Oktoberfestwurst

Civilization ends at Quantico. Today.^†

• Speaking of obsessions with appearances (see also the note below), I suppose I should be happy that my appearance allows me to pass as an upstanding American of northwest-European ancestry. The contrast with some other people brings the world beyond Mayberry into a videographer's focus.
• One meme that continually annoys me is celebrities (of all kinds) misusing their platforms to spout bullshit, despite their best intentions (which are sometimes, but not always, good intentions). This all too often results from a passionate and personal interest not backed up by any study or exposure beyond their own personal experiences — an argument from authority, with the authority in question being celebrity and not expertise. Two current examples:
  • Jennifer Lawrence — a talented actor — went for the soundbite and missed when she proclaimed that Israel's atrocities in Gaza are "no less than genocide." They are certainly no less than atrocities; they are certainly no less indefensible. However, precisely because the stated target is a political opponent (however virulent and unjustified its positions are), the war crimes at issue are not technically genocide — which requires as its target an ethnoreligious identity.

    Ms Lawrence is right to be outraged. But words matter, especially when they're technical terms, especially near the eightieth anniversary of establishing their meaning — and consequences. That's not just for this instance, either: It's for the future.

  • Ms Lawrence's error is misuse of a technical term (encouraged, admittedly, by all-too-common misuse of that term in general discourse, often by those who should know better). This rather pales, however, next to a celebrity author accusing the actor who played the Mary Sue character in films of that author's most-famous work of "ignorance" for stating views closely aligned with that character — even if the subplot encompassing those views never made it on screen. Perhaps Ms Rowling's views have evolved since SPEW made its way onto the page a couple decades past. Perhaps there's a (private) incident or two in Ms Rowling's past that explain her feeling threatened by those whose gender identity does not match their at-birth genitalia (I feel no need to delve into it; many people have similar otherwise-unexplainable personal reactions, distinct from outright bigotry). But proclaiming that an actor with significant on-set and full-production exposure to the film industry — not to mention an education split between Oxford and the Ivy League — is "ignorant" about the full scope of, and personal rights concerning, those issues from the security of one's Scottish castle without disclosing any nonconclusory basis is more than a bit self-defeating. Or, at minimum, self-deceptive.

    If there's oblivious ignorance in this tiny teapot tempest, it's in the author's extension of unstated personal experiences or perceptions to universal declarations of (non)rights. Sadly, that's far too common a problem; the fundamental difficulty is that "civil rights" cannot be founded on whose turn it is to be the bully.

• On a slightly less obviously emotional controversy (but in the end equally so), consider the value of "a book," whether for outright piracy or to libraries. As to the latter, it appears that the publishers have learned at least a little bit since US v Apple, Inc. — they've done much better at hiding any price-fixing conspiracy from view, just as they have with "e-book royalties are 25% of net." Why yes, I am suggesting the (probable) existence of multiple loci of antitrust perfidy in commercial publishing.
• In a result remarkably similar to "dog bites mailcarrier," a study that appears to have adequate controls has concluded that anti-phishing training for employees doesn't work. What would work better is always reading e-mail as plain text, so that any mismatch between where a link says it's going and its actual address is immediately obvious; that, however, would conflict with sales-and-marketing memes and graphic design pushed elsewhere by many employers…
• I suppose we could just continue to obsess over the unfitness for purpose of tax systems and burdens. Yeah, that's absolutely going to involve fewer hidden agendas, conflicts of interest, ignorance, and bigotry in favor of inherited advantage of original position.

---

†  The contrast here with the CINC is beside the point — he's a civilian. The real problem is that the height-and-weight standards (not official) are largely established with a view toward "proper military appearance" (and fit into existing vehicles/aircraft/vessels) and not to capability as a warrior. A 177cm man weighing in at 95kg is more than 10kg over the standard but suitable as a starting running back. This is just slightly off… as was being a rail-thin football player (the other football) at the other end of the scale. "Warrior ethos" my avulsed toenails.

The contrast with the slack/missing mental fitness standards must be left for another time.

Just Eat It

I think I've finally gotten the sausage grinder under (at least temporary) control. The last four months have been almost non-stop output, even without any real inputs.

• So, the Orange Menace thinks that WalMart should just "eat" price increases caused by his tariffs. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose: If costs increase over time at his "luxury condominium and apartment complexes," perhaps Trump Tower (Chicago) rents should snap back to their 2007 levels (from what I've been able to determine, about half the current rate). Oh, that's not what he meant? He meant that just the price rises due to tariffs he personally and imperially imposed should be eaten? (We'll just ignore how much the steel to build that luxury complex came from, or had price influenced by, import tariffs on steel.) Oh, wait, he's a special snowflake; this is about appropriate behavior for the little people, not for Very Important Real Estate Speculators (With Substantial Histories of Bankruptcy and Tax-Loss Carry-Forwards, resulting in at least a decade of not paying any federal income tax despite Being Yuuuuuuuugely Rich)…

  No kids in Japan were starved in the production of this link sausage. I cannot say the same, however, for the kids of those holding "good manufacturing jobs" in Japan once the tariffs hit — that would be trickle-down economics, wouldn't it?

• Speaking of "the little people," consider early-career (and popularity-passed-them-by-with-no-other-skills-developed) artists. Or, as is all too apparent, don't; the objective of "ensuring" that there are more "good manufacturing jobs" for Real Americans has much more to do with ensuring that those Real Americans have not the resources, time, energy, or education to object… or retrain for new "good manufacturing jobs" fifteen years or so in the future, when the products and processes of their current jobs will no longer result in above-market returns for passive investors.
• The NEA, however, is just a tiny piece of artists' property interests. Like in their good government jobs… oh, wait, she's not an artist, never mind; I therefore shouldn't be considering the interests of a black woman doing an impossible job, well out of public awareness… It's almost like there's a hidden agenda involved, such as replacing the de facto Zeroth Restatement of Copyright Law (immensely flawed as it is, both in detail and in its underlying assumptions that favor transferees over natural-person creators and reject "creative process" as at all relevant) with one more favorable to techbros.
• But perhaps it's time for a sweeter, apple-flavored sausage (although nobody really wants to see how that one was made). Perhaps Mr Cook should just eat it… like he didn't do almost exactly a decade ago (just in case you're wondering, cert. denied).

Their Lips Were Moving

Let's just skip the medical TMI and get right to the platter.

