Tag: law

Literary Relevance is Not Guaranteed

The Dark Herald explains how the modern exploitation of the Tolkien legendarium is likely to reduce the chances of JRR Tolkien’s future literary relevance, and provides a rather devastating example of how that decline in relevance takes place:

In his prime, Roger Zelazny wasn’t some niche cult figure, he was one of the biggest names in speculative fiction, standing shoulder to shoulder with the New Wave heavyweights of the 1960s and 70s. His novel Lord of Light is often remembered as his breakout, and it was certainly his most decorated, winning the Hugo (when it meant something) and cementing his reputation, but Zelazny’s real impact was broader and more sustained. He was a constant presence in the major magazines, a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the few writers equally comfortable blending myth, science fiction, and fantasy into something distinctly his own. By the time The Chronicles of Amber hit in the 1970s, he wasn’t emerging… He was already established, and Amber became the work that proved he could translate that critical acclaim into lasting popular success.

Except it didn’t last.

Roger Zelzney’s old hard covers frequently go for three digit figures and I’m not talking Easton Press editions either. But his works are mostly published directly by his estate on Kindle.

Roger Zelzny is moving from the thing everyone knew about to the guy who is studied by writers. Most of his works have six figure sales ranks on Amazon.

And when Gen X is gone, he’ll be forgotten.

Zelazny, at his best, was very good. He wasn’t a first-rank SF/F author, but he was at the top of the second rank. And it’s true, he has been largely forgotten today, which is deeply unfortunate.

As an author, I’m aware of this phenomenon, which is why it has been my intention to release my books into the public domain upon my demise. The advent of AI and the lowering of barriers to entry in the video market may inspire me to rethink that, but at present, the way in which copyright guarantees that all literary properties are eventually acquired and controlled by corporate interests inimical to the long-term interests of an author’s literary legacy means that the best way to combat that is to put one’s works into the public domain immediately upon one’s death.

The problem isn’t that the corporate interests can alter the original works, but rather, the way in which they alter the common perception of the author’s works. How does the average Gen Alpha individual distinguish between The Hobbit and The Rings of Power, or between The Two Towers and whatever abomination Stephen Colbert and Peter Jackson end up concocting?

The only way to level the playing field between the community that loves the literary creation and the corporate interests is the public domain. Indeed, the public domain is the only reason that classic, but hitherto unknown works from the likes of Yoshikawa Eiji and Benito Pérez Galdós are able to be published in English, which is a project you can support via the Castalia Library. We’ve already translated nine works by these two authors, in addition to other amazing novels by Ozaki Koro, Oguri Mushitaro, Naoki Sanjūgo, and Luigi Capuano.

Who are they, you ask?

Exactly…

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The Pipelines are Not the Police

This is a very sensible ruling by the US Supreme Court. The RIAA is one of the more rapaciously evil organizations out there, and speaking as someone who is nominally represented by them, they don’t do much to make sure the musicians actually get paid.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday (March 25) rejected a billion-dollar music piracy lawsuit filed by the major labels against telecom giant Cox Communications, ruling that the internet service provider cannot be held responsible for infringement by its users.

In a decision against Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music, the justices unanimously overturned an earlier ruling that held Cox liable for thousands of songs illegally shared by its users — a decision that led a staggering $1 billion infringement verdict in 2019.

“Countless people use the Internet for legal activities, but some use it to illegally share copyrighted works, such as songs and movies,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

In a statement, the Recording Industry Association of America said it was “disappointed” in the ruling, saying there had been “overwhelming evidence” that Cox “contributed to mass scale copyright infringement.”

“To be effective, copyright law must protect creators and markets from harmful infringement and policymakers should look closely at the impact of this ruling,” RIAA chairman Mitch Glazier said, though he stressed that the “narrow” ruling would apply only to internet service providers and not to websites that host infringing content.

In its own statement, Cox said the ruling was a “decisive victory” for internet providers and their users: “This opinion affirms that Internet service providers are not copyright police and should not be held liable for the actions of their customers — and after years of battling in the trial and appellate courts, we have definitively shut down the music industry’s aspirations of mass evictions from the internet.

