An Unreasonable Use of Resources

This sausage platter is not a reasonable use of my time and resources —

• Lots of obscure copyright and intellectual property stuff that I've neglected to mention of late, ranging from global applicability of US copyright terminations (n.b. beware broken/inaccurate links in the article) to still more nonsense about dog chew toys and trademark infringment of whiskey bottles. IMNSHO, these judicial opinions got tripped up by the process versus product problem in and around the arts and intellectual property — but that's for another time, another forum, another stultifying set of citations to authority that reflexively fail to engage with the process versus product problem by their very nature.

  But the winners, as usual, aren't the actual creators. Sometimes the winners are publishers (and some classes of reusers); sometimes the winners are TV production companies; sometimes the winners are an entirely different set of reusers. The only guaranteed winners are the lawyers. Well, the general class of transferees, too, but that's also for another time, another forum, another few hundred footnotes…

• …some transferees being less basically honest than others. (Translation: Companies House, in the UK, performs the functions — and more — of US state-level Secretaries of State and their divisions responsible for business organizations.) Of course, it helps the con artists Over There that the UK doesn't overtly prohibit unfair competition, for some value of "unfair" that depends largely on "how much did you pay your lawyers?"
• I'll just shove the politics in one big lumpy sausage for the day, so if you'd rather not barf you may want to skip to the next one. The current administration is trying its very best to be more corrupt than Ulysses S. Grant's, which was so corrupt that Congress established a civil service system to prevent personal loyalty "oaths" from being a criterion for getting or keeping a federal job. Civil service isn't dead yet, but not for want of effort. You want an example of the alternative? Try city hall… in Chicago. That's all too consistent with the only effective way to reduce the felon count among Illinois governors. Part of the problem (and not just the executive branch) arises from how we choose the winners, but even that piece goes not nearly far enough because it doesn't excoriate the corrupt, coopted gatekeepers (who usually epitomize "patronage").

  In the end, I'm not sure which is more disturbing: That cancellation upon accusation remains A Thing in the arts (especially when, no matter how well supported, the accusation is levelled at a creator or performer previously acclaimed as a role model for and around their work, particularly when there are clearly multiple sides of the story — perhaps all icky — which remain untested), but that opprobrium doesn't extend to politicians not just accused, but found liable for the ickiness after a full trial, or refuses to pay legal bills (that's just one example). If character matters for the one…

  What's next? Jackbooted thugs in the military? Unfortunately, that's not that implausible. The public has little idea how close we came to that; the end of the Cold War disrupted a decade of perceived-loyalty buggery, but not nearly enough.

  Obviously, the current administration is trying its very best to deflect attention from Secretary-Designate Brainworm's policy preferences utter ignorance by undermining medical research all by itself. Oh, wait, basic science isn't efficient because the outcome is largely unpredictable.

  "Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, when asked whether she could describe the scientific advances we may expect to achieve from the voyage of the Starfarer, replied with a single word: 'No.' [* * * *] 'Science,' she insisted, 'is not meant to create useful applications of scientific knowledge. [… A] scientist does not do an experiment to prove a hypothesis. A scientist does an experiment to test a hypothesis. You may guess about the answer that nature might give back to you. You may even hope for nature to give you a particular answer. But you can’t know what answer you'll get until you’ve performed the experiment. If you did, or if you thought you did, you'd be back two thousand years when experimentation was looked upon as unnecessary and vulgar, or, worse, back a thousand years when belief was more important than knowledge, and people who challenged beliefs with knowledge were burned at the stake.'"

  Vonda N. McIntyre, Starfarers (1989). It may be a work of fiction, but it's accurate, looking backward and forward… and as previous ingredients in this sausage and the news demonstrate all too well, the stake-burning was less than a thousand minutes ago.

• A little bit less politically — but not entirely removed from it — consider the healthcare problems caused by the division between "mental" and "physical" health. There is an underlying political issue: Convincing those who pay to do so when "the records" don't include clear and replicable "evidence" regarding the "condition" to be "treated"… not to mention that there's so little quantifiable treatment applying to all patients. Determining whether a patient needs, say, a particular dose of atorvastatin (brand name: Lipitor) to control lipid and cholesterol levels can be quantified; even the regimen and results of body-building can be quantified. Getting a trauma victim readjusted to normal function? Not so much.

— but I did it anyway.