So. In Texas, they believe that sleeping lawyers are fully effective counsel. In North Carolina, it's drunk lawyers.
You wonder sometimes: exactly how impaired or incompetent does a lawyer need to be before a court will decide that the defense is not effective? The Court of Appeals has ruled that sleeping lawyers don't meet the requirements, no matter what Texas' Court of Criminal Appeals thinks; why do drunken lawyers survive the test?
@ 02:27 AM CST [Link]
How can you decide where 'fanfiction' begins and 'literature', 'textual criticism' or 'multiple authorship' ends, without recourse to the law of copyright or the hierarchy of institutions and genres? [...] In other words, fanfiction as concept and practice can be central to one of the most important political / cultural / aesthetic problems of our time: is it possible to create anything new?
Fanfic has been represented as existing in this space; as rejecting traditional notions of ownership and using this natural resource to power divergent discourses. [...] The key point is the proposition that ownership ceases with publication, and thereafter, so long as no profit is sought by the fanfic creator (although this is perhaps a placatory gesture, rather than an integral part of the argument), it is unreasonable to object to anyone making use of what was once your fictional universe. But it hurts. Simple as that. Which is weird. [...] I feel an injury, a gut-churning sensation like a blow. What the hell is that about?
Hmm.
No, really, just ... hmm. Given my peculiar past, I suppose I ought to have more to say about it, but just ... hmm.
I do understand the difference that Mr Cornwall makes between his television characters and his fiction characters, though. Given the way that writing on television usually works, you can be somewhat less invested in television characters and plot.
The discussion on the Barbelith bulletin boards is sailing well over my head, I'm afraid.
via plasticbag.org
@ 01:58 PM CST [Link]
Well ... I can't say that the result in this case is at all surprising. What surprises me is that both sides made the wrong arguments.
The argument by the gay men who wanted to adopt should have been that, as long as other single people were allowed to adopt in Florida, and as long as homosexuals were allowed to serve as foster parents, the state had no legitimate reason for barring gay men and lesbians from adoption. Homosexuality is simply irrelevant when comparing single people against each other. The argument that it's "best for children to be reared by a married mother and father" is also irrelevant, since Florida does allow adoption by single adults. Frankly, the only other point they could have reasonably made was that the law was enacted to express bigotry.
The counter-argument by the state is very easy, and entirely dispositive: homosexual behavior is a criminal act in the state of Florida. Known criminals are not allowed to adopt children; therefore, gays and lesbians should not be allowed to adopt. The only reason for Florida not to make that argument is that they might have thought that the laws regarding homosexual behavior would be stricken, but since they weren't directly at issue, the court would have been considerably overstepping its limits to do so. I am surprised that the state brought up "its moral disapproval of homosexuality" at all, as it would pretty much constitute bigotry on its face. (And Florida got a nice little slap from the judge in return: The court cannot accept that moral disapproval of homosexuals or homosexuality serves a legitimate state interest.'') What I don't understand is why the judge didn't give more weight to the fact that not only can single people adopt, but gays can serve as foster parents for an indefinite period; all the burdens of parenthood with no certainty, no knowledge that after a few years, the state won't capriciously come in and remove the child from your home, no certainty for the child.
Frankly, what I seriously fear is that the state will now remove the children or that some conservative ideologues will come forward to adopt them, just to make the point.
@ 12:10 PM CST [Link]
Well, after Dan and Steven did it, I had to give it a shot, right?
Although, frankly, I can't imagine any other circumstance in which any sane person would search for the word "amusements" all by itself (#3 in Google's hit parade) or the word "grim" (#6 with a bullet!). And Google is now my principal referrer, followed by the Yahoo version of Google. Doesn't seem to be making much difference to the searches that I get hit with, though. Or where. (Why is this site so popular in Mexico this week, and Belgium last week, and Norway the week before? How the hell did "picture of unemployment line" get here? Who are those people searching for "Oscar dresses" and what are they doing here? I've never mentioned Oscar dresses even once. Until now, of course. [Of course, now I've given them something that works for their false hits. They'll be SO frustrated ...] How the hell does IE 6 already account for more than 5% of the people here? And you people, the ones looking for "buffalo testicles" these past three weeks ... you people worry me ....)