Copyright law is a joke that protects gatekeeping corporations instead of the financial interests of the creators. It hurts more than it helps, especially given the limited viability of the average creative product, which is mostly measured in weeks, if not days.

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Feature, Not Bug

A young woman is taking legal action against her high school, alleging she was awarded honors at graduation even though she’s illiterate. – Thomas Sowell

The problem is that a class action lawsuit of this kind that encompassed even a small fraction of those for whom this is true would create sufficient liability to end public schooling in America.

Yeah, so, that’s not at all a problem.

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DOJ Defends Clown World

Pam Bondi and the corrupt DOJ are still lying through their teeth about having released all of the information in the Epstein Files. I’ve heard that the additional 3 million documents are still less than 10 percent of the total:

MAGA broadcaster Alex Jones expressed frustration after insisting that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice was wrong to claim that it had released all documents required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

“Now it’s the big, massive top story, Saturday and Sunday, that people reading these files think maybe that’s the case,” Jones explained on his Monday show. “Again, you heard Bondi, oh, there’s hundreds of victims with Epstein and, oh, these powerful people are going to go to jail. Then she’s like, oh, actually, I was wrong.”

“So when you go into these files in the public, you see stuff blacked out, that’s the reason. So you’re like, God, that’s satanic. Yeah, folks, they have satanic training by increment to find out who is satanic to build a satanic army,” he continued.

Just two days ago, Jones was telling everyone that an apoplectic Trump was threatening to fire everyone; apparently their argument against releasing the files in full is due to how many institutional figures from the colleges and corporations to the state and federal levels would be taking a fall and that this would destroy the stock market. And supposedly, Trump had finally figured out that the stock market is going to crash anyhow, so the threat was a hollow one.

Of course, this scenario doesn’t account for the probability that the short fake Trump serves the same masters as his corrupt Department of Injustice and Other Iniquities.

Americans don’t care about the stock market or the economy. What they very much want to see every single blood-drinking satanic pedophile exposed and punished for their dreadful crimes in a timely manner. If that crashes the economy, the corporations, and the banks, well, that’s a price that the American Posterity is more than willing to pay.

Because if the system can’t prevent those crimes, the system isn’t worth preserving. And Clown World is going to collapse no matter how they try to rationalize it or preserve it.

Satanic Witch Marina Abramovic says she can no longer walk down the streets.

Hmmm… I seem to recall someone predicting that a few years ago…

UPDATE: Apparently what has been released to date is about 2 percent of the total. Also, it’s now firmly established that Bannon is one of the Epsteinists.

When Steve Bannon worked for Trump in his first term, every single thing that was inside knowledge, every secret, he ran straight to Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most famous pedophile and child trafficker in history, and told him everything.

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Wartime Powers

Not only do they have to go back, but the President can utilize the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines to make them go.

Supreme Court just handed Trump a massive win – 5-4 RULING UNLEASHES WARTIME POWERS FOR HUGE GANG DEPORTATIONS!

“In a stunning 5-4 ruling, the U.S Supreme Court has granted President Donald Trump broad wartime authority under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act” – breaking news dropping like thunder.

I don’t know why this would surprise anyone. There are about 90 million aliens now occupying United States territory and a significant percentage of them certainly aren’t very friendly.

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Get On the Cart

Canada has become a Monty Python skit:

Concerns have been raised over questionable deaths. In this case, the woman – referred to as “Mrs. B,” had complications after a coronary artery bypass graft surgery. After a rapid decline, she opted for palliative care – and was sent home from the hospital for her husband to take care of her. As her condition worsened, the husband struggled to care for her despite visits by nurses.

After she allegedly expressed her desire for MAiD to her family, her husband called a referral service, the report reads. Yet, Mrs. B told the assessor she ‘wanted to withdraw her requests, citing personal and religious values and beliefs,” and instead wanted inpatient hospice care.

When her husband took her to the hospital the next morning, doctors deemed Mrs. B to be stable, but that her husband was “experiencing caregiver burnout.” A request by a doctor for in-patient hospice care due to her husband’s burnout was denied, after which her husband asked for a second assessor to weigh in, the Daily Mail reports.

