Month: December 2023

I’ll believe it when he’s in jail

I’ve been trying to post less about politics in general and about Trump in particular, who I haven’t posted about for more than two months now. But this story is getting people excited, and I can understand why:

The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified by the Constitution from serving as president again because he stoked an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
The 4-3 ruling, which rests on an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, will almost certainly force the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve whether Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, is eligible to hold future public office.
The Colorado court ruled that Trump cannot appear on the state’s presidential ballot next year, but the ruling will not take effect immediately to give Trump time to appeal.
“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the Colorado majority opinion reads. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”
The court, which consists entirely of Democratic appointees, is the first in the nation to side with activists and voters who have filed numerous lawsuits around the country claiming that Trump is barred from office under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause.” That clause states that anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” after taking an oath of office to support the Constitution is forbidden from holding any public office.

I think the interesting detail here is that the entire court is Democratic nominees but three of them still voted against the judgement, which makes it a bit more complicated to argue that OBVIOUSLY it’s a Democrat attack… but one of the dissenters offered the interesting point that they didn’t think the Colorado court actually had the authority to consider the case anyway. And that’s what has me a bit puzzled by the excitement about the story, i.e. what if anything does it actually mean beyond the fact that he apparently can’t be included on the Colorado ballot? This is a state-level rather than federal thing. What if any effect does this actually have at the latter level? I don’t know enough about American law to know if this actually means anything for Chump, and that’s why I’m not as excited about it as some people are.

On the other hand, Republicans are worked up about the situation in the opposite direction:

Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP presidential candidate, called the court’s action “an actual attack on democracy”.
Ramaswamy pledged to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary and called on other candidates – Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Nikki Haley – to do the same unless Trump is allowed to be on the ballot.
“The framers of the 14th amendment would be appalled to see this narrow provision being weaponized … to prevent a former president from seeking re-election,” Ramaswamy said.

The framers of the 14th amendment would probably also be surprised at best by someone of Indian ancestry being allowed in American politics. But apart from that, I’m not sure how actively refusing to participate in the Colorado primary if they disallow Trump helps the Republicans either; I gather Colorado is basically a blue state anyway but why hand it to the Democrats on a plate like that? Then again, Vivek does not strike me as the most shining intellect in that mob…

And in the copyright office bind them

A story of genuinely remarkable stupidity:

A Lord of the Rings fanfiction writer has lost a copyright lawsuit over the publication of his own sequel to the much-loved series after opening up a counterproductive legal battle against JRR Tolkien’s estate.
The US-based author Demetrious Polychron published what he described as the “pitch-perfect” Lord of the Rings follow-up in 2022, titled The Fellowship of the King. He planned for the book to be the first of a seven-part series inspired by the franchise.
But the following April, Polychron attempted to sue the Tolkien estate and Amazon over the spin-off TV series The Rings of Power, which he claimed infringed the copyright in his book. A California court dismissed the case after the judge ruled that Polychron’s text was, in fact, infringing on Amazon’s prequel, released in September 2022.
The Tolkien estate then filed a separate lawsuit against Polychron for all physical and digital copies of The Fellowship of the King to be destroyed, as well as a permanent injunction to prevent any of the fanfiction series from being further distributed.
The US court also awarded lawyers’ fees totalling $134,000 (£106,000) to the Tolkien estate and Amazon in connection with Polychron’s lawsuit.
Making the order, Judge Wilson referred to Polychron’s original claim for copyright protection as “unreasonable” and “frivolous” given that his work is entirely based on characters in The Lord of the Rings.

This piece offers a bit more information, noting that Polychron’s book is a sequel to Tolkien’s story… which is slightly but immediately problematic when you’re claiming that Rings of Power was ripping you off, cos the latter was notably a PREQUEL to LotR. Seems that one of his gripes was the series including a character called Elanor who was OBVIOUSLY ripped off from his character of that name… but his Elanor is TOLKIEN’s Elanor, the child of Sam Gamgee. She appears right at the very end of Return of the King. He was basically going to sue Amazon and Tolkien’s estate for using characters and character names that he’d knocked off from Tolkien himself. It’d be like Brian Lumley suing H.P. Lovecraft for using Cthulhu. What a fuckwit, he deserves whatever he gets… admittedly I’m not sure how you destroy all digital copies of something, but that’ll be Polychron’s problem, not mine.

Brother 12 and a half?