Actually, I suspect that Greymatter sites come off slightly better in this than would Blogger sites, because each entry generates its own page, instead of just having one weekly archive. More hits for the terms.
@ 10:51 PM CST [Link]
THIS is the most religious family in sitcoms? ... Well, OK, I suppose they are. But somehow, that concept just makes your head turn, don't it?
@ 10:14 PM CST [Link]
USA Today has discovered that people who write weblogs have opinions that they like to air.
No, really, that's what they say. They did research. They asked around. They asked researchers. It's a definite fact: we have opinions. We like to write about them. Really.
Can I have a "Well, duh?"
I said, CAN I HAVE A "well, DUH!"?
Hallelujah! Praise the weblogger!
@ 01:16 PM CST [Link]
"Democrats are the geeks and the math nerds, and Republicans are the cheerleaders..." (REALPLAYER REQUIRED). Well, really, that explains it all, doesn't it?
Seriously (well, sort of), an interesting, if brief, examination of the differences between Democrats and Republicans and the pain of the knee-jerk Democrat (REALPLAYER still REQUIRED) on that dreaded night/week/month of November ... ("Ralph Nader is an electric car." Hee!) However, I would like to state for the record that most Democrats really can find Georgia on a map of the US ... as long as it's not an electoral map.
@ 12:42 PM CST [Link]
Ecologists, Bush make surprise deal: ... what the hell ...?
You know, the only reason I can think for this to have happened at all is that the administration realized that these species would all eventually have been protected, so they decided they might as well get the PR gravy from doing something environmentally-friendly. I mean, really, Gale Norton on the side of the endangered? Have aliens taken over her brain, or what? (Heh. They've protected freshwater snails, a chub and a frog in New Mexico. The agricultural interests that want to draw even more water from the Rio Grande -- not that there's a lot of water left there anyway -- will be absolutely livid. But I digress.)
Maybe His Fraudulency's minions are thinking that this could be a trading chip or that they can use a later threat to pull the protection to get around new environmental testing for Star Wars. Although an outright concession is a pretty weak trading card.
I suspect that the true marker of His Fraudulency's attitude to the environment is that he's appointed a man who can block any regulation issued by any agency on fiscal grounds, and who once said of dioxin, a known and particularly effective cancer-causing agent, that reducing dioxin levels too far might "do more harm than good." The new assistant director of the EPA was a lobbyist for Monsanto. And so on, and so on, and so on ....
@ 12:32 PM CST [Link]
Good grief. I can't believe that the government is pressing forward with this case. I can't believe that any court is allowing it. They're prosecuting a foreign national for violating US law in the course of his employment at a foreign company. They're prosecuting despite the fact that the company involved has decided not to press its own charges. This case ought to be so thoroughly and completely fatally flawed that a court would just punt it; why on earth haven't they?
@ 04:37 PM CST [Link]
Aw, how very special. Bush II Fraudulency wants to remove affected workers from a government compensation plan. They worked in uranium mines and/or were exposed to fallout from various government projects. They'd actually been approved for participation in the compensation program and now, suddenly, the government wants to study whether or not these people should be compensated. And of course the problem is that the type of studies they're going to do will never say that the uranium and silica dust were the cause of the illness; they can say that it's more likely, they can say that there's a higher incidence of certain types of illness in people exposed to these elements, but studies generally cannot -- and ethical researchers generally will not -- explicitly say, "Uranium exposure and silica dust in the mines caused these problems."
I suppose it's entirely too cynical to say that if the Shrub hadn't gotten his tax cut from the cowardly Congress, he might not be looking at this right now. It will be interesting to see if Congress has anything to say in the matter -- normally, this is the sort of thing that would make good enough copy so that they'd have fun slapping the Shrub down a bit, but it's also a small enough group that they may be willing to let it go.
