Fortunately, not black pudding; just a near relative of its main ingredient.
- For the narcissistic jackasses down in the Bay Area who think they're entitled to declare themselves a "library" because they're not charging people to download copyrighted material, a few words from someone who knew you. (I won't say "rest in peace," he didn't want "peace." At least not that kind.)
If you had explored, purchased, and farmed a piece of land in, say, Central Texas in about 1880, how would you feel about an oil company coming along and taking all the oil for free, because (a) the public "needed" it, (b) it's separate and different from the actual dirt, and (c) you had already gotten what (the oil company claims) is a fair return? That the oil company had the power and ability to, in practice, make "all your oil are ours," did not give it the authority or right to do so. So, too, with digitized books, etc. And pointing out the difference between "ability" and "authority" is not standing in the way of Progress - particularly not "progress in the sciences and useful arts."
- I'm incredibly pissed off at the aid and comfort being provided to enemies of the Constitution by the political appointee current leadership of the United States Department of Justice. (That's the less-inflammatory version.) One of the sorrier examples of Academy-related problem children from my first profession may skate due to incompetence, arrogance, and political opportunism by purported representatives of my second profession.
Fortunately, I'm no longer subject to Article 88 (I'm aged out, too!), so I can just say that I hold Mr Barr and his henchbacteria beneath contempt. As I do their respective bar-regulation authorities and their refusal to enforce the requirement that attorneys must maintain independent legal judgment — independent of any nonlegal impetus. Oh, wait a minute — the DoJ is outside of the protected class identified in Article 88 in the first place, so there's no problem (just with Article 133). <SARCASM> Any relationship to the prosecution-provided defense theory underlying this "filing" is intentional… and intended as food for thought. </SARCASM>
- Speaking of contempt, the contempt I have for subprime and predatory lenders is closely related to the contempt I have for their more-"legitimate" counterparts — especially those continuing to demand high positive returns from residential real-property investment during this public health crisis. The bottom line concerning the arrogant underpinning of the latter is that they're special snowflakes: Real-property investment is supposed to be essentially risk-free — it's the only property that's "real" — so those who invested in it seeking rents (pun intended) are morally exempt from sharing in the risks and costs borne by everyone else.
Which, now that I think about it, explains a lot about subprime lending, too… especially when, as in discovery many years ago, one pierces the veil of ignorance to find the lenders' respective original positions (not to mention sources of funds, and their original and present ownership chains). All too often, subprime lending — whether real-property related or concerning anything else — is on terms that can't be refused.