Links
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Hard to find who, but it seems to have been Hemingway. Whose writing I don’t like, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. ↩︎
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And not the good one. That’s May Day. ↩︎
Crazy Copyright Claim
Gotta say I hope Radiohead (or their lawyers) lose this case:
Pop star Lana Del Rey says she’s being sued by Radiohead for copying their breakthrough single, ‘Creep.’
I’m not a fan of Lana Del Rey, but I just listened to her song, ‘Get Free,’ and the only similarity is the chord progression in the first verse. You can’t claim copyright in a chord progression. Or if you can, you shouldn’t be able to.
If the chords and the melody were the same, they’d have a point, but even then apparently they want 100% of the publishing royalties; don’t the words count? Del Rey has offered them 40%, and I think that’s way too much.
I’m amused that the album containing the song gets its title from a doubtless much better one by the same name: Lust for Life. There’s no copyright in titles, of course.
Mayday for Human Rights
More evidence, as if it were needed, that this government is not just incompetent, but actively malevolent:
The EU (withdrawal) bill, published on Thursday – known as the “great repeal bill”– which will formally enact Brexit, includes a clause which says: “The charter of fundamental rights is not part of domestic law on or after exit day.”
Yes, Theresa May and her cabal of crazies do not believe that British citizens should have the same fundamental rights guaranteed to them as citizens of the rest of the EU.
A Firefighter's Words On Grenfell Tower
This can’t be spread widely enough: the words of a firefighter who attended the Grenfell Tower fire.
Right Wing Pirates to Plague the Med
This is a disgrace on humanity:
Far-right activists are planning a sea campaign this summer to disrupt vessels saving refugees in the Mediterranean, after successfully intercepting a rescue mission last month.
Members of the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant “Identitarian” movement – largely twentysomethings often described as Europe’s answer to the American alt-right – have raised £56,489 in less than three weeks to enable them to target boats run by aid charities helping to rescue refugees.
From The Guardian.
A right wing organisation that wants to stop aid agency boats that are trying to rescue refugees. I hope the coastguards of Italy and Greece shut them down hard.
Landmark European Court Case Could Curtail Freedoms of British Dual Nationals
The Home Office refused his application on the grounds that she could not rely on her EU freedom of movement rights, which include the right to bring in a family member, as she was a British national as well as an EU national.
Does this legal case mean that British citizens automatically have fewer rights than EU citizens in general? If that’s the case then we should be leaving the UK, not the EU.
Protect the Human Rights Act
There’s a petition at Change.org to get the parties to commit to protecting the Human Rights Act and Britain’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. The latter was drafted by British lawyers, remember, after the Second World War; and now some British politicians are suggesting we should abandon it, as we are seemingly committed to abandoning the EU.1
The former enshrines the convention in UK law.2
This one is definitely worth signing.
Margaret Atwood's Uncanny Ancestor
This is a horrific quote from The New Yorker‘s interview with Margaret Atwood:
Mary Webster, whose neighbors, in the Puritan town of Hadley, Massachusetts, had accused her of witchcraft. ‘The townspeople didn’t like her, so they strung her up,’ Atwood said recently. ‘But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn’t die. She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive.’ Webster became known as Half-Hanged Mary.
But I can’t help thinking, if there’s anything to the story, wouldn’t they have taken her survival as further evidence of her witchy nature, and made sure they killed her next time? As it is, it sounds like she lived on.
Brexit and Northern Ireland
Here’s a great tweetstorm about the effect Brexit will have on Northern Ireland. Worth reading the whole thing.
Interrupting-Kids Video and Analysis Thereof
The video of the guy being interviewed on the BBC and interrupted by his kids is great, but even better is Ben Thompson’s analysis of it.
You can see the video and read about it at that link.
The Writing Process
In What Writers Really Do When They Write George Saunders gives a great insight into some parts of his working process.
What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs.
Or “Writing is rewriting,” as someone once put it.1
It’s a good piece, and well worth reading. Oddly, in the printed edition (Saturday’s Guardian Review section) it was entitled “Master of the Universe.”
