Just put the <SARCASM> tag on everything on this platter — but it's also full of serious points, which may perhaps be best appreciated with a shot of bitters (Angostura is probably the most widely available).
- You really know that things are bad in political discourse when the White House sounds substantially less credible than a convicted perjurer (who, at least this time, brought documentation to back up his sworn testimony and offers more). If there's any contempt here, it's the contempt endemic in those who have power who believe that they're entitled to both power in the sense of being "representatives" and power in the sense of "autocracy." And that's regardless of purported ideology or party affiliation.
After all, the mythical computer that always lies gets defeated every time, even in the worst-written dreck. The hard part is distinguishing the true bits in a habitual liar's sworn testimony. It's not that there are none; it's that believing them in isolation from anything else is difficult, especially when those accusing them most vociferously of lying sound like they've never heard of Proverbs 28:1 by fleeing from showing their tax returns, which would tend to refute some of the lies coming from that liar.
What this fiasco says about legal ethics and the efficacy of bar discipline is left as an exercise in frustration. And I'm explicitly referring to professional misconduct during the hearing by more than one member of the bar (which no longer includes Mr Cohen…).
- More shocking, shocking news out of H'wood: Nobody in LA can spell "conflict of interest" if given the first dozen letters. There's another potential writer's strike looming, this time because the (largely coopted, but that's for another time) Writer's Guild is demanding that talent agents refrain from being on both sides, especially in the same transaction. The agents' trade association, however, wants signs that the Guild is willing to "compromise" on a basic principle of ethics. Many industry "insiders" claim that the entire system of H'wood would collapse if social-climbing rentseekers couldn't shift from role to role, even in the same transaction when their clients' interests are in making producers pay the talent more but their personal interests are in making producers (themselves) pay talent less — let alone the temptation to do so in general, which even a profession with as many loopholes in its ethics rules as the law forbids (at least without a knowing waiver) (and see also the next three rules thereafter). And H'wood falling apart would be a bad thing after this round of Oscars?
This is precisely why unionization is all too often not just helpful, but necessary. Of course, because the WGA needs to continue working with these hypocritical assholes, it can't actually call them hypocritical assholes. At least not in public. Non-screenplay authors don't have the same insulation (or unionization rights!), so they can't call all too many book packaging operations out for even worse misconduct. In short, unions in the arts (and, for that matter, in public service, ranging from teachers and nurses and cops to disability-claim processors) aren't so much about the facial-rate-of-pay issues as about the outright abuse and fraud issues… but the only leverage available for the latter is giving unions power over the former, in a system in which "capital accretion" is the only purpose of damned near anything and venture capitalists will buy out or otherwise take control of the exceptions.
- Meanwhile, Apple's COO says trust him, Apple isn't elitist. Nope: A company that obstinately refuses to conform to any standard it can possibly hope to evade for the last few decades — the one-button mouse, the lack of filename extensions, spiral floppy disk formatting, refusal to provide service manuals to non-employees, nonsegmented addressing (and that's just the 1980s); we'll avoid, for the moment, the non-user-removable/replaceable battery (which is also a security issue), the utterly nonstandard connectors. the missing connectors that force users who want to use a headset with their phones, as implicitly required by the laws of a couple of dozen states for drivers, to pay an order of magnitude more for a substantially less-capable headset — isn't elitist at all. Neither is it elistist because it disables transfer of purchased iTunes content to a new machine (even a new Apple machine) without paying for a more-bells-and-whistles-but-actually-less-capable software "update" and a subscription fee for access to material that is not stored in the cloud, but locally. Neither is it elitist because it continues to refuse to comply with data-storage formats and standards, such as the completely unnecessary workaround required to embed fonts in epubs to make them readable on Apple devices and saleable through Apple "stores." Neither is it elitist because it charges an exhorbitantly premium price for often-inferior and source-locked hardware.
I've seen more accommodation and flexibility from cable-TV providers!
Nope. That's not elitist at all. In this sense, I believe Mr Williams… because it's almost all an obvious and almost inevitable consequence of corporate dumbism, not elitism. Consider the legendary hostility of Apple hardware and software to people who — unlike the late Mr Jobs — got decent grades in eighth-grade typing, and have since gone on to write long documents all by themselves (instead of assembling parts other people have provided) and edit them and revise them extensively into a coherent whole that does not rely upon cheap and often irrelevant eye-candy (elitism would include a help system linking directly to Tufte, if "good and clear communication" is "elitist"). Or who can independently operate their index and middle fingers (same underlying issue, I suspect) and therefore demand a two-button mouse, just like in the 1970s at Xerox's lab just down the road from Cupertino… and other 1970s military applications that used trackballs. Or who select things to do by other than pointing at items on a list someone else has created at the factory without detailed knowledge of what actually needs to be done. Or who think that fine points of design that are to the taste of high-level, highly-paid managers with little or no experience working in resource-restrictive environments definitively determine the functions directly available to people in the field without extensive customization that gets trashed with every upgrade.
Apple isn't alone in this. It's merely one of the worst offenders; in that, it's up against some pretty stiff competition. Just try comparing the user interface of current versions of either Microsoft Office or even LibreOffice to functions actually used in writing more than a two-page letter or crappy-graphic-laden sales flyer… let alone an academic paper, a legal document (especially on lined pleading paper!), or even as plain-vanilla-formatted an effort as the draft of a novel. But it's not elitism: It's contempt. OK, I guess that is a form of elitism. Never mind.
- This one has been fermenting for a month, so it's rather kimche-like. Shame on you, Grauniad books editor and interviewees, for your shortsightedness concerning short fiction. The closest any of the fifty stories on the list come to speculative fiction — you know, the stuff that appears in books and magazines with dragons and rocketships and occasionally a single, staring eye on the cover, even when it's as unrelated to any of these tokens as "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" — is one piece from Angela Carter, and perhaps (but only perhaps) one nineteenth-century story from Edgar Allan Poe that is "speculative" only in that it presents a horror-like internalized view of quasi-Judaic guilt. If it was good enough for Borges (whose notable absence from the list can perhaps be excused by the "written in English" trope, which has problems of its own!) and Saramago (ditto) and Voltaire (ditto, ok, last time I'm giving them this monolinguist excuse, even if the list does include Chekhov-and-I-don't-mean-the-Star-Trek-one) and Le Guin and Ellison and Wells — not to mention any of several much superior pieces by Angela Carter to the one on the list — the best short speculative fiction is good enough for more than 2% of this list. The less said about the other blind spots on this list, the better.
I specifically expect better from Hilary Mantel… except that the article itself is misleadingly cast with her name first when only a single one of the stories is her selection. The real "villain" here is Chris Power, responsible for half the list. In the end, this is the elistist entry on this platter (as noted, the Apple item is just contempt).
- Last, a more hopeful item, but it still has some contempt for (aspiring) officials in it. Chicago is going to choose a black woman as its next mayor, after the Democratic primary rejected a Daley. Good {unbelievably foul and offensive string of expletives deleted} riddance. At least for the present: I strongly doubt that family is capable of learning a damned thing, let alone that "family connections do not entitle one to office in a representative democracy." And, as that article neglects, it appears that liberal white voters played an important role, due to low voter turnout which was even lower among black voters.
Neither of these women is immune from connection to Chicago machine politics; politics in Chicago really is a dirty game dominated by dirty players. But at least one of them appears to have had a bath recently, before diving back into the mud puddle. And both of them are demographically distinct from Chicago's past "leadership," although they're still going to be stuck dealing with a City Council (and County Council, of which one of the two candidates is a member) that is ardently nonrepresentative and a national synonym to this day for "corruption" — deservedly so.