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(This article has some rather blunt observations about the representation of race, nationality, sex, sexuality and religion by multiple litigious media companies. I strongly doubt that the editors of SoylentNews would ever approve official publication of such an article and therefore I publish this, without editing, in a personal capacity.)

I really want to watch some high-quality, fan produced StarTrek. However, the pipeline is exhausted. This is due to the rights holder being extremely restrictive. This leaves me quite disgruntled.

I've made friends through a shared interest in StarTrek. It has also been useful in a professional capacity because it allows some technical concepts to be conveyed more concisely. I've been persuaded to visit Pages Bar in Pages Street, Westminster, London and (due to booking error) persuaded to attend a StarTrek convention where Ethan Phillips (Neelix), Jennifer Lien (Kes) and William Shatner (the third best actor to portray Captain James Tiberius Kirk) were guests of honor.

Pages Bar was the most fun but that closed many years ago. Saturday evenings were for StarTrek. other evenings were for other science fiction themes. The bar had a large model NCC1701D Enterprise hanging from the ceiling and some of the tables were in the style of 10 Forward. About 1/3 of the patrons wore StarTrek uniforms, although ranks below commander were quite sparse. Some of the remainder dressed as Borg or Klingons. (Top tip: Wear a tampon under a Klingon prosthetic forehead to absorb sweat.) There was a dealer table run by a guy who was known as the Ferengi due to his generous discounting policy. The bar served Romulan Ale (lager with a dash of blue food coloring) and Tribble Burgers (which were probably about 90% beef and 10% horse.) It also showed official episodes of StarTrek, fan productions and promotional video for conventions. There was often one guest of honor, such as George Takei (Sulu) or Garrett Wang (Harry Kim from Voyager). Every Saturday was like a mini-convention.

When the rights for StarTrek transferred from Viacom to Paramount, the latter scoped around to see if any rights required enforcing. When it encountered Pages Bar, the reaction was akin to "WTF is this???" Paramount made a token effort to enforce rights. Romulan Ale and Tribble Burgers were dropped from the menu but it was otherwise unaffected. It was generally understood that Pages Bar pushed a little too far and shouldn't push further. This was respected by fans and Paramount gained considerable goodwill.

Similar truces stood for many years but during this period, the cost of quality cameras crashed, the cost of post-production crashed and a growing number of actors from the growing canon were willing to participate in a growing number of productions. Cribbing from reason.tv's brief history of fan productions prior to StarTrek: Axanar getting sued, this first occurred in 1985 when George Takei appeared in Yorktown: A Time To Heal and then Chekov, Uhura and Tuvok appeared in the (rather good) fan production, StarTrek: Of Gods And Men. The latter also had Gary Graham from Alien Nation.

I find most of the legacy fan productions to be unwatchable. The seven seasons of StarTrek: Hidden Frontier rivals The Next Generation by size and is widely available. However, many of the sets were rendered with less than 100MHz processing power and composited to NTSC VHS at 525i before being archived, sampled, uploaded and transcoded to 360p. Early episodes of StarTrek: New Voyages and Starship Farragut have equal distribution quality. StarTrek: New Voyages becomes extremely watchable from Episode 8: Kitumba. It helps that Episode 9: Mind Sifter has a retro 5:4 aspect ratio and is consistent with StarTrek: Of Gods And Men. Unfortunately, StarTrek: New Voyages finishes at Episode 10. Starship Farragut has an astounding set but the acting hasn't improved over 20 years. The actors have merely gone from having the presence of young middle-managers to having the presence of old and fat middle-managers. One is more suited to the rôle of dental receptionist with Stage 4 RBF rather than StarFleet Communication Officer. It is ass-clenchingly awful and not in an amusing way.

With seven episodes of StarTrek Continues each raising funding and then StarTrek: Axanar raising US$1.3 million of crowd-funding across Kickstarter and IndieGogo, Paramount/CBS (or whatever it is called nowadays) decided to set rules which prohibited anything beyond 2×15 minute productions - and no canon cast or crew allowed in *any* rôle, paid or unpaid. And Paramount/CBS set these rules with nothing ready for StarTrek's 50th anniversary. Thanks, guys.

Like some other members of SoylentNews, I paid to see the first two StarTrek reboot films and I decided that I wouldn't be conned on a third occasion. Zachary Quinto is surprisingly good as Spock and Karl Urban is versatile as McCoy but that isn't enough to redeem it. I hear that the series: STD StarTrek: Disco Discovery is also awful, in part because it differs more from canon than many fan productions and, in part because of an overt progressive agenda. StarTrek is renowned for tolerance and harmony but occasionally pushed too far. A kiss between Kirk and Uhura was censored in Alabama, although that's a place more closely associated with incest than racial tolerance. The Original Series and The Next Generation also attempted to cover racism and homophobia more tactfully. However, The Next Generation had an unconscious undercurrent of casual racism where, for example, black actors portray a violent race. Also, good Klingons are portrayed by actors of Christian, West African descent and bad Klingons are portrayed by actors of Muslim, East African descent. Furthermore, the Ferengi have a remarkable similarity to the stereotype of a short, ugly, money obsessed, Hollywood Jew - complete with the sexual objectification of women. (StarFleet also has an acute shortage of gallium and therefore none of the LEDs are blue.)