Tory MP Claims Astrology Could Help the NHS
This should be enough to disbar someone from public life for good: Astrology could help take pressure off NHS doctors, claims Conservative MP — The Guardian. Though I notice the article is two years old. It just came to my attention via Facebook one of Twitter’s occasional emails.
David Tredinnick said astrology, along with complementary medicine, could take pressure off NHS doctors, but acknowledged that any attempt to spend taxpayers’ money on consulting the stars would cause “a huge row”.
Getting his defence in early, he goes on to say that his likely critics (he names Brian Cox specifically):
“… are also ignorant, because they never study the subject and just say that it is all to do with what appears in the newspapers, which it is not, and they are deeply prejudiced, and racially prejudiced, which is troubling.”
Nice tactic: he knows he’s talking bullshit, so accuses people of racism. Last time I checked, astrology wasn’t a race.
Nor was stupidity.
And in the unlikely event that anyone reading this thinks I’m just being reflexively mean and as bad as the critics he fears, here’s a considered scientific opinion. The only possible known way the positions of the planets and stars at our birth could affect us is by gravity. And while gravity does travel all through the universe, it is very, very weak — the weakest of the fundamental forces. Just look at how hard it was to measure gravitational waves. We were only able to do that in the last year, and it took colliding black holes to make enough of a splash for us to measure.
Is it possible that heavenly bodies affect us in some other, as yet unknown way? Yes. And here’s what science says about that: show us how, and we’ll study it. Demonstrate the mechanism by which this influence happens, and we’ll write down the equations that govern it and learn all about it. We’ll have to throw out all existing models of physics, but if you bring the evidence, that’s what we’ll do.
That’s science.
Brain Explain
Interesting article on psychology wherein Robert Epstein tells us that “Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer.”
It is, as I say, interesting. But it’s also profoundly annoying in the way he asserts that the human brain is not an information processor, but then makes no attempt to explain what it is, instead.
He asserts that the brain does not hold a copy of a song it has learned, for example, but instead “is changed in a way that allows the person to sing it” (I paraphrase).
But isn’t that just another way of saying that it has stored a copy? If that change does not in some sense denote making a copy, then what exactly does it mean? What is the brain doing when the singer recalls the song? Inventing it anew, exactly (or not) as the original composer intended?
I don’t doubt that what he calls “[t]he information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence” has its limitations; but he has completely failed to explain them or provide an alternative explanation.
The truth is we don’t understand much about how the brain does what it does; and this guy knows more than most of us. But he’s a psychologist. He no doubt has a deep understanding of the workings of the human mind. But I think if you want someone to explain what we understand of the workings of he human brain, then you want that person to be a neuroscientist.
Why Liberals Are Wrong About Trump
This is well worth reading. We should all see an alternative view from time to time:
Brexit Hope?
A very small hope. Brexit—take back control by the improbably-named Jolyon Maugham, suggests that a court ruling could be achieved which would ensure that we can back out of Brexit at the last moment:
The effects of an Article 50 notification are not fully understood—and not only because May is still peddling a blind bargain, a Brexit pig-in-a-poke. We do know that, should we ask and the other 27 member states agree, we could remain. But it is brave to assume that two years of exposure to the negotiating skills of Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis will not generate even one hold-out. [...] The preponderance of legal opinion is that we could, after all, decide to remain. That we could, having notified, withdraw that notification. But, given the magnitude of the issue, our parliament must know more than what the answer probably is. It must know what it actually is.
[...]
only the court to which we all subscribe can give an answer: the European Court in Luxembourg.
He/she (I’m guessing “he,” from the writing style) says:
But a case which—along with Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley, Steven Agnew, a Green member of the Northern Irish Assembly and Keith Taylor, a Green MEP—I am bringing in the Dublin High Court seeks to give us the power to travel back if we need it.