• If you can take your attention off of the multiline train wreck in DC, you might want to sympathize a bit (or perhaps enjoy some schadenfreude) with the poor, poor executives at Apple. Smacked around by the European Commission and by a respected US District Judge in the same month for antitrust… issues. It's not like they weren't warned about turning the Apple IIe (we'll just elide the Apple III as if it never happened) from an open system to a walled garden with the Mac, although that's nearly half a century ago. More to the point, it's not like they weren't warned about executives-as-witnesses whose greatest economy was with the truth about a decade ago — also regarding antitrust.
• Apple's colleague down the street isn't doing much better. Not only was it also fined by the European Commission (first link in the preceding sausage), but it disrespects all IP that it doesn't own. This is a far-from-unique issue among IP transferees, but it's particularly annoying coming from a company that traffics in personally identifiable data. It's also quite interesting that different divisions, and different product lines, of the same corporation have different, but overlapping, variants on IP rights that end up pointing at the same underlying foundation: Only our IP has value.
• Speaking of transferees taking all the seats at the table (and disrespect of a major actor for everyone else's IP), the ongoing lawsuit by Big Phonogram against the Internet Archive continues to stumble along, perhaps toward an endpoint. Or perhaps not; in any event, this is one bit of IP litigation that I wish both sides would lose — Silicon Valley learned everything it knows about "only my IP rights deserve respect" from Nashville.
• Returning to European concerns, there's an interesting case on the minutiae of trademark law brewing that has important implications for certain disreputable publishing practices. As this blawg's only feline friend the IPKat asks, "Is it deceptive to use a designer’s name in a trade mark if the designer is no longer with the company?" If the CJEU says "yes," or even "maybe," that would have profound implications for works written by other than the identified author. That's not to say the "ghostwriting is to be forbidden" — just that if it's a deceptive act to attribute a design via mark to someone no longer with the company, attributing a book to someone who didn't write it while hiding the identity of who did is also a deceptive act. Hmmmmm, can I think of a political figure implicated in this sort of thing?
• Then there's… this long-running fiasco. Bluntly, Ms Palin, you clearly have little idea of what "incitement" means — and implies.

That's enough for now. I'll try to emerge from the fallout shelter a little more often than I have this month.

Nonendorsement From a Dog-Loving Parent

…that is, about as far from a childless catlady as one can get…

OK, I lied; I will make an endorsement here. I hereby endorse ensuring that your voter registration is up to date (non-US citizens, too, but the link is for 'murikans). Many jurisdictions (not just US, either) have thirty-days-prior-to-election restrictions, such as not being allowed to vote in non-Federal elections if registration is updated less than 30 days prior to the election. And that's even more common outside the US.

• Although I'm hesitant to give this self-righteous jerk a platform, the MIT Technology Review already did, so the marginal damage is minimal. Chris Lewis bloviates — on behalf of the organization of which he is President, and I'm burying the lede here — that the Second Circuit's decision declaring that the Internet Archive's piracy is not protected by fair use will lead to the downfall of western civilization, brutal whipping of puppies, and destruction of all libraries anywhere. I'll grant that the current "ecosystem" is unfair to libraries, but this sort of "self-help" solution has already been rejected rather thoroughly in the context of book availability.

  If Apple is suggesting that Amazon was engaging in illegal, monopolistic practices, and that Apple's combination with the Publisher Defendants to deprive a monopolist of some of its market power is pro-competitive and healthy for our economy, it is wrong. This trial has not been the occasion to decide whether Amazon's choice to sell NYT Bestsellers or other New Releases as loss leaders was an unfair trade practice or in any other way a violation of law. If it was, however, the remedy for illegal conduct is a complaint lodged with the proper law enforcement offices or a civil suit or both. Another company's alleged violation of antitrust laws is not an excuse for engaging in your own violations of law. Nor is suspicion that that may be occurring a defense to the claims litigated at this trial.

  US v. Apple, Inc., 952 F.Supp.2d 638, 708 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) (emphasis added), aff'd, 791 F.3d 290 (2d Cir. 2015). (Ironically, many of the publishers Lewis would attack regarding their e-book pricing policies "pleabargained down" in that matter.)

  The real problem here is that Lewis is conflating publisher misconduct — and a pattern and practice of imposing publishing contracts that facially violate the Rule Against Perpetuities is certainly a window onto misconduct — with the impact on the author community of the so-called "CDL" (far worse than musicians legitimately complaining about Spotify). Any claim that his organization and/or the Kahlebros are merely engaging in "civil disobedience" paints the wrong house with too broad a brush, because those who will be most harmed by involuntary "CDL" acquisitions are the authors who have no control over pricing policies… and, because "commercial publishing" is in the strange position of being both an oligopoly and monopsony, never reaches the actual interior-decoration misconduct.

  Then, too, the broad brush spatters all buildings (and appurtenances) as if they convey only mere "fact," without regard to originality of expression. But that's for another time… and, more to the point, careful examination of the "lending records" to discern both (a) how much is nearly-pure creative expression like "fiction" and "poetry" and (b) how much it's just an attempt to move Grokster's goalposts without ever admitting that's what they're trying to do.

• Speaking of Apple, schade. It's worth pondering how this relates to the conduct at issue in US v. Apple; whether a quick note of parallels, a deeper examination of repeat behavior of (unpunished) natural-person miscreants, or a broad-ranging consideration of how bullying relates to multinational corporations, that pondering will be disquieting.
• As Judge Côte implied in that quotation above, there just might be an antitrust problem in the part of publishing that is Lewis's legitimate concern: Scientific (and quasiscientific) journals. (Keep in mind that, because PW has more conflicts of interest in reporting on industry financials than the world-champion catlady has cats, the financial figures appearing in the article substantially understate the profitability of those journals.) All before citations themselves go rogue, which is at the opposite end of the problem and reflects the "academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low" meme.
• Interestingly, we may learn more about Ozymandias and other portions of the classical "canon" for which we have only fragmentary third-hand descriptions. Advocates of "original public meaning originalism" should ponder the equivalent — discovery of a trove of documents from the 1770s and 1780s reflecting the thoughts of ex-slaves (manumissed or otherwise) and how they used and understood terms like "person."
• Offered without further comment, there are changes afoot for prepublication review.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

They don't respect you. With their fingers in their ears, they can't hear you. For many values of "They."

• That recorded deposition revealed a great deal about The Orange One (that we really already knew, if only we'd listened). Perhaps the most damning undercurrent, though, was Drumpf's mistaken confusion of the plaintiff with his ex-wife — which certainly explains both the "ex-" and The Orange One's inability to recognize that maybe (just maybe) he wasn't entitled (as a property right) to what it appears he took this time. One must wonder if the Access: H'wood "locker-room talk" was about a single incident… and exactly what kind of towel-snapping, stuff-the-nerds-in-the-locker locker room he thinks is appropriate when the military moved on from that crap half a century ago.

