zucked

Much like the laisse-faire champion of free-markets who only thought it was the government’s place to intervene in monopolies when there was demonstrable consumer harm—never mind about democratic harm or erecting barriers to entry—the US judge and Solicitor General Robert Bork (and author of such titles as Slouching Towards Gomorrah) whose name became a verb for those (righteously) villifed and held to account by the mass media, the anti-social media conglomerate (previously) has finally generated enough ill-will to call to action the Federal Trade Commission joining suit with forty-six states attorneys general plus Guam and Washington, DC to get roundly borked and broken up.
Since the last times the American government was compelled to take legal and legislative actions against Ma Bell and then Big Blue, tech and telecos have seen few restrictions and rather nurtured and coddled to become some of the most powerful companies in the world. The FTC is charged with protecting consumers from cartels and monopolistic and monopsonistic practises and while perhaps a bit too timid over the past couple of decades, it has gathered up its courage and decided to push forward during this lame-duck session. Of course this corporate bully, armed to the teeth yet claiming it’s being undermined and unfairly assaulted—is formible with virtually unlimited resources to lobby, leverage the public (the fight comes to us too and we can continue to not dally in that walled-garden) and rail against regulation and dial-up the victimhood. These staid giants of industry are built on the model of suppressing or absorbing the competition and know no other route to success.

recap

Via Duck Soup, we are directed to another year-in-review told through the editorial board and camera pool of The New York Times, month-by-month of 2020, which serves as an incredible reminder to headline the lack of correspondence between the world depicted in the first quarter with what was just over the horizon. All captioned and curated, one can explore these pivot-points, especially those that receed apace from the present, in this interactive retrospective. As indelible as 2020 seems, it’s surprising what iconic images seem to belong to another time and place.

sit, ubu, sit

The surreal and obscene stage play Ubu Roi (see previously) by Alfred Jarry opened and closed to audiences on this day in 1896 at Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris after the performance incited rioting. A synthesis of Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear through the comic grotesque lens of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel franchise. Jarry (*1837 – 1907) expounded on the symbolism and allegory behind his controversial play in a novel published two years after its celebrated primier, The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Fasutroll, Pataphysician that defined the discipline of 'pataphysics, the underpinning theme throughout his writing, as beyond the metaphysical realm and concerned itself with finding imaginary solutions and the study of laws that government exceptions, as a primer to his two sequel—unfornutately never staged in Jarry’s life time. The US television production company founded by Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties, Spin City) has for its mascot the producer’s dog, namesake of the titular character. See more at the links above, including a modern performance at the link up top.

year in search

Via The Curious Brain, we are directed towards a superlative, year-end compliation that waxes exsistential and exegetical with search-engine queries of why besting what and how illustrated in this emotional video short. Despite the potential for misinformation, baiting outrage and holding up an unflattering mirror for us scrutinise or more often avert our eyes from, the internet and technology are owed a debt of gratitude for helping us muddle through 2020 and remember whom and what we’ve lost, what's irreplacable and what can be brought back better. Keep on seeking, keep on searching.

variola major

With humankind since the beginning, claiming at least half-a-billion lives over the ages, scarring and maiming countless more, and surely the inspiration for all manner of curse and blight and vengeful and contractual god, on this day in 1979—after centuries of observation that a bit of homeopathy was promising innoculation and informing a more potent technique for Edward Jenner in 1796, able to later route the contagion’s last few sanctuaries and hiding places, a group of eminent epidemiologists, later confirmed by global public health agencies, were able to declare the eradication of smallpox. That is no small feat to banish the plague that informed and entangled an incredible portion of what we are as beings.

laches

In an apparently unananmious and delightfully terse decision, the US Supreme Court, despite it being stacked with three justices appointed by Trump himself, rejected mounting efforts to reverse the results of the election outcome in the state of Pennsylvania.

A toady representative built his case on the specious argument that universal mail-in voting (enacted in 2019) defies constitutionality and therefore all ballots not cast in person and on the day of the election ought to be null and void. This decision—based on the title principle from the French legal concept of dilatoriness (laschesses), that is a lack of a lack of diligence in exercising a party’s right to challenge and failing to do so in a timely matter (changing the rules after the election prejudices the defence) is hopefully the last of a series of suites that either sought to throw out millions of votes or allow the state legislature to advance faithless electors to the collegium, which convenes on 14 December to cast their votes. Vigilantibus non dormientibus æquitas subvenit. Equity aids the vigilant, not the indolent.

show dna

Informed earlier by our faithful chronicler and now reprised for the cinematic adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s 1975 novel of the same name going into general release in US cinemas on this day in 1983, James L. Brooks directorial debut film (also writer and producer) has a throughline to the Simpsons. As a thank you gift for securing her and her production team an Academy Award (Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacClaine, Danny DeVito, Debra Winger, Jeff Daniels, John Lithgow and Jack Nicholson did quite well at the Oscars) assistant Polly Platt had procured for her collaborator an original panel of the comic Life in Hell—a bleak strip about a depressed, neurotic rabbit called Bongo, specifically one from 1982 entitled “The Los Angeles Way of Death”—as imagined and illustrated by Matt Groening. A year later, with a new television project, a variety show with a series of sketches, Brooks reached out to Groening about developing a series of animated interstitial bumpers between segments. Fearing loss of creative control over his original characters, Groening created a wholly new cast based on his own family, giving the world the Simpsons as a regular part of The Tracey Ullmann Show.

third protocol emblem

The global humanitarian movement comprising nearly a million volunteers and staff worldwide, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, adopted on this day in 2005 the red crystal, officially referred to as the above, as an auxiliary symbol available to use when religious connotations of the previous emblems might be objectionable as an amendment to the Geneva Conventions, known as Protocol III. Neutral and without religious, political or geographic associations, it was meant to make the organisation more inclusive and not a vehicle of hegemony and privileging, allowing more groups to join and deploy this protective banner during times of conflict to render assistance to the wounded.