationship among "prominence of participants in arbitration proceedings," the purported "mandatory and exclusive" nature of arbitration, and the reality of disputes and dispute resolution in the face of unclear factual foundations must be left for another time. It cannot, however, be left aside forever (I've been struggling with it for a quarter of a century in various contexts), no matter what the post hoc ideologically developed "federal policy in favor of arbitration" — a purported policy that appears nowhere in the legislative history, which is where one would expect to find it — seems to imply.