  Which leads to some cringing and anticipated sympathy for any person who is the… object of romantic overtures… from Baron Trump, who is at this writing inherently the worst possible candidate for respectful interpersonal relations: A rich white teenaged boy. (One with a name that sounds like the villain — an irredeemable rake — in parody of a Regency romance, doesn't it?) He's had such faaaaaabulous examples of how to treat other people with respect throughout his family, and the bonus of a Secret Service detail during adolescence that may well have fumbled a "no" from someone other than their protectee — especially if accompanied by a knee to the groin, or a slap, or any physical response at all. So there's a nontrivial probability of at least one future victim of a Drumpf male to cringe at in advance, although hopefully at least in a less tawdry location than a department-store bathroom. Nurture? Nature? Who cares — same result. Maybe he'll overcome it, but that's a steep mountain to climb above and beyond, ya know, the craggy foothills of raging teenage hormones.

• Then there's the current Lost Cause — which is far more closely related to the more-famous one than one might expect, or than can be explained in a single link sausage. A significant portion of the Heffalump establishment now wants to assert what is in essence a later-session legislative veto/override by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, thereby potentially causing the United States to default on debt. (And yes, Manchin is part of the Heffalump establishment, notwithstanding his stated party affiliation.) However, rather than engage in persuasion; rather than muster the votes to actually overturn prior statutes that mandate spending — that is, passed by majorities in both houses of Congress and then either signed by the President or enacted through a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress; rather than raise taxes on those who can afford it to pay for "the general welfare" (for some value thereof that used to be "paid for" by draftees and now just generally is neglected)… they're trotting forth Calvin Coolidge as the savior of baseball, apple pie, and America.

  Really.

  Leave aside that most apple pie is oversweetened with imported sugar produced under rather dubious labor (and too often human rights) circumstances; that baseball is a communist plot to destroy the aerobic fitness and team ethic of America's youth; and that they keep using that word "America," but I (descendant of immigrants) do not think it means what they think it does. Calvin Coolidge? Renowned philosopher of circular reasoning like "The business of America is business," which just sort of neglects the whole "When in the course of human events" and "honor, lives, and sacred fortunes" and "equal protection of the laws" parts of actually governing in a democracy? What this really demonstrates is the theocratic turn in Heffalump ideology — inability to conceive of legitimate dissent — combined with some really bad translations from dead languages (which, one might add, will be impossible without publicly funded education): Taxreductionsforusbutnotfortheearethenewshibboleth. Of course, absent that publicly funded education neither Senator Turtle nor Representative Nocommondecency would be able to pronounce that word (and it's a perfectly valid construction in German, which they'd know if they weren't busy trying to overturn a century-old opinion by effect).

  Debt-ceiling shenanigans make a heckler's veto look respectful. And good. Get over it, guys: At the time that it mattered, you lost. Just like the 2020 election, and yes I am trying to incite a riot — or at least a tempest in a teapot — by claiming that "election denialism" and "debt-ceiling brinksmanship" come from the same intellectual and ethical void. Now that Drumpf has no government position, Turtle and Nocommondecency are vying to fill an obvious abuse-of-power vacuum (and those of us who actually studied any science could explain to them the math demonstrating exactly how and why nature abhors a vacuum… if they'd hear it).

• Listen, we've had experience over here with brothers who are an embarassment to the head of state. I think in Blightly they were just trying to show the upstart colonials how it's supposed to be done. And very much the same with civil servants, who are neither to be seen nor heard. And definitely not respected as human beings… which is a common thread used to tie off all three of these link sausages. In a very negative-space fashion.

Illegal (or at Least Illogical) Fictions

I'm hoping to tell some truth with these fictions, simultaneously recognizing that hope is not a strategy.

• Del Boy is a Lit'rary Figure (with DCI Slater in figurative lukewarm pursuit), but certain pirate havens are probably out of luck in Germany. What's most interesting about these seemingly unrelated cases is that they're both cross-border, and in particular as to the purportedly "Swiss" operation (which, when I last tunneled into it pre-COVID, was majority-English-language media and vast-majority-English-language text).

  More disturbingly, the subtext of both cases is that the natural-person authors have no power. But we all knew that.

• We especially know that the individual authors have no power once amateur Firemen get involved. (Aspiring Guy Montags, that is.) And these amateur firemen are even more amateurish than most: Authenticity comes from actual knowledge making its way into a work — fictional or otherwise — and not from birthright, especially when that birthright considers only one dimension (Chip Delaney being an excellent example). Some lived experiences can give insight largely unavailable through research, and certainly provide perspective on both source reliability and subjective impression that gives substantial before-research-is-completed advantages to, well, Members. But not exclusively, and not by providing any actual insight into implications in a work of fiction… unless, that is, said work of fiction never interacts with any aspect other than Membership and its lived experiences. Including, among others, potential readers who are not Members.
• The "authenticity of creators" argument is disturbingly parallel to self-defeating corporate diversity policies; so parallel that, from some points of view, the lines merge — or, at least, their purposes do. Neither "authenticity determinants" nor "corporate diversity statements" are actually intended to promote or acknowledge diversity and difference at all; they are both about demonstrating tribal allegiance instead of, as the crowd outside Brian Cohen's window proclaims, actually valuing — actually being — individuals.

  The irony that the meme of "conformist authenticity" relates most commonly and most closely to works of fiction — works that at their core rely upon empathy to convey anything at all, even purportedly "pure entertainment" — seems to have escaped this narcissistic black hole. For example, there aren't a lot of currently active mystery writers who can "authentically" write about the mindset of a murderer… and the most prominent example of whom I can think writes from the perspective of the crime-solver, the other side of the jailhouse bars (except perhaps in Chicago). Similarly, most military fiction is written by those who've never had the joys or burdens or headaches of command; most "spy fiction" by those who've never been inside an intelligence/counterintelligence system or deep cover; to put not too fine a point on it, most Regency romances by those who've never been members of a hereditary aristocracy (let alone 200 years ago!) … and it shows, most of the time, only to have just enough startlingly authentic-seeming exceptions to give hope to others. Which is, in the end, the point.

• Then there's Death to Lightning, which is loooooooong overdue. Apple's approach has long been the equivalent of mounting the gear shift on the ceiling — it's even worse than English as the sole official language or the French dictionary police. One wonders if the entry for "Palo Alto" (associated with HP) has been cut out of all gazetteers found in Cupertino… which would be rather ironic given how much Apple's function and design imperatives still descend from a 1970s Xerox lab in Palo Alto. But then, recognizing irony has never been a strength of leaders in the tech industry…
• …any more than recognizing nonscientific inquiries has been common among pollsters proclaiming their allegiance to scientific polling. A recent example is one asserting that "Three in five of Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of economic recovery" — a nonsensical statement that requires having asked counterfactual questions to get any results at all. To begin with, no President has that power; if there's any one place to blame, it's the Fed, and even the Fed can at best nudge (not "handle") the economy. (Indeed, Congressional gridlock is by Constitutional design far more responsible; the President can't impose a budget!) And that's before getting into the polling universe's fundamental assumption, which is that it's some pollster's business about a subject's personal opinion in the first place; they clearly do not understand the concept of either a "secret ballot" or "in the context of the alternatives, this is least bad." Delving into the way this particular polling agency operates and imagines itself in public (the "About Us" page is highly revealing!) is even more disturbing to anyone who knows diddly-squat about experimental design, data validation, linguistic friction, or at the deepest level false dilemmas (because providing a range of "how strong" one feels merely hides the implicit duality). What that polling company ensures its clients "are sure" about is the bloody invoice.