After the second assessor judged her to be eligible for MAiD, the original assessor objected – expressing concerns over the alleged “urgency” of the request, and expressing the need for further evaluation. A request to meet with Mrs. B the next day was declined by the MAiD provider, as “the clinical circumstances necessitated an urgent provision.”

Then, a third MAiD assessor agreed with the second one, and Mrs. B was euthanized that evening.

“I feel happy! I feel happy!”

I think there would be a lot less euthanasia if the closest family member was required to administer it with a wooden club. It’s just a little too easy to farm things off to the white-coated angels of death.

And “caregiver burnout” is a thing now? How long will that take to trickle down to the streets?

“I was his caregiver, yo. I had no choice, he had me burnout!”

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Gun Rights and Realities

Since I’ve never hesitated to criticize ESR, I would be remiss if I failed to point out that he’s raised some good points on his public Q&A concerning gun rights and the recent fatal shooting of an armed protestor by federal agents in Minneapolis:

Q. This Alex Pieri character was well within his rights to be carrying a firearm at a demonstration.

A. Gun rights folks say “Yes, absolutely!” The fact that he was carrying a weapon was not grounds to shoot him. The fact that some government officials have made remarks that could be interpreted that way is immaterial; that’s on them, not on us.

Q. If, while at a demonstration, you interfere with an LEO criminally overreaching his authority, and you are armed, and you are shot, are you a Second Amendment hero?

A. Gun rights folks answer “Yes.” Nobody is obliged to roll over for the equivalent of Redcoats trying to confiscate civilian weapons. In that case, we have your back.

Q. If, while at a demonstration, you interfere with an LEO in the performance of his lawful duties with force appropriate to the occasion, does the fact that you’re armed when you get shot suddenly make you a Second Amendment hero?

A. Gun rights folks say “No, it does not.” In fact, under those circumstances, the fact that you were carrying a gun justifies the LEO believing you are a lethal risk even if they’ve secured your primary weapon. Because holdout guns and knives exist. If you get shot, we’re not going to cry for you.

Q. If, while at a demonstration, you interfere with an LEO performing lawful duties but using what you deem to be excessive force, and you are armed, and you get shot, are you a Second Amendment hero?

A. Gun rights folks answer “Maybe.” It depends on whether a reasonable person would agree with you that the amount of force used was excessive. A lot of what’s been going on is an attempt to confuse these last three cases in an attempt to make gun rights folks into hypocrites and bootlickers. But we’re not going to roll over for that. We carry guns. Because we’re aware of the power that puts in our hands, we think a lot about violence and ethics and morality. The distinctions among these cases matter a lot.

Q. If you know that people being shot at demonstrations are trained agitators hooked into a covert network run by revolutionary Communists that intends to create violent confrontations and martyrs, how does this change the moral calculus of police shootings?

A. Gun rights folks answer: “These people are no longer innocent civilians, and they’re not the militia within the meaning of the Second Amendment, either; they have placed themselves in the same category as terrorists and illegal combatants.”

Of course, the idea that federal agents enforcing immigration law and the literally tens of millions of violations therein is intrinsically absurd. Everything going on in Minneapolis is the theater kid color revolution crowd that is normally engaged in spying on everyone, so trying to appeal to Americans in their defense is a definite no-go.

I’m pretty sure Constitutional protections don’t apply to many of them in the first place.

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Vaccines are Organized Crime

This recently filed lawsuit could be some very effective lawfare, especially when one considers how difficult it’s going to be for the vaccine lobby to play their usual “it’s too dangerous to actually test vaccine safety” game in front of a court:

In a lawsuit filed today in federal court, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and five other plaintiffs accused the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) of running a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud American families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule.

The suit alleges that the AAP violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by making “false and fraudulent” claims about the safety of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) childhood immunization schedule — while receiving funding from vaccine manufacturers and providing financial incentives to pediatricians who achieve high vaccination rates.

“For too long, the AAP has been held up on a pedestal, as if it were a font of science and integrity,” said CHD CEO Mary Holland. “Sadly, that’s not the case.”

Instead, Holland said, the AAP “is a front operation in a racketeering scheme involving Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Media, ready at every turn to put profits above children’s health. It’s time to face facts and see what the AAP is really about,” Holland said.

