The 2015 Turkey Awards

An annual tradition for over a decade! This is my list of ridiculous people from 2015 (so far). If you're not named and disappointed, you're not a loser (wait a minute...), just not quite ridiculous enough in those categories; the competition was especially stiff (limp?) this year. Pass me one of those rolls, please:

• The Greasy Gravy Award for oily publicity that makes the main dish inedible goes to the leadership of the Russian Athletics Federation for throwing all of its athletes under the doping bus... now and when it mistreated them in the past. Meanwhile, there will be no effective change in management, nor of the ridiculous overreaction by WADA that does not have athlete health as its first and only priority.
• The Red-Tide Oyster Stuffing Award for carelessly poisoning an otherwise tasty dish goes to the sad and/or rabid puppies who found a tiny thing to complain about and ignored multiple dancing elephants in the room.
• The Broken Wishbone Award for shattering dreams goes to American governors (and a few congresscritters) who know nothing of history... or of compassion. And, more to the point, of their own familial history.
• The Golden Gristle Award for assertions far too difficult to digest (and usually stuck in one's teeth) goes to the entire Heffalump presidential candidate pool, with a special shout-out to the thing on Trump's head. And we still have nearly a year more of this crap before the election (Jackasses, you're not much better).
• The Crabapple Pie Award for marketing something sour as something sweet goes to the industrial leadership of the entertainment industry for utterly forgetting about the human element that makes up — and is the purpose of — entertainment, ranging from H'wood's treatment of women to the entire Western industry's treatment of "persons of color" (which is quotated because I'm not "entitled" to be their advocate, despite my three-decade-long appreciation for that particular actor/comedian/entertainer, as I'm not one myself... an argument for another time).
• The Wilted Salad Award for the one part of the meal that's supposed to be "good for you," but is instead rather past its sell-by date, goes to the anti-processed-food movement for its constant rhetorical distortion of reality that masks its actual, worthwhile concerns. All modern food is "genetically modified organisms" in that at minimum it results from selective breeding over centuries, and all food except salt is "organic" in that it consists of mixtures and compounds based on carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The distrust of science in the lab (instead of trial and error, however scientifically informed, in the field) so seriously undermines the movement's message that it's more harmful than helpful... especially when advocates of blanket restrictions proudly proclaim that "Im [sic] not a scientist and not an authority on agriculture," disturbingly reminiscent of the Know-Nothings (at the same time some of their proposed practices, such as inadequate clearning and sterilization and certain pest control, encourage the spread of disease).
• The Brussels Sprout Award for stinky, slimy, overcooked, gentrified little cabbages goes to "law and order" advocates who encourage law enforcement systems to focus on "undesireables" and property crimes against the Establishment with consequences predictable in their nature if not their detail. When you treat a substantial portion of your citizenry as less than full citizens on the basis of their ancestry, you already have (and you're inviting more) problems.
• The Dried-Out Breastmeat Award for overcooking the books goes to Sepp Blatter and the rest of the senior leadership at FIFA... if only because they made John Oliver chug a Bud Light Lime (which, despite his highly competent technique, he could not finish).
• The Rancid Drumstick Award for something that should be edible, but isn't, goes to Vladimir Putin, leader of the (purportedly) post-Soviet Russia, who seems to be trying his best to be the sort of clown-like dictator sitting in Moscow often depicted in English-language fiction and film of the fifties through seventies... when his original remit under Sobchek and Yeltsin was as a reformer, even if now he's an antagonist for Rocky & Bullwinkle.

A Few Notes for the Ignorant Twenty-Odd

So, in a display of partisan ignorance that should surprise exactly no one, twenty-odd Heffalump governors and candidates have (mis)used their powers and candidacies to try to keep dark-skinned semitic Syrian refugees out of their respective states... and sightlines. Anyone with even a moderate connection to reality, however, should be able to see right through the almost-overt racism with little difficulty — presuming, that is, that one is inclined to look.

Consider, for example, Mr Huckleberryabee's slave-state crocodile tears for the insuperable difficulties that Syrian refugees will have adapting to Minnesota winters. Actually comparing Minnesota's climate data (January average temperature: 12F, not "twenty below"; but we have to excuse his ignorance, he's only off thirty bloody Fahrenheit degrees and describing conditions fifteen degrees worse than the January average in Nome, Alaska) to the Syrian mountains pretty well refutes his ignorant statement... and leaves one wondering whether internal immigrants from near the Rio Grande River should get equal, or even greater, sympathy. At least those whose native language isn't Spanish.

More broadly, consider the converse: Moving from a cold, wet Northern European climate to the harshness of the Great Plains or the American South and Southwest. One can easily imagine this same "humanitarian concern for inability to adapt" argument being raised against requiring the Irish of the late 1840s to endure the horrifying summers of Atlanta... back when the Irish were not classed as "white"... I wonder what Mr O'Reilly might think of that?

Then, too, all of this assumes that local citizens — Somalis in Minneapolis, Palestinians in Detroit, and native 'murikans everywhere — would provide no help at all for refugees seeking to adapt to local conditions. There is a three-hundred-year history of exactly the opposite in the Americas. Those of us who remember the influx of refugees from Southeast Asia in the 1970s — when some nativists raised the very same objections — are also rather puzzled by this assumption.

The "security" issues don't seem to be much better thought out. The US is taking in approximately ten thousand Syrian refugees (out of over four million registered refugees). Curiously, there's no comparison to NRA membership offered — which, coincidentally, is about four million (according to the NRA, anyway). Sadly, there is at least as much reason to distrust the collective terrorist threat from four million NRA members as there is from ten thousand refugees who've been living in bloody refugee camps. After all, the NRA members already have their guns, and won't need to acquire them over here before we pry them from their cold, dead fingers... (Yes, this is intended to disparage the NRA, but primarily under the law of large numbers.)

