Unscheduled tech challenges delayed this platter of link sausages. Don't worry, though: With modern preservative techniques, they're just as fresh and wholesome as they ever were. Admittedly that's "not very much," but at least I'm not charging more for any extra ingredients.
- Censorship pisses me off. It doesn't matter whether it's general "think of the children's morals" bullshit (all too often originating with truly upstanding "community leaders"), or just harassment of academics who (peacefully) undermine Establishment narratives (presuming he makes it out). Not so ironically, but rather predictably, many of the prospective censors haven't actually read the books themselves, and just don't get that with many entertainers, "It's an act, lady!" Hell, they're doing better in Blighty.
Dammit, the entire point of "freedom of speech," and in general of "representative democracy," is that you just might learn something if you hear from — and more particularly listen to — people whose viewpoints vary from yours. It's rather interesting how few of those advocating censorship (and restrictive visions of "morality") have, or have had, those "good factory jobs" on which some want American education to focus (entirely unlike this guy, of course). What that implies about limiting education and libraries and bookstores and music to unchallenging, preapproved pablum is not very favorable; but you'd have to hear it first…
- …which won't happen anywhere the Pentagon if Major Major Major gets his druthers. Fortunately, it appears that at least some media outlets give at least lip service to their constitutional role over their financial advantage. Right now, that is; we'll see in three to six months, won't we? Not at FEMA, though. Or the Department of Justice. And maybe Blighty has similar problems, so I'm rescinding the faint praise buried in the preceding sausage's ingredient list (right after sodium erythrobate), unlimited surveillance being the flip side of supressing journalistic "oversight."
- How about something a little cheerier? (Uhoh — when he says something like that it's usually anything but.) Consider the social advances that might be made by "AI"-based inventions and patents — at least while they're not hallucinating — and in music, especially the quasiindustrial kind.
- Meanwhile, musicians and authors continue to be underpaid as gamblers unqualified to either perform music or write books end up making all of the critical decisions about which ones to distribute and how to promote them. Not to mention that pay scale in the first place; it simply would not do for expectations of prosperity, or even bland middle-class comfort, of actual practitioners in the arts to take any profit-making potential away from trust-fund kids and techbros riding their luck as if it reflects actual merit, or enhances their private collections of objects in a way reminiscent of formalized magic.
- All of which is substantially less disturbing — at least to nerds like me, of whom there appear to relatively few (perhaps for the best) — than rows over the pending (purported) "Restatement of Copyright" that blithely ignores that at least in the US, we already have a Restatement of Copyright. For all its flaws, the Nimmer treatise is treated almost exactly like a Restatement, quite similarly to other (flawed!) Restatements like Conflicts of Law and Torts. Of course, the "guiding members" of the committee pushing the Restatement and I have had our disagreements in the past, especially regarding misuse of mislabelled, cherry-picked evidence to support a predisposition. It's even been in public, more than once. So I'm not precisely the most disinterested, neutral evaluator of this ALI effort; just because I believe many of its precepts and interpretations are so wrong that they're unworthy of being adopted by the ALI doesn't mean you should believe me uncritically. Which rather brings this ring of link sausages back to the first one, doesn't it?