And he explains that:
We access it via a national court. And it can’t be one of ours. One of the complaints in the Dublin case is that the other 27 have breached the Treaty by excluding us from Council meetings before we’ve notified under Article 50. And that complaint can only be made by a court in one of those 27. The Irish court is the natural choice
Which all seems fair. The idea seems to be that the European Court of Justice could rule definitively that we could revoke our triggering of Article 50 at the end of the two-year negotiating period. And if the deal is bad, or especially if there isn’t one, parliament is likely to call another referendum in those circumstances, wherein we’ll know exactly what we’re voting for, and get it right this time.
A small hope, like I say. And it doesn’t protect us from the damage that’s being inflicted in the meantime.
But a small hope is better than none at all.
Beginning of the End
A total of 47 Labour MPs voted against the Brexit bill, joining 50 SNP MPs and seven Liberal Democrats. Just one Conservative MP, Ken Clarke, joined them in the division lobbies, to applause from Labour rebels.
A fifth of Labour MPs defy three line whip to vote against article 50 bill | Politics | The Guardian
Well done to all the rebels. But really, Tories: only one? Only Ken Clarke? Is that really you doing your duty, acting in the best interests of the country?
We’re living through the death of representative democracy.
Thanks, Obama (for Real)
Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of dthe most prominent whistleblowers in modern times when she exposed the nature of modern warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who then went on to pay the price with a 35-year military prison sentence, is to be freed in May as a gift of outgoing president Barack Obama.
Nice one. Next, pardon Snowden?
The Only Good Brexit is No Brexit
38 Degrees is consulting the public on a “DIY Brexit,” wherein the public can give their opinions on what Brexit should look like, and supposedly the results will be looked at by a group of think-tanks who are being consulted on the matter.
The things people have come up with so far all seem pretty good and sound, at a first glance (kind of hard to read, the way it’s presented with big fixed header and footer).
But. But what we want is not the best Brexit we can get. What we want is no Brexit at all.
And I think I can safely say I speak for the majority when I say that. But Theresa May and her crazy government don’t look like they’re willing to listen to anyone about it.
You know how all recent prime ministers get “isms” named after them? Ever since Thatcherism, at least? Well this one gets an alternative suffix: Not Mayism. Mayday!1
Probably a Good Time to Download Your Twitter Archive
This Bloomberg article may not be entirely serious, but it is, you know, Bloomberg:
There’s a strange idea circulating among Mexican currency traders. Well, more of a joke really. But there’s a certain logic to it.
It goes like this: Instead of spending its precious reserves to defend the peso, Mexico should just buy Twitter Inc. — at a cost of about $12 billion — and immediately shut it down.
The idea being that it would be the easiest way to stop the Trumpet tweeting negative things about Mexico.
I don’t know, he’d just find another forum, no doubt. Shit, in a week’s time he’ll be able to put whatever he wants on Whitehouse.gov.
[T]hat the idea was even raised in jest shows how just how frustrated Mexicans are that their economy and the value of their savings are at the mercy of the seemingly random musings coming in 140-character bursts from Trump’s Twitter account. It’s a sentiment that presumably would be shared by U.S. investors in companies like, say, General Motors Co. or Lockheed Martin Corp., but in Mexico, the pain, and the accompanying despair, appear to be on a much greater scale.
A lot more than Mexico is at the mercy of those “seemingly random musings.”
Trump Not Appointing Palin as Scientific Advisor
There’s a story doing the rounds on Facebook that Trump has appointed Sarah Palin as Science and Technology Advisor. Terrifying, if true. But a rudimentary search tells us it’s false.
The clue was the site it was reported on — which I can’t find at the moment as I now can’t locate the post where I saw it (bloody Facebook). Not that I would have linked to it, but I might have given its name. People need to look at the sites they’re reading and evaluate them for credibility. But apparently that’s hard.
Can We Stick With Labour Now?
This story about Labour giving in to Brexit is the latest straw in a… problematic few months. I’m not sure I can stay a member of the Labour Party if the leadership is now as definitively opposed to sanity as this. While still failing to actually oppose this terrible government.