According to the complaint, the AAP has worked to conceal the findings of studies that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) — now known as the National Academy of Medicine — published in 2002 and 2013.

The IOM called for more research after concluding that no studies had ever been conducted to compare the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. The AAP’s conduct constitutes a pattern of fraud under RICO, a statute often used to prosecute organized crime, said Rick Jaffe, attorney for the plaintiffs.

Perhaps this will help shut down one of the wickedest of all industries. Perhaps not. But it’s a potentially effective line of attack, and the free pass on liability the industry was given from Congress isn’t going to help them very much here.

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Once Lethal, Always Lethal

Law officers are not restricted to justifying each and every shot they fire the way civilians tend to be:

One of the dumbest arguments being advanced in social media and elsewhere is the effort to distinguish between the ICE Officer’s first shot through the front windshield — presumably while he was still in front of the vehicle and at risk of being run into — and later shots that were fired by him through the driver’s side window after he was no longer immediately threatened.

Besides this being a 20-20 hindsight analysis that runs contrary to Graham v. Connor, it also ignores a more recent 9-0 decision by the Supreme Court involving the use of deadly force against the driver of a vehicle.

Plumhoff v. Rickart — 2014, with Justice Alito writing for a unanimous court:

Following a car-stop of a suspected drunk driver, and after just a few questions posed by the officer, the driver sped away. The officer gave chase and was eventually joined by five other cars. The chase lasted more than 5 minutes, and at times exceeded 100 mph.

The chase eventually ended in a parking lot where the suspect’s car collided with a police vehicle, and other vehicles made an effort to pin in the suspect’s car in — the high speed chase portion was over. But that wasn’t the end of the suspect’s efforts to flee:

Now in danger of being cornered, Rickard put his car into reverse “in an attempt to escape.” As he did so, Evans and Plumhoff got out of their cruisers and … Evans, gun in hand, pounded on the passenger-side window…. Rickard’s tires started spinning, and his car “was rocking back and forth,” indicating that Rickard was using the accelerator even though his bumper was flush against a police cruiser. At that point, Plumhoff fired three shots into Rickard’s car. Rickard then “reversed in a 180 degree arc” and “maneuvered onto” another street, forcing Ellis to “step to his right to avoid the vehicle.” Ibid. As Rickard continued “fleeing down” that street, ibid., Gardner and Galtelli fired 12 shots toward Rickard’s car, bringing the total number of shots fired during this incident to 15. Rickard then lost control of the car and crashed into a building.

The comments I’ve seen on social media suggest there is case law that says each round fired must be independently justified as “reasonable.” They make this claim based on the premise that the shot fired through the front windshield must be evaluated separately from the shots fired though the passenger window, and if either are “unreasonable” then the ICE officer committed a crime. That’s just nonsense and I’d like to see anyone post in the comments a citation to a case saying that is the law.

As always, the “I’m not a lawyer crowd, but…” is extrapolating from what they think they know in order to reach a conclusion that is directly contradictory to the law. Once a police officer, or an ICE officer, or a federal officer, is justified in firing his weapon, he doesn’t face the same potential ramifications for firing subsequent shots that civilians do when acting in self-defense.

So, yes, if you finish off a wounded home invader with a double-tap as he’s desperately trying to crawl away from your house, you almost certainly will find yourself facing some serious charges. But if you’re an ICE officer who fires four, or ten, or fifty more shots after the first one, all that really matters is if the first one is justifiable or not.

Personally, I’d prefer to see the civilian standard relaxed to meet the officer’s standard. What is the societal benefit to protecting criminals who have already conclusively established that their elimination was legal and justifiable, simply because the civilian didn’t shoot quite straight enough the first time?

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The Logic Holds

If we can suspend the constitution in its entirety over a 99.999% survivable virus, we can suspend it to expel all the Somalis and the Democrats facilitating their welfare and election scams.

Without question. Furthermore, the Somalis, naturalized or not, have no Constitutional rights as Americans. The Constitution was written to protect the rights of the Posterity of the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Regardless of what immigrant judges may have declared over the years, no one else resident in the USA has any claim to any rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

You can point horse and say cow all you like, but that doesn’t make the horse a cow.

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