Slashed Link Sausage Platter

No, not price-slashing; these link sausages are already free. OK, free of independently-imposed "user fees" that act as free riders on top of suppressed infrastructure investments, like the Direct Marketing Association does with its lobbying for lower per-item mailing costs for its crappy advertising. At least this blawg post won't take an extra day or three to get to you now.

• The European Union, in a laudable effort to reduce wasted electronic gear (not just chargers, although that's certainly the face of the effort), will require portable devices to use USB-C. Apple can just bloody well be unhappy; I'm old enough to remember having to buy the correct floppy disks.

  I also remember driving on the left side of the road in the UK, which stubbornly refuses to conform to world standards. Sort of like US civilian expression of dates refuses to conform to world standards.

• "New" taxes (no, they're not "new," they're merely "rolling back previous reductions") might soak the rich a little (registration-wall). At least until their lawyers and accountants find more loopholes.
• Speaking of "even-handed application of existing law," consider publisher mistreatment of libraries for e-book sales. Yes, "sales"… because noninteractive content doesn't meet the requirements for being "licensed material." Unfortunately, nobody is really asking very loudly whether labelling ebooks as "you get a license, not an owned copy" isn't itself an abuse of monopoly power… most especially not the source of this article, which I chose only because it's not behind a paywall.
• Copyright, and in particular music copyright, has some bizarre hangovers from nineteenth-century photography littered throughout it. When photographs first became copyrightable, copyright ownership was reified as persisting in the physical image-taking medium that was in the camera (the slide/negative/plate). Whoever had the legal ownership of that medium owned whatever copyright interests there were. Once musical recordings became an issue (even before White v. Apollo Music), the same principal was applied. Thus, we get to the "divided copyright" today that depends on who has "legal" and physical possession of the "master recordings." This leads to the excrutiatingly obvious dodge of rerecording one's own back catalog because there's a dispute between the recording artist and the owner of those master recordings. (I'm very, very carefully not inserting myself into the merits of the dispute(s)… or recording(s). Look, it's originating in Nashville, meaning that the probability of one side being absolutely free of chicanery is somewhat lower than the probability that I'll be named to the federal bench in the next round of nominations.)

  Which sure as hell leads to interesting questions about composer crediting, both the obvious ones raised in this article and the subtler ones arising in popular music. For example, how many "cover versions" actually properly, fully, and prominently credit the composer, let alone equally with the performer, in popular music? (Example: How many people think Jeff Buckley "wrote" "Hallelujah"?) And, lurking in the background in other areas, there are some ghostly echoes that presage the last sausage on this platter; cue the creepy music…

• At long last, we get to the slasher. I know, the suspense has been killing you. But this is more of a Three Stooges tale than an actual horror film, or perhaps Laurel and Hardy Meet the Statue in the Park.

  The short version is that Freddy Krueger has been reclaimed by his writer from the producer. This resulted from the writer — a freelancer — issuing a § 203 notice; the producer defended "but it was a work for hire by an employee within the scope of his duties" ("see? union? therefore employee!" is probably a too-generous way to summarize the argument; from this opinion, there was legal malpractice at every stage, all the way back to the initial relationship). The Second Circuit said "not so much," rejected that defense, and affirmed that the notice was valid.

  Keep in mind that the critical relationship began after the effective date of the 1976 Act, so if the bar had been doing its job, there would have been notice and seminars and sample contracts and so on adapted to the new law. The text of the new law had been fixed for a year and a half before it went into effect. Even at 1970s publishing pace, that would have been enough time even if the first drafts of § 203 (and § 304(c)) hadn't been in wide circulation for a couple years, and the first drafts of § 101 for longer than that. It was malpractice for providers of legal advice to rely on "the way things had always been" as definitive.

  Unfortunately, the opinion in Horror, Inc. v. Miller, No. [20]18–3123 (2d Cir. 30 Sep 2021) (PDF) has its own flaws, its own blind spots regarding "changes in law" — to name an obvious one, consider that the ABC test of Dynamex, which applies in California and increasingly across the nation, was a largely post-1980s response precisely to abuses and evasions encouraged by the thirteen-factor "common law" test "endorsed" by the IRS in the 1980s and relied on in Reid… but no longer relied on by the IRS. Under the ABC test, this case comes out much closer and probably differently. (Aside: California employment firms are desperately asserting that the ABC test applies only to wage-and-hours disputes, but it doesn't despite the apparent caveats in Dynamex itself; at minimum, it applies also to workers' compensation and employment discrimination suits, and not just due to California law. The film industry really doesn't want to get into workers' compensation for mere scribblers…)

  In any event, a "proud" film franchise has been slashed to ribbons as a franchise by its creator… who was the scriptwriter, not the producer. Nearly from beyond the grave. I look forward to a 2023 blockbuster that will get a direct-to-streaming release: Friday the 13th Part LXIV: Freddy Passes the Bar.

Unintentionally Revealing Link Sausage Platter

This platter showcases actual paragraphing — something you won't find in Big Media!

• From the world of "Why can't they both (or all) lose?" comes a pair of related stories. First, Apple's purported privacy focus (and sniping at Faceplant) is — as should be thoroughly expected by anyone who can spell "unlawful tying" or remembers United States v. Apple and recognizes that most of the same executives remain in place — less than credible (cf. also id. at 703 n.66). This is not much of a surprise; that Apple itself doesn't own the advertising referral network, like Google does, doesn't mean it doesn't use user data for its own financial benefit.

  Then there's the BFF of a carefully cultivated KGB/FSB source, who thinks social media is helping his opposition. Let's leave aside for the moment that said opposition is a lesser evil sort of "alternative leader" being opposed by a Bond supervillain, shall we? Let's also ignore that Putin's own minions have enthusiastically used [anti]social media for the same inimical purposes, and using the same methods, to which he's objecting, shall we?