@ 04:24 PM CST [Link]
Aw. Little Orrin Hatch. It's just fascinating to see what people in Congress are willing to sacrifice for their own interests, isn't it? Thanks in large part to Orrin Hatch and his connections to the dietary supplements industry, they've been willing to sacrifice at least 184 of us so far.
I'm not saying that dietary supplements are bad in and of themselves. I am saying that they should be subject to the same regulation as the rest of the food and drugs that we eat. Anything that makes any sort of nutritional or health claim ought to be required to prove it, and ought to be required to meet production and shipping standards. Yes, that would make the products more expensive. However, relatively speaking, hospitalization for arcane sorts of poisoning surely costs a great deal more. And death, technically speaking, is the ultimate expense on a personal scale.
("A lamb placenta a day"? Ewww....)
@ 04:10 PM CST [Link]
You know, you've got to love a site that has something like the Dan Quayle Memorial Rule. (And it's so very true, too!) That aside, the whole shebang is a remarkably useful site if you do a lot of writing and need to look up rules and usage periodically.
@ 02:51 PM CST [Link]
The latest version of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser, made available for free download Monday, is drawing protests because it doesn't support two rival products commonly used on Web sites. Internet Explorer 6.0 will not automatically support the embattled Java programming language or Netscape-style "plug-ins," though users and developers will have tools to make the browser compatible with those products.
I have to admit, I'm of two minds on this one. No, I don't think that Microsoft has any responsibility to support Java -- and in fact, getting the Sun standard Java console is pretty easy; you can get it with almost any other browser download. However, relatively few sites actually do anything functional with Java (although the class of sites that does includes, unfortunately, many library catalogs). Mostly it's annoyingly decorative.
Also, the article is just plain wrong about QuickTime; Apple eventually decided to produce an IE6/5.5 compatible ActiveX control. (Although installing it on Win98 systems with slower connections seems to do something quite odd to the connections.)
@ 01:08 PM CST [Link]
Ah, yes. The American pasttime.
@ 12:27 PM CST [Link]
Well. It will be interesting to see what happens when this case is appealed to the Supreme Court (and it will be). Ideally, the court will decide that the Oncale case controls, and will simply refuse to hear it. Given the precedent set by the Oncale case (egad, a unanimous court holding that same-sex sexual harrassment is possible; whoda thunk?), it seems like it should be fairly likely.
@ 12:26 PM CST [Link]
“IN ORDER TO SOLVE A PROBLEM, you’ve got to admit you’ve got a problem,” says [activist-attorney Adjoa A.] Aiyetoro, who for the past 14 years as cofounder and legal consultant for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) has been on a grass-roots campaign to make America do just that. “We need you to embrace our strategy.”
Well ... no. I cannot possibly embrace that strategy. I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm not. This particular strategy strikes me as one of the most wrongheaded things to emerge from American politics in quite some time, which is saying something.
In California, a new law requires all insurers doing business in the state to disclose whether they sold any slave- owner policies prior to emancipation; this followed a probe triggering an embarrassing public admission by Aetna last year that it had insured slaves like property.
And what good will this do? Will the state refuse to work with insurers which have been relatively good corporate citizens since the Civil War over what they did 150-200 years ago? Will they demand that the insurers offer coverage in areas and to people they have previously refused? If they certify that they have covered slaves as property, what happens next? (And it's a nonsense law in any case; with relatively few exceptions, most insurance companies didn't even exist that long ago. It's just another odious paperwork requirement.)
I dare say that most federal courts will dismiss reparations cases as moot when they arrive on their doorsteps; I'm mildly surprised that the government allowed the lawsuits to be filed. (It always amuses me that you need the government's permission to sue the government ... but I digress.)