The shorter, sharper version: Read the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"
cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your
poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

and if we can't live up to it, send it back to bloody France where it immigrated from. That'll show real solidarity against the menace of da'esh.

While we're at it, let's send back every politician whose ancestry is primarily of immigrant stock, or are themselves immigrants.

Neglect

Two thoughts and a postscript for Veterans' Day.

1.

2. Spot the missing part of the proverb:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
for want of a shoe the horse was lost;
and for want of a horse the rider was lost;
being overtaken and slain by the enemy,
all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.

Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (1758).

Sure, this is just one version of an old proverb that utterly ignores every human being involved except the rider (officer who purchased his commission)/knight/king. There's no blacksmith to make the nail, nor farrier to properly install it, nor breeder nor stablekeeper to care for the horse, nor quartermaster to outfit the horse and rider, nor communications technician to make the message being carried by the rider (in other variants) both intelligible and secure, nor infantry dying on the field of battle waiting for the bloody message. The military-industrial complex, however, seems to be doing just fine... as is the bookkeeper or entrepreneur who was too damned cheap to pay either the people or the manufacturer for the damned nail in the first place.

 
PS I still say that Election Day should be moved to Veterans' Day... or, if it's too much interpretive gyration, move Veterans' Day to Election Day.

Silencing Creators Again

And now the House Judiciary Committee is participating in silencing the actual creators of copyrightable materials.

On Monday 09 November, the so-called Copyright Listening Tour will make it to the Bay Area. The list of invited participants (courtesy of the somewhat-caught-in-the-middle hosts at the Santa Clara University School of Law) almost entirely cuts out actual creators, as is usual for these things:

• Steve Bene, General Counsel, Pandora
• Laura Covington, Vice President of Intellectual Property Policy, Yahoo
• Clint Cox, VP of Technical Operations, Ultimate Fighting Championship
• Tony Falzone, Deputy General Counsel, Pinterest
• Alex Feerst, Attorney, Legal Team, Medium
• Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
• Zoe Keating, Cellist, Composer and Technologist
• Michael Keller, University Librarian, Stanford University
• Lisamaria Martinez, Director of Community Services, Lighthouse for the Blind of San Francisco
• Tyler Ochoa, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law
• Matthew M. Sarboraria, Vice President of Intellectual Property, Oracle
• Brianna Schofield, Teaching Fellow, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology
• Ellen Seidler, independent filmmaker
• Ted Ullyot, Partner, Andreesen Horowitz
• Ruth Vitale, Chief Executive Officer, Creative Future
• Timothy Vollmer, Manager of Public Policy, Creative Commons
• Kit Walsh, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO, iFixit
• Matt Zinn, General Counsel, TiVO

And it's actually even worse than it looks; there are no representatives of writing, or of fine art; there's the usual dominance by distributors and transferees; there's... well, to quote myself yet again:

Last, and far from least, a British lament on the various copyright debates that goes not nearly far enough — because the writer is being measured and academic, not because he's incorrect. One of the IPKitties is concerned about the absence of authors in the debates on copyright. The US Copyright Office's Orphan Works Inquiries are one example of the problem. I remember being awfully lonely at the west coast public "roundtable" on orphan works in 2005; I was the only representative of natural-person authors (and I include creators of nonwritten works) at the table — the other 19 represented transferees. Sadly, that reflected the makeup of comments in the 2005 Inquiry all too well, particularly in the initial-comment round (when only one written-works-authors' organization even provided an independent comment... out of over 600 received). The situation in the current round on orphan works is a little bit better, but human creators' interests — even including those who are primarily reusers of others' material — are advocated in less than a quarter of the comments provided. Things are even worse when considering information-age infringement issues, such as this all-too-typical "conference" on the DMCA that has no panelists whose perspective is that — or arguably primarily aligns with that — of the individual creators who most need a low-cost, low-formality means of objecting to online infringements of their works.

This is unacceptable and inexcusable. It's easily explained as a combination of the power of financial initial positions to set agendas and, specific to the Copyright Office, agency capture, but that's not an excuse. The ground was set when Congress — possibly, indeed probably, exceeding its constitutional power to do so — redefined "author" to include, and often exclusively mean, "patron" in the 1976 Act... without ever using the word "patron" in subsection (b). No other nation has gone so far, so claiming that it's a necessary means of complying with international norms is more than a bit much. The echoes of the complaints about "bureaucracy" in and around the second sausage on this platter should not be ignored... because in this instance there really is an unfulfilled entitlement; it's not only an ethical one, but a constitutional one. Indeed, there's an excellent argument that, under the current confused jurisprudential framework, virtually all of the proposed systems for dealing with orphan works constitute regulatory takings.

The current debate over copyright, especially as it is on the 'net, uncomfortably resembles the partition of a colony by colonial powers without a voice at the table for the indigenous peoples (or at least not one drowned out by moneyed interests like the East India Company). It seems to me that we've made that mistake a few times before with unsatisfactory results. We really, really shouldn't be repeating it.

C.E. Petit, Giant Squid, Anyone?, Scrivener's Error (23 Feb 2013) (links and emphasis in original).

Not acceptable. As usual, Congress is only going to listen to positions consistent with what its respective members' reelection finance chairmen want to hear. And the irony that what I'm quoting above would be fair use (if, that is, I wasn't the creator and copyright holder in the first place) will, no doubt, be lost upon the a**holes who think this sort of refusal to grant an audience to those who are not Party members has a damned thing to do with either good policy or democracy.