• Carey Mulligan gave Variety exactly what it deserves, but was perhaps too nice about it… quite possibly because she lacks the egotism to proclaim exactly how right she was. The Variety reviewer has quite obviously never known any medical students, or premedical undergraduates, who weren't "from" LA: The hotness is in their minds, moreso than anywhere else, and their bright inquisitiveness and strength of personality don't come through well on the screen in the first place. Indeed, one of the laboratory guidelines in organic chemistry — a subject required for premedical students that I doubt more than half-a-dozen H'wood figures have even read the course-catalog description for; now that I think of it, one of those few is known for other things, but that's for another time — is "no contact lenses, no/almost no makeup, no flammable hair products, and remove or tape over your jewelry" which in the impaired vision of H'wood denizens puts all the hotness in the Bunsen burners and not the people.

  Even more than just "misogyny" — which is bad enough — is the overt ignorance and antiintellectualism. Which all too often expresses itself as misogyny, in that the "hot chick" (white, almost-always Northern European Christian and occasionally Hispanic but almost never Eastern or Southern European let alone from anywhere else) almost always is closer to the H'wood story center than any other female character… and on the incredibly rare occasions that she isn't, it's either a romcom or all-eye-candy anyway, and thus focused on surfaces (in H'wood) even more than usual. Perhaps it's because the schlubs in the back rooms can imagine that they're just one more round of plastic surgery away from being "hot," but even their narcissism recognizes that no plastic surgeon just off Rodeo Drive can elevate them from shallow or stupid. That takes years of work. In libraries and in laboratories and doing fieldwork, where nobody will see their hotness. Unless, perhaps, they imagine themselves as Charles Gordon without going through being on the blacklist, and that doesn't exactly turn out well.

  I haven't seen the subject film yet. I've seen enough of Mulligan's other work to be intrigued… and even before this became publicly controversial (nearly a year after a review based on a "beautiful-people-only" premiere), I had read that particular reviewer's review and decided that his (warped) judgment made it more interesting, not less. His outraged, self-centered reaction at being called out — his attempt to make this about him and his hurt feelings, not about the actor let alone the film — just reinforces that. It's sort of like classic Siskel and Ebert: for non-speculative-fiction films, many interesting and most worthwhile films were those that Gene loved and Roger was lukewarm about. (Gene's instincts about speculative fiction were unreliable, I'm afraid.) More disturbingly, though, it demonstrates that the reviewer knows not a damned thing about major aspects of sexual assault: It's about expressing power far more than about physical attraction (or any other kind of attraction), especially since sometimes — maybe even most of the time — there's a question of being "not my type," which is exactly the subtext implied here. His failure to recognize that in himself or his writing just reinforces the conclusion of misogyny.

  So congratulations, Variety: By thoroughly exposing one of your lead reviewers' blind spots, you've just made yourself even more relevant… in an obviously unintended way. (And we won't mention "media consolidation" here. At least not very loudly.) That an editor chose to run the review anyway itself speaks volumes; if it was so bad that it "required" a disclaimer, why print it in the first place? Somehow, though, I doubt that you're ever going to print a disclaimer for just being antiintellectual…

• OK, I guess we will mention media consolidation. Obsessive focus on soto voce targets isn't exactly new in media; Sauron's media empire, for example, isn't really about "profit" as much as it is about "influence" and "suppression of opposing views by restricting venue and shouting louder." When even the Authors' Guild wakes up (two months late… which is unusually quick for that misguided circus) and opposes the merger, it's time to ponder.

  It's time to ponder even when the Authors' Guild just can't stop itself from waving the "Amazon Is the Source of All Evil!" flag again. That this exposes the Upper West Side class bias in the Authors' Guild is neither unusual nor surprising; but then, I doubt that any senior official at the AG has been to a bookstore more than 100km from the Flatiron Building just to shop for his or her own books in more than a decade, so their idea of what a "bookstore" really looks like — especially in, say, a Big Ten town of 150,000 or so (it's a B&N), or serving the half-million or so between San Francisco and Palo Alto (ditto), or 100km north of Amazon's headquarters (ditto, although there is one alternative that's about one-third the size with an even larger proportion of non-book merchandise than a B&N, notwithstanding its unjustly lauded status as an "indie paradise") — leaves a lot to be desired. The AG just refuses to accept that its cramped membership criteria — and overt hostility to those who write for courses not found in the 1968 Fordham or NYU undergraduate course catalogs — has reinforced a cramped worldview that is itself the product of a century of "consolidation," given that almost no one who isn't the beneficiary of a trust fund or rich relative has been able to afford to be part of that lifestyle within 100km of the Flatiron Building since Sputnik. For all its faults, Amazon at present (even leaving aside COVID precautions; it really pisses me off that churches and auto repair stores are "essential," but bookstores and libraries aren't) manages to serve both those who already know something and want to expand it and those seeking to learn for the first time, whether through "fiction" or "poetry" or "nonfiction." (The less said about exactly how much nonreligious "poetry" even the best nonspecialist brick-and-mortar bookstores stock, the better… and how long it remains on the shelf instead of being returned for the newest hot (usually young) poet…)

  So welcome to the party, two months late. I don't call that "fashionably late," but then my experience with wine-and-cheese parties was limited to St. Louis and London and DC, not the self-annointed "greatest city in the world." The AG (and its allies, and looking at who is not on that list is itself revealing) has yet again demonstrated that civilization really does end at the Hudson — but the barbarians are on the eastern bank.

Diggin' in the Dirt

These link sausages are so dirty that they're guaranteed not to pass a USDA inspection. Fortunately, there are no inspectors in this Wurstfabrik… and even if there were, they'd have been paid off, in the fine tradition of the US agribiz.

• So Ms Thunberg needs to study economics before opining on something that isn't economic, Mr Mnuchin? Leaving aside that your own degree from early-1980s Yale probably doesn't qualify as "studying economics" itself, one must remember that the best way to get three opinions on where the economy is or is going is to ask two economists.

  Of course, that imprecation to Ms Thunberg is exactly parallel to what passed for "economic-sensitive reasoning" at Ford in the early 1970s, resulting in The Memo. Yeah, that's exactly what we want to hear from any government official.