There’s a Tumblr account I follow that mostly posts vintage paperback cover art in an occult vein of some sort, and today it offered something that really struck me for some reason:

Canada’s False Prophet by Herbert Emmerson Wilson, dated 1967. So who was this notorious Brother XII? Well, Wiki answers that; he appears to have been an English-born mariner called Edward Arthur Wilson who, later in life, appears to have fancied himself as the next Aleister Crowley or something… he claimed to have had some sort of vision in the south of France in 1924 which inspired him to set up his own cult; wonder if the “vision” came from hearing about Crowley’s ill-fated Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, which had just been shut down the previous year. (This piece suggests he then “channelled” the text of his book The Three Truths, which story certainly has a whiff of Liber AL to it.) Whether or not that was indeed the case, Wilson’s Aquarian Foundation seems to have gone tits up even faster than Crowley’s Abbey, from which he appears to have learned nothing about how not to screw this sort of thing up…

So what about the author of the book? Herbert Emmerson Wilson… ooh, same name as the notorious brother 12? Maybe an actual brother? Well, evidently not, per the Dictionary of Canadian Biography:

“…the fraudulent work Canada’s false prophet; the notorious Brother Twelve (Richmond Hill, Ont. [1967]), which was written by Herbert Emmerson Wilson, a convicted criminal who falsely claimed to be Edward Arthur’s brother.”

Oh.

There wasn’t much to be found online about Herbert Emmerson Wilson, but if you subtract one “m” from his middle name, you get this:

H. E. Wilson, former ordained clergyman, war veteran, bank robber, mail bandit, safe-cracker, jail breaker, convicted and sentenced murderer of his “stool-ing” partner, is without question the outstanding criminal character of the world and of the twentieth century.

Now, that comes from the website of a publisher devoted to republishing the works of one Thomas P. Kelley, a Canadian pulp writer who, among his many other works, helped Wilson write his autobiography in the 1950s. So obviously. I’m sure that description was written to hype Wilson up a bit and make him sound interesting to prospective buyers, but, remarkably enough, as far as I can see it’s actually true.

So Herbert Em(m)erson Wilson would appear to have been at least as interesting as his subject. Makes me wonder why he wrote this book about the other Wilson, then, while posing as his brother. (I am, obviously, assuming this book’s author is in fact our murderous safe-cracking ex-clergyman and the differently spelled name on the cover is the publisher’s mistake rather than being someone else with a bizarrely similar name.) Or was he? There’s a biography of Edward Wilson by John Oliphant which I haven’t read because, obviously, I only heard of him for the first time today, so I don’t know what evidence it offers, but one of the pieces I linked above indicates that his early biography is kind of sketchy and that Wilson himself claimed he was born to royalty in India.

So he was, by the look of it, not above bullshitting people. So could that English background have been part of his bullshit too and maybe him and Herbert were indeed related? At any rate, we do know he wasn’t the only Edward Arthur Wilson around at that time… maybe John Oliphant found another one? I don’t know, and somehow I suspect not, I just find the speculating interesting; after all, his reported death in Switzerland in 1934 is apparently widely considered to have been faked, maybe his birth was too. Or maybe not.

In any case, there was one more detail that amazed me as I researched this: whatever the truth of Edward Arthur Wilson, Herbert Emerson Wilson had a fan in none other than STANLEY KUBRICK, who had read Wilson’s autobiography and thought it was a great idea for a film; at the time he was working with Kirk Douglas, with whom he’d just made Paths of Glory, and offered the latter a script he called God-Fearing Man, but for whatever reason it became one of Kubrick’s many unmade projects. Until about 10 years ago when there was talk of it being made for TV by some European mob; nothing came of that but then they seem to have started talking about it again in 2019 with a view to filming it in 2020. Except we all know how that year turned out; I’m guessing this was one of the many casualties of Anno Covid… still, maybe it could yet happen?

A little detail I’d missed…

So remember how, just a few weeks ago, Oolong was copping mockery for this glorious post? For some reason, it’s only just struck me now after looking at it again that it’s actually even stupider than I first thought.

An armoured personnel carrier from the future.

What “Bladerunner” would have driven.

But when did Blade Runner take place?

…OH.

Which was four years in the PAST when Oolong said Cybertruck(kk) was from the future.

I don’t know how I didn’t pick up on this at the time when this silliness started circulating, but goddamn I’m pleased that I’ve finally done so.

Once more with stealing

Needless to say Hbomberguy’s now-famous plagiarism video has provoked a lot of discourse on Youtube, some of which I’ve watched, but this particular example offers a different perspective on James Somerton: where Harris looked at Somerton’s plagiarism and Todd Nathanson looked at his misinformation and lies, Courtney and Royce look at, frankly, giving him money:

This video’s more about Somerton’s business practices with his production company Telos Pictures, which seem to have been as shitty as anything else. These creators have further particular beef with him over what they consider his poor showing when it came to asexual representation (I did rather enjoy the bit where she says how they gave him a bunch of potential resources and he never plagiarised any of it), but their more obvious problem is that, frankly, they put money into Telos, a fair bit thereof, and the return rhey got from doing so was… well, bugger all.

The more I hear about this character, the less I like him, and the detail about him literally calling the cops on some of his critics for “harrassment” makes me lose that rather pointless feeling of vague sympathy for him I had after watching Todd’s video. I can’t do it. He’s brought all this shit on himself and HE FUCKING DESERVES IT. And his Fandom page that I linked previously has been updated with some new bullshit, looks like he may have engaged in catfishing and some sort of scam on Patreon and he may never have got those business degrees he started out his career with (having sold himself as a media expert before YT). I’m kind of glad I never watched any of his stuff now…