Month: December 2023

Somerton re-redux

Interesting interview with Hbomberguy over THAT video:

For Harry, the shocking success of his four-hour video has itself brought a few internal issues surrounding a pledge he made to give away a portion of its profits to those who had been plagiarised.
“We said we were going to give away all the ad revenue that video raised and now because ad revenue’s higher in December, the video is four hours so there are more ads, and a lot of people have watched it, it’s an order of magnitude higher than we expected it to get.”
This means that the payouts Harry and the Hbomberguy team promised have increased dramatically, and, coupled with Somerton’s reaction, things have become much more hectic.
“Now, like, taxes are involved,” Harry says. “This is a substantial amount of money to be taxed on before we give it to people. It’s actually made it harder for me to do the intended purpose of the video.
“My wonderful producer, Kat, has had to set up a database to keep track of all of the things that were stolen from just to make sure we have everything correct… This isn’t like 300 bucks, which is what we expected it to be, this is a lot more.”

Good to know that something worthwhile has come from the debacle. The REALLY unexpected outcome from the whole thing, though, is surely this:

I will indeed be DAMNED. James Somerton returned just two weeks after he was blasted off the Internet to… apologise? And to reactivate his Patreon, too, but this video is what’s drawing most of the attention. Understandably so. And… YIKES.





These last two items raise an important point. I did try and watch Somerton’s video, and he basically started by talking about, frankly, having been hospitalised since Harry’s video came out. And I couldn’t watch it beyond that point, not because that’s, you know, grim as fuck (I’m assuming he’s telling the truth about this, I find it believable and I feel the people I’ve seen questioning this point are being unnecessarily uncharitable), but because I knew what the tone of the rest of the video would be if this was how he was kicking it off. From what I can see, I don’t appear to have missed much.

You may have noted, though, that my first screenshsot was of a reupload of the video… that’s cos not only did James upload what appears to have been one of the worst Youtube apology videos ever (a truly cursed subgenre), he also removed it a few hours later. Unsurprising, given that all the comments I saw before he whacked the video were bracingly negative. Alas for him, it’s so easy to download YT videos these days, and Somerton’s well enough known now, that someone was bound to save it in case he did that. Mind you, I’m still not going to watch it. I feel somehow that even watching someone else’s save and reupload of his video is just going to encourage him…

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?