• And makes just about as much sense as Apple's insistence on proprietary power connectors. It's sort of like insisting on the right of automobile manufacturers to have a smaller hexagonal nozzle opening that is only available at Shell stations. Well, no; it's exactly like that, as it's far from coincidental that in almost any given competitive circumstance, the Shell station has the highest price per gallon of equivalent-grade fuel. (And I'm really not interested in the supposed detergent advantages, which make little or no sense for the vast majority of drivers and vehicles even if replicably true and statistically significant, and I've not seen any double-blind, non-interested-party data so indicating.)
• Some good news from publishing: The wicked witch is dead. Stephen Joyce personally held back scholarship of James Joyce's work, and his assholery — there really isn't another word for it — deterred a number of young scholars in the 1980s from even trying. He also epitomizes the "worst case" issues related to droit morale, droit d'auteur, extended copyright terms, and the ugly intersection of "family privacy" and "semiconfessional and/or family-inspired fiction." And has thereby made it that much more difficult for those with legitimate concerns to express or protect them.
• But much more bad news from publishing. There's so much, in fact, that I'm just going to neglect most of it. There is one recent incident, though, that demonstrates all too well the problems with white (upper-middle-class-and-trust-fund) domination of commercial publishing. And it's a dirty, and inevitable, fight in which everyone ends up covered in mud. The author comes off as slumming and/or appropriating… to at least some extent. The critics come off as demanding that their own personal experiences are the only authentic ones… to at least some extent. The publisher comes off as utterly clueless about both the book it was publishing and its audience… to more than some extent.

  Failure modes like this are inevitable under commercial publishing's model: Those establishing sales and marketing and publicity plans have not read the book. At least the maroons pushing "high-performance cars" have at least seen them at auto shows or on the track. Hell, even marketing of firearms is dominated by actual gun-totin' 'murikans! But the practice of establishing sales/marketing/publicity plans and systems with no direct knowledge of the product being sold/marketed/publicized isn't just intellectually dishonest: It implicitly treats failures like this (which necessarily involve a lot of deceptive acts, conduct, and words) as a cost of doing business. Just like exploding gas tanks on cheap hatchbacks. Bloody free-riders.

Link Sausage Platter (No Leftovers!)

A thoroughly miscellaneous, but disturbingly related, platter:

• A little bit of holiday subversion for you: Limit your own ISP's tracking of your URL requests — and, at least as importantly, whatever one is sucking down that information at whatever coffee shop you're quickly connecting to for e-mail and antisocial media — by enabling DOH in your browser. The key word there is "limit"; this is no panacaea. I thoroughly expect one of the major ISPs (I would consider betting on Cox, but only if offered hefty odds; they're all sleazebuckets) to start quietly changing their terms of service to require use of the ISP's own address providers "for security and protection of intellectual property" within the next three months… if there isn't already something buried in there.

  This is also a subtle way to protest the commercial pushback against net neutrality. It's only a protest, though, because ultimately the origin of the actual traffic is available to the ISP… if it turns on certain aspects of its internal systems. Which might cost it money (if only for additional storage space for the header requests and processing power for managing it). Rather interestingly, DOH would have no effect at all on dedicated "apps" like Faceplant… which leads to interesting theoretical questions on property rights and rivalrousness (the latter of which is an illusory class-based construct to reify the superiority of land to all other forms of property, but that's for another time).

  Unfortunately, this has only a minimal privacy benefit, because it just shoves the data somewhere else. At least at present, though, that "somewhere else" is less prone to monetizing it. There's at least one or two additional layers of gauze between the IP address associated with a DNS request at a given DNS provider and knowing "who" that IP address is (even through a VPN). But at least it makes your own ISP work a little harder to profile your 'net activity. And monetize it.

• Speaking of inappropriate tie-in, consider repair costs and life-cycle closure when buying electronic devices. It would be one thing if all of the parts of Apple devices were themselves proprietary, carefully quality controlled, and actually easily available. That's three strikes, especially given the particular manufacturing processes Apple has chosen.
• Milan Kundera is a Czech citizen again. That I paid attention to this just shows that I'm old; damned few Millenials know who he is, let alone why his citizenship was revoked in the first place. It is both shocking and reassuring that they don't know about the Velvet Revolution… or its context… or the price (and sources) of all of those stains on the velvet. Ewwwww!
• On the other hand, there are Nazis using bill mills out there. OK, I've just taken a step down the road toward Godwin's Law (hi Mike!), but sometimes that's the actual subject of discussion and not a smear attempt. Organized groups with common policy positions are far from unknown. In this instance, though, it's First Amendment camouflage for activities and policies that actively undermine the First Amendment (and civil liberties more generally)… even before getting into the we're-going-to-strike-the-first-blow-in-class-warfare aspects hiding just barely under the surface. Or, as to a number of the backroom leaders at ALEC, not hiding at all.

  I'm not saying "Given Torquemada, all Catholics are antisemitic"; rather, I'm saying that Catholicism must openly acknowledge the currents of antisemitism throughout its history and structure, epitomized by but not limited to Torquemada. And nobody is exempt from this examination; I'm mentioning Catholicism here because it's an easily documented exemplar. As to ALEC, if you allow the misnamed Allian(3 Def3nding Freed0m (to Violently Impose Old-Testament-Style Orthodoxy, Religious Tests, and Bigotry) to sponsor one of your events, you've got Torquemada in your midst. In this instance, knowing that particular company that you keep is enough — regardless of any hypothetical merits (or self-interest) of your "content."

• And the company kept by too many scientists and scientific organizations included Jeffrey Epstein. What this really demonstrates is that neither government nor anyone else is willing to make adequate investment for profitability-not-guaranteed research. If research activities in the sciences (and elsewhere) were adequately supported without "must apply immediately" agendas, the entry point for the Epsteins (and ADFs) of this world would be much more limited… and obvious.
• All of which is less disturbing than rabid space baboons. Personally, I think Ms Vaughn was too easy on the fundamental conceptual and script problems with this "film." Attempts to impose an overt spiritual skeleton on narratives about space and exploration pretty uniformly fail, especially when there's any attempt to explicate them or analogize them to contemporary-to-the-author/scriptwriter concerns. (Exhibit A: The last two seasons of Battlestar Galactica (2004).) Part of this is, I think, because so few authors — and even fewer scriptwriters — have enough sense of wonder at the Great Unknown; they feel obligated to bring in more, and ironically enough more familiar, Great Unknown because they don't trust the other filmmakers, critics, or the audience to see enough profundity.

  As to Ad Astra, it's clear that nobody who had ever had anything to do with maritime or aviation operations had a damned thing to do with supervising the baboon cage setup/scene/sequence, or indeed damned near anything else. The film ignores safety and communication systems and procedures that are extraordinarily routine even in non-experiment-related sea and air operations, not to mention all of the backups and session memos and everything else done by competent researchers in any context (and not just regarding the baboons). I'm hesitant to award a negative rating to an entire film over one scene/sequence. Hesitant but, in this instance, not unwilling… especially when the rest of the film, in Ursula K. Le Guin's immortal words of nearly half a century ago, could have been told at Poughkeepsie.

Bond 26 Leak

After Daniel Craig actually steps away from the role, for realz this time, following the 2020 release of Bond 25, the producers are going to need to come up with a new Bond — and new international conspiracies to fight. In the past, they've had one, but it's obsolete (all too much like British intelligence/counterintelligence primacy, even without considering Brexit).

