Earlier this week, we were only a couple minutes off (Eastern Standard Time) — and the treatment of former comrades is already all too consistent. Which should shed quite a bit of light on whether this has anything to do with "ideology" or "principle"… before it Snowballs too much, on the perhaps-inevitable slide toward Shostakovich's fate.
- There's been some rather bizarre and, at least cumulatively, disturbing news in the last couple months in and around publishing.1 Perhaps the most obvious is yet another shoe dropping in the single-most-profitable area of publishing: for-profit restricted-focus academic journals. Nobody is looking at oligopolistic practices there, of course; and certainly not for stock photography frequently relied upon for cover images (sometimes with dire consequences due to rampant incompetence and deception regarding "permission" throughout publishing, but who's counting?). At least there wasn't outright forgery… this time; no guarantees concerning "AI-generated art" slipping in without proper attribution, though.
- That's less disturbing, though, than silent defaults for writers' drafts to be assimilated by
the Borga large-language model. This is, or should be, a big hint to anyone who handles confidential information — especially, but not only, lawyers: Cloud-Based Executables Are Not Your Friends. Or at least not your clients' friends. It's not going to be long at all before a FISA warrant issues (if I'm not already late with that). - We don't blame you — you were only doing your job, Mr Parsons. Given this sort of effort, one wonders just how accurate the information making its way to
the Inner Partyupper-management MAGAts is going to be. Perhaps they'll end up tilting at the wrong windmills, despite their intent to blow them up.One also wonders if the real "deep state" actors are the self-righteous apparatchiks who keep ensuring ballots have only the same bad choices, I probably shouldn't say that as I just received my ballot in the mail this afternoon.