In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 It is time for a Pratchett post.  Last week, I wrote my Sunday piece about K.J. Parker's The Folding Knife , and Pratchett is always a good palate-cleanser, including after such a perversely weighty book.  So we turn to Terry.  My last Pratchett post was about Pyramids , and were I to go in order, that would take us to Guards! Guards!   That one is actually quite good, but I think I may come back and revisit the City Watch books at a later date, if I can stomach the series they tried to make of that particular corner of Ankh-Morpork.  For now, we'll skip ahead to Faust Eric .  I can work with that, topically.  I remain in terror of whatever the modern television industry would do to Sam Vimes and the rest of the Watch, though.  (Sgt. Detritus, don't  salute!) Regardless,  Faust  Eric  follows a child demonologist named, um... I can't remember.  He intends to summon a demon to grant him three wishes.  Immortality, power, and the most beautiful woman in history.  Yet th

 It happened again this week.  In the Montana State House, Rep. Zooey Zephyr was barred from the floor of the legislature during the debate of a bill.  The coverage of the incident did not always make it clear what happened, which I find frustrating.  Clickbait stories about a transgender representative barred from the floor of the Montana State House aren't really clickbait if they give in-depth analysis of the story itself.  The headline is the point, and the headline without the analysis is less than fully informative, while also providing some interesting observations about developing patterns for those who follow state legislatures. It was not all that difficult to find out what happened, but any news story covering Zephyr's floor speech should have covered the full events.  The way to distinguish clickbait from real news coverage is whether or not the news source actually described the full events.  Here is the story.  Montana was debating legislation that would have proh

 Throttle Elevator Music, "Testimonial," from Jagged Rocks .

 Well, that was interesting.  Discovery during the Dominion lawsuit demonstrated that Tucker Carlson does not believe much of what he says.  How much of his schtick is pure schtick?  We will never know.  I doubt that he has a secret reading room in his house with the complete works of Karl Marx, Derrick Bell, Judith Butler, John Money, Alfred Kinsey, and all of his Bernie Sanders fan-fic short stories, written out by hand.  This strikes me as implausible.  Yet he detests Donald Trump, and has no compunction about lying to keep his audience.  Carlson was among the anchors creating the greatest legal and financial liability for Fox, despite knowing that he was full of shit, yet Carlson was not going rogue.  He was not brushing off directives from executives to keep it within the lines.  Quite the opposite.  He was among their cash cows, bringing in money precisely for spreading the lies and conspiracy theories that created the legal liability.  That business incentive remains, and hence

 This morning, we return to K.J. Parker (a pseudonym for Tom Holt), about whose books I have written before.  Parker (Holt) manages wit and insight, if paired disquietingly.  The Folding Knife  takes place on an Earth analog, primarily in the Vesani Republic.  The Vesani Republic reads as some mashup of Rome and Venice, and follows the rise and fall of Bassianus Severus-- Basso-- as he goes from the son of the "First Citizen" to First Citizen, himself, to fleeing for his life after flying too close to the "Invincible Sun," which is the deity they worship.  Is Basso a villain?  Not quite.  In many ways, despite having been published in 2010, he was what Donald Trump pretended to be, and desperately wished to be, with a few differences.  He was, however, a testament to the folly of even that false dream. Basso was born to wealth, yet he was far more intelligent than his instinctive and reckless father.  At a young age, he was apprenticed to Antigonus, the eunuch who o

 My explanation of the legal system is as follows.  It is a Turing machine.  It is an attempt to approximate, through mechanical rules, the wisdom and justice of Solomon, or pick your icon.  In an ideal world, there would be a wise and true philosopher-king, to whose court you would take your dispute.  The wise and true philosopher-king would listen impartially, and come to the fairest ruling possible.  You know that the history of "court" traces back to the court of the king, right?  In the absence of any such avatar of fairness and impartiality, we have constructed a Turing machine of rules.  Rule, after rule, after rule, and like any coding procedure, the code that has resulted from this ongoing process is a kludge of patches because code is mindless.  Code is stupid.  Code is not merely impartial, but impartial to intent.  Impartial to a fault.  Code has no idea what you meant to write, which is why you never get it right the first time.  So you code, and you code, and yo

 T.J. Kirk, "The Payback."

 Sen. Diane Feinstein is not doing well.  She has physical health issues, and if we cut through the euphemisms, she has pronounced cognitive decline.  Sorry, that was a euphemism.  She is senile.  Whatever one thinks of her ideology, which we can now describe as center-left (even if it was once comparatively further left), she has committed her life to public service, and anyone who believes in democracy should recognize and honor that.  Honor Diane Feinstein and her lifelong service to the American people, and the principles of representative government.  Yet the republican form of democracy requires having public servants who can perform the task, and there comes a point at which a person can no longer do that.  One of the few careers in which people regularly stay past their ability is that of "public service," at least in the elected realm.  Of course, academia is the other, but I'm not senile yet.  I'm just plain, ole' crazy, which will make any such assessme

 Amid the clatter, amid the sturm und drang of American political melodrama, or perhaps culturally appropriated Kabuki theater, we have another important show:  that of social media, and specifically, a platform uniquely harmful to children, cognition, and likely funneling data to the Chinese government.  I write, of course, of blogspot , I mean, TikTok.  I have raised some questions about the efficacy of any potential government action on TikTik, but this morning, let us turn to an old classic science fiction novel by one of my favorite oddballs, Fredric Brown.  In 1955, he published a strange, surreal, and vaguely solipsistic book called Martians, Go Home .  It was a perversely nightmarish book about a Martian invasion resulting in cartoonish annoyance, the elimination of any privacy at the personal or national level, and if you think that's better than some Earth-shattering kaboom movie, well, maybe, but it's still bad.  Hilariously bad, but bad nevertheless.  Let us conside

 Donald J. Trump was just indicted on felony charges, and that can ruin your whole week, but I mean that question in a more general sense.  Pictures of Trump with an expression of a scowl are easier to find than those of him with an expression of contentment unless he is posing, and he has adopted the gesture of the raised fist-- a common symbol of the black power movement-- as something between affectation and Tourette's-like tic.  Donald Trump was born to a life of privilege beyond historical royalty.  He has been given literally everything.  His family bought his way into the Ivy League, transferring him from Fordham to U Penn with donations because his academic qualifications and native intelligence were insufficient to gain admission on merit alone.  His father, Fred Trump, began transferring money to him through illegal tax schemes at such a young age that the only way Donald could ever fail to be absurdly rich was if he simply became the worst businessmen in all of history. 

 Against my better judgment, this morning's post will be a [gulp]... cautiously optimistic post.  Clearly, I have been replaced by a pod person.  Please enjoy this morning's guest post by pod-person Buchler.  Anyway, the Arthur Conan Doyle motivation for the post is a dog that didn't bark in the form of a violent reaction that didn't occur.  Donald Trump has been indicted, and while he will almost certainly not be convicted on the hush money payments (nor anything else), he warned of his impending indictment and has predictably raised the temperature on his rhetoric, hoping to inflame a reaction.  Does Donald Trump want more violence?  Yes.  Yes, he does. But it didn't happen. Granted, very little time has passed, but this is an important observation.  January 6 was not a spontaneous thing.  It took organization and planning.  Trump's followers have a range of reactions right now, generally negative, but without anyone planning and organizing any kind of violent