First, of course, there was the SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion, better known as SPECTRE. Starting with From Russia With Love (1963), during the Connery phase, SPECTRE was in essence an evil multinational corporation before knowledge of multinational corporations had really sunk in to popular culture. After all, in 1963 English automobile manufacturers were owned in England (and made their Minis there), almost everyone took the Royal Navy seriously as an instrument for worldwide power projection, and fixed exchange rates meant that Sterling was still a widely accepted reserve currency. SPECTRE had several chairpeople over the years, ranging from the forgettable Morzeny (pictured here) onward. One unifying thread, though, has been that the putative head of SPECTRE has seldom been the actual, direct villain with whom Bond interacts. In From Russia With Love, Bond is primarily concerned not with Morzeny, but with Grant; similarly, in the most-recent outing, Bond's direct adversary was less "Blofeld" (his "brother") than it was Moriarty Fleabag's latest lust interest C. But SPECTRE today is a tired, and indeed insufficient, adversary for a social-media-age Bond. The attempts to make SPECTRE a creature of contemporary information culture, constant kneejerk communications, and engagement with not just governments but with everyone, have failed. Even the name is inappropriate, because it refers to something that's purely imaginary.

For franchise credibility, there needs to be a new overarching organization of selfishness and villainy for the twenty-first century. Fortunately, the real world has provided a much more credible, much more menacing villainous organization, with an acronym that refers to a real threat:

FAANG

which sounds much more threatening. Unfortunately, one obvious actor for portraying this member of FAANG's Central Committee has already played a Bond villain — Andrew Scott's appearance, ability to sneer, and skill at portraying narcissistic opportunism underneath a not-very-thick-or-opaque veneer of projected earnestness mixed with nerdishness, have been preempted by his performance as C in 2015's Spectre… and a repeat performance (so to speak) from Jesse Eisenberg would be too unsubtle for even a Bond film. No matter; there are other possibilities, and a distinctly white-male-obscenely-wealthy-and-American villain representing US-based tech giants Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and/or Google is probably more appropriate anyway.

We already know (or at least infer) that will require a new Bond. Since Daniel Craig has already said he's leaving — and leaks indicate that the 007 moniker has already been passed on — the field is wide open. It should be someone who can handle suave, or at least socially smooth; who can play at someone engaging both in and against extralegal conspiracies; and, above all, who is credible portraying a high-powered player with information technology — both a hacker and an exploiter. I'd also like to see slightly more diversity. So here's one possibility; there are certainly others (such as, at least potentially, the Bond-25 007, but there's little market data on or critical/media evaluation of her performance yet!). I sort of like this one because Parker would be an interesting 21st-century take on a Bond girl.

That still leaves portraying the putative chair of FAANG. Inspired by a neighborhood dog of that name and breed, I offer this possibility. Which, frankly, is more threatening in appearance than the original Blofeld… or, for that matter, Zuckerberg (or Cook, or Bezos, or Hastings, or…).

No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to sync all of your social media accounts.

Son of Article 88 Link Sausage Platter

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.

Rather Missing the Point

Just to demonstrate that my ire isn't always about politics or law, I'm going to take both Scalzi and Harvilla to task for missing the, or at least one very important, point about negative reviews. Simply put, reviews aren't generated and don't appear in a vacuum… and a certain proportion of thoughtful negative reviews from a review source is the best demonstration of that source's trustworthiness.

A negative review is almost never the only review that reviewer has done. One learnt far more about — to choose a famous example — the perspicacity of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel by hearing/watching/reading their negative reviews and defenses thereof. And that isn't just about nebulous "taste," either: A critic (or author writing a review, or author in general) had bloody well better have a conscious rationale for why certain "types" of works are outside their attention. It might be rational or irrational disdain; it might be humility in knowing how little one knows in some areas (one only wishes that more "critics" and "reviewers" of military and espionage fiction would acquire some of that… including too damned many "former military" and "former intelligence" people writing about radically different contexts unmerited by their own experience/scholarship); it might be bad experiences with crap (remember, Sturgeon was an optimist). It might even be so personal that the conscious rationale isn't for public consumption, like a reviewer who lives with PTSD.

More broadly, a single review is almost never the only review appearing in that review source. Here, I must genially disagree with Mr Scalzi on one point: PR people generally do not accept that reviewers are not just adjuncts of the publicity-and-marketing campaign, and especially not in more (self-) serious subsets of the arts. If they did, there would never be an embargo date on reviews. And this is where Harvilla's invocation of Krasinski and Anderson really fails: Simply by being prominent enough to be big fish in the small indie pond, Krasinski and Anderson are inherently part of the marketing-and-publicity strategy of others in that pond. <SARCASM> If you really want to see how it's done, try visiting the world of the young classically trained musician in nonacademic selective youth orchestras — presuming a very strong stomach and very high tolerance for posturing, bullshit, egos, entitlement and privilege, parents living through their children's achievements, outright sabotage, and temper tantrums. If you can shrug off the contemporary political news, you might have a shot at it. </SARCASM>

The well-considered negative review is a demonstration of trustworthiness on the part of both the individual reviewer and the review source. It doesn't even need to go as far as Ebert did about North in demonstrating that the emperor wasn't just naked, but was probably unable to spell "textile;" the gentle, considered thumbs-down is equally valuable in demonstrating that the reader of/listener to that review can have at least some trust that the reviewer hasn't been coopted and isn't just a cheerleader or relentless booster. And in the social media world with its unacknowledged benefactors, that's even more important. Objecting to a stale crust on that apple pie is not unAmerican.

The Big Reveal

There was a big reveal last night on WestWorld (Season 2, Episode 2, "Reunion") Well, not really: It was implicit from the very first episode of the first season, obvious after the third episode, and inevitable after the sixth.

<SPOILER ALERT> Delos — the "corporation" that owns WestWorld, although it's as much a true "corporation" in apparent operation as is Harriman Enterprises, whose namesake is also "Delos" — is the result of merging FaceBook, Cambridge Analytica, and Apple… with a little bit less self-deception/disingenuousness regarding "nobility of purpose" (or even "sociopathy"). In one of the flashback scenes, William the Younger admitted that WestWorld would involve pervasive monitoring of Guests, taking advantage of the fact that the Guests think nobody will be watching. He implied that it would be for marketing and advertising… but Logan's escapades during the episode demonstrate that obtaining material for blackmail is at least as important, especially considering the scope of the purported "market" for WestWorld (the 0.1%ers).

I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

A Computer With a Keyboard Is Not a Cell Phone

… and the bloody marketing "geniuses" at a certain computing monstrosity in Redmond should remember that one of the reasons that those of us who touch-type are Apple-averse is that we, well, touch-type, and use keyboards on computers for more than dust-bunny storage. If you want to add some new features for the kids who can't qwerty, fine; don't take away features that we rely upon.