The other model is the Japanese-American reparations payment for the World War II internment camps and loss of confiscated property. The problem with using the Japanese-American reparations bill as a model is the fact that many of the people who had been directly wronged were still alive; they directly experienced the wrong for which they were being recompensed. In addition, there was a direct property component; they lost lands, houses, goods, all sorts of things on which monetary value actually can be placed. I don't deny that most blacks have been wronged by racism resulting from slavery -- in fact, I don't deny that most minorities have experienced one sort of racism or another in their lives; that would be foolish. What disturbs me is the concept that somehow, you can set a global value on it: "Your great-great-great grandparents were slaves. Therefore, your family history is worth $80,000. Would you like that in education vouchers?"
Unlike Shelby Steele, I know for a fact that my mother's great-grandparents were born into slavery. They were alive during my mother's lifetime, and talked to her about it. (Very briefly, and as little as they could manage.) I don't necessarily agree with him on anything else (which is good for my sanity, thanks), but I do agree with him that reparations are an extraordinarily bad idea. I don't know if I agree that reparations are "trading honour for dollars". I do think that it's not really possible to compensate for slavery at this late date. And I do think that there's a great chance that society will then say, "We've paid you, now shut up. We don't care if things are happening to you only because of the color of your skin. We've paid you and you should just deal with it." (Which, you know, is what most of us do anyway; we just deal with it. I don't see how reparations could possibly change that aspect of society.)
@ 11:49 AM CST [Link]
OK, am I missing something here? According to this study reported in the Guardian Unlimited Observer, playing video games stimulates different areas of the brain than doing simple arithmetic equations.
Um ... yes? so? your point being?
I honestly don't see how this means that children are "halting the process of brain development". There is no chance in the world that everything children do will stimulate all portions of their brain all the time. I can't imagine that watching television, for example, or listening to music can provide all that much stimulus to the frontal lobes -- in fact, Prof. Kawashima even notes that you don't get a lot of frontal lobe stimulation from listening to music.
So what is he proposing? That parents have their children do nothing but math problems in their spare time?
To be sure, I understand that the results he found were unexpected -- although I'm not sure why; it seems pretty obvious on its face that there isn't a lot of cogitation going on during most computer games. I just don't understand why it's suddenly not acceptable (in Japan, of all places, which surely has some of the most violent media in the world and yet has a remarkably peaceful society) to allow children to do different things that stimulate different parts of their brain.
And I dread what will happen should the ideologues in His Fraudulency's administration chance across these results. (No fear of His Fraudulency himself running across them, of course; that would require reading. Foreign newspapers or [GASP!] the Heathen Internet, at that.)
@ 10:43 AM CST [Link]
You know, I must say, I'm impressed at the way that Satcher is going out. Frankly, he's probably been the most invisible Surgeon General we've had for quite some time -- which was, to be sure, exactly what Clinton wanted from him after Joycelyn Elders. (Pity she never really got a chance; she could have been a really great SG, I think.) First Satcher issues the Sexual Health and Behavior report that so thoroughly pissed off Bush II Fraudulency, who never deigned to even read the thing before condemning it, and now he's issuing a report on minorities and mental health care that's likely to just continue the general trend. (Yes, pissing off the Shrub is a positive in my book. What can I say? I'm a vaguely rabid Democrat. And the Shrub is, you know, a shrub.) It won't piss him off because the report is all that controversial -- there's really nothing in the report itself that we didn't already know. (Well, aside from the fact that foreign-born Hispanics have fewer mental health problems than native-born, which is a shade peculiar on its face. And that for no apparent reason, African Americans are more likely to be incorrectly diagnosed with schizophrenia than some other affective disorders.) It's going to piss him off because Satcher is again saying something that hasn't been pre-approved by the Shrub's string-pullers; after all, some of the government's health-related policies are supposed to come from the various research programs in the Surgeon General's office, and something that says, "We should actually spend a buck or two on mental health care for minorities and the indigent" is not one of Bush II Fraudulency's pre-approved policy areas. (And, I would imagine, that the Shrub will continue his Shrubbery course and not read the thing because then he'd actually have, like, research and information on which to base policy, and you can't base "compassionately conservative" policy on information because then you'd actually have to be, you know, compassionate.)
@ 11:41 AM CST [Link]
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!