Like menu bars accessible from the keyboard.

Like alphabetically-sorted contacts and chat/instant messaging contact lists.

Like accessing actual help facilities using your own imposed standard {F1}.

Like removing the "away" status and forcing everying to either "active" or "do not disturb."

And while you're at it, don't by default show more information to other users in the new version of the program than was shown by default in the older version of the program, especially when the new version is an essentially mandatory security upgrade (due in part to SPECTRE and MELTDOWN, but without the Bond girls to deal with SPECTRE — if I have to deal with a phony criminal conspiracy that isn't actually as scary as the real ones, at least grant me some airbrushed eye candy instead of bigger bloody emoticons).

I passed eighth-grade typing. Just because neither any executive at Apple nor anybody in your own marketing department did — or actually works with and edits words for a living, instead living by soundbites — does not mean it's a good idea to reduce accessibility under the Americans With Disabilities Act. For example, this program is now no longer usable at all by the visually impaired, precisely because it no longer has keyboard-accessible menu bars and predictable alphabetical lists of chat "partners." Indeed, one cannot even use it to place an outgoing voice call any longer without full and clear access to a touchscreen or trackball/mouse/trackpad. One wonders if anyone from legal even saw your plans… or, perhaps, whether you bloody geniuses listened if they did and raised any objections.

0/10.

Buried Lede Link Sausage Platter

Perhaps not the lede, but at least the overt politics. Not that deeply.

• A different take on "urban planning" seems necessary, and not just for the arts.
• If you really need proof that the wrong people are in charge in publishing, consider yuuuuuge advances for celebrity "memoirs" and similar works. Leaving aside the fundamental dishonesty involved with these almost-universally ghostwritten (and seldom acknowledged as such) works — which would at least be a matter for discussion in any kind of writer-respecting society, or in which "trademark as a designation of origin" was enforced with anything approaching an even hand — the real problem with this article, and all of the juicy finger-pointing, is that it stops where it does. As appalling as seeing these figures is, articles like this one don't ask the obvious follow-on question: What are these distortive transactions doing to the rest of the marketplace?

  That doesn't just mean "the rest of the memoir segment," either. Even a megacorporation like HarperCollins has a budget for advances, and outsized advances offered to a few authors act as fat leeches on the advances offered to everyone else. The less said about how this sort of thing affects behavioral allocation of other resources (availability of review copies, promotional effort aside from budget, etc.), the better. On the other hand, a fuller analysis would also help torpedo the myth that the publisher isn't making a profit until the advance has been earned back… and that's definitely not something that the publishing industries want authors to understand.

• At least I'm not the only one who is skeptical of Apple as a closed-system content provider. Cupertino has just never struck me as sensitive to creators/authors, perhaps — and only perhaps — to a certain type of commodified middlecreature. Welcome to the party, Bloomberg, because fundamentally Apple's plan all along has been to require one to engage in tying arrangements declared unlawful under antitrust law half a century ago.
• An interesting piece — an interview with "Bob Roberts" — reflects on some of the predatory behavior in H'wood… and prefigures similar predatory behavior that is already unfolding in publishing:

  Aside from his monstrous behavior with women, Mr. Weinstein ravaged Hollywood in other ways, Mr. Robbins posits, adding that, though the producer was hailed for his good taste, “you could make the argument that Harvey’s overall impact on cinema was negative.[…] What happened is, when Miramax became as successful as it became, every studio all of a sudden wanted to have an independent arm,” he says. “So they all set up their little boutique companies that would do ‘independent’ films, quote unquote. And it wasn’t that they were independent or edgy or that the content was risky or provocative. It was more that it was independent of paying people what the studios had to pay them. And so it became this way of making films on the cheap and not committing full studio resources into those kinds of films.”

  When Mr. Weinstein asked Mr. Robbins to star in an indie called Smoke, shortly after the producer had sold Miramax to Disney for some $60 million, the actor remembers confronting him, saying: “‘Harvey, the talent made your company and you’ve been paying them scale for years. And you just put a fortune in your pocket. When are we going to see some of that?’”He said that Mr. Weinstein called back an hour later to say that he would pay Mr. Robbins a million dollars to do the part but ordered him not to tell the other actors, who would still get scale.

  Maureen Dowd, "‘Hollywood Is Changing,’ Says Its Veteran Activist, Tim Robbins," NYT (03 Feb 2018, typography and fake/misparagraphing corrected). Tell me that doesn't sound like the problems created when publishers refuse to release actual, auditable sales figures and rely on "scale" (the virtually nonnegotiable royalty rates) to deal with their own century-old Uber-like problem (not my first — or twelfth — choice of links, but paywalls… the irony of which in this context is just a bit overwhelming).

• I promised that I'd allow myself only one, context-sensitive reaction to the State of the Uniomn-Busting speech, so here it is:

  It's the fault of law schools.

  So, so many people in government and politics have law degrees. By itself, that's fine. The problem, ultimately, is who is being admitted to law schools, and more finely how law schools sort the admittees into which school and cohorts within each school. It's sort of like comparing basketball teams from, say, Japan and Thailand to those from the Netherlands and Lithuania: There's going to be talent on both sets of teams, but one of them is unlikely to be well-adapted to 1990s-NBA-style every-possession-must-end-with-a-collision-and-a-dunk hoops, because demographics presort otherwise. And what the law schools — and, thus, political advisors — do is sort against science. Science undergraduates spend more time in class (if only due to the difference in credits accorded "lab" versus "lecture/discussion"), and thus have less time for activities, and get slightly lower grades on average. Further, unlike other undergraduate majors like political science and history and business administration, the top of the class in the natural sciences and engineering tends toward medical school and continuing in the sciences/engineering themselves, not law school, further "pre-sorting" the selection.

  And that means we end up with celebrated judges who establish foundational law not knowing the difference between arithmetic addition and the summation of discontinuous functions over discontinuous, noncontiguous domains (or even recognizing the possibilities of discontinuity, noncontiguous domains, duplicative cost allocation, or divide-by-zero errors); a Supreme Court on not which one of its nine members, or even one of about forty clerks, had ever even been in the same room as a semiautomated DNA testing machine, let alone observed how a routine (lab-pristine) sample gets handled and tested, before deciding matters of life and death based thereon; elected officials, disproportionately former prosecutors, who continue to deny climate change solely because some of their moneyed constituents tell them so; I won't go on. But I will call on the Association of American Law Schools to stop relying on "grade point average" as the sole measure of undergraduate achievement that it tracks, because doing so discriminates against increasingly important basic knowledge.