Look further afield and other science fiction is just as bad. I hear that the StarWars triple trilogy is awful. Episode 4, Episode 5 and Episode 6 are swashbucklers in space with excellent three act structure - individually and as a trilogy. Repeating this on another scale was ambitious. Unfortunately, it failed. Technical problems were overcome, such as matching analog and digital cinematography. However, Episode 1 has no plot. (It also has Jar Jar Binks which some believe is a German, Italian and/or Latino immigrant stereotype.) Journalists were shown pre-release screenings where 80 minutes of the footage was shown in a random order. Ostensibly, this was to prevent the plot being published but this was soon discovered to hide the lack of plot. Episode 2 has been described as "attack of the cloned plot". Episode 3 has the unenviable job of tying two bags of shit to Episode 4. Given the circumstances, this was achieved competently. However, that's not a recommendation.

Disney StarWars was made in record time with an overlap of cast and crew with the StarTrek reboots. When their work on StarTrek scores zero out of 2 and previous work on StarWars Episodes 1-3 scores 1/2 out of 3, I'd be an idiot to pay to see Episodes 7-9 in a cinema. The film: Solo may also disappoint. Despite all of the advances in textiles and fur rendering, audiences complain that Chewbacca looks worse than 40 years ago. At best, this is a failure to meet raised expectations.

There is also the issue of affirmative action casting. After StarTrek cast a white male captain (William Shatner as Kirk) then another white male captain (Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard), StarTrek cast a black male commander (Avery Brooks as Sisko) than a white female captain (Kate Mulgrew as Mrs. Columbo in space Janeway). With far more clumsiness and the full wisdom of hindsight, StarWars Episodes 7-9 has a black male protagonist and a white female protagonist. What an original combination! Are they called Cisco and Janeway? And, apparently, a character from Episode 5 is now pansexual. I hope this gets viewed with equal clumsiness.

A much bigger issue is that big budget action films have converged on the hero's journey plot. Unfortunately, the film industry has been following the example "beat sheet" from the book: Save The Cat to the extent that the film: Pacific Rim, the film: Skyfall, the film: The Dark Knight Rises and many others can be played concurrently. Minute-by-minute, almost the same plot is followed, complete with blatently underlined plot developments for the protagonists' and antagonists' intrinsic and extrinsic motives. Among other matters, this fully explains Bruce Wayne's pointless flashbacks and the 58 second dojo scene in Pacific Rim. Film industry experts, such as Lord Putnam, thought that finances would fall apart by 2010 but inertia has carried it to 2018 and perhaps much further. How many times are you going to pay to see the same film made with different actors?

Meanwhile, an astounding amount of money is spent on television. Black Mirror costs more than US$1 million per episode. Westworld costs more than US$3 million per episode. The Crown costs more than US$5 million per episode. Adjusting for inflation, budgets are typically lower than The Next Generation. However, no-one is paying, for example, US$6000 per second to composite a star-field at warp. And, at a minimum, everyone shoots lossless digital at 3840×2160, 60FPS, 10 bit per channel. The money spent to subscribe to video on demand and the money spent on productions has lured multiple Oscar winners away from film and stage. Regardless, much of this big budget television can only be streamed from proprietary systems over the Internet. Although, even when Black Mirror was made for broadcast, it was never cut to length or with regular advert breaks.

CBS's reaction to a fan production reaching US$1.3 million was to sue and shut it down. It had reached professional quality and a professional budget. It was also produced with love and on its own schedule. That was too much competition. However, given that CBS is the center of an eco-system where it has sole discretion about the revenue model, CBS could have chosen many other options:-

1. Recruit the best talent.
2. Allow fan productions to continue.
3. Move to a licensee only revenue model.
4. Allow 2×15 minutes under fair use and charge licensing fees on anything else.

I envision a scenario where a credit card processor takes 3%, crowd-funding platforms take 2% and CBS takes 5% or so. A worked example for StarTrek: Axanar's US$1.3 million funding would be US$39000 for credit card processing, US$26000 for crowd-funding, US$65000 for licensing and the remaining 90% (US$1.17 million) for production. Licensing requires due diligence, signing a standard contract, approving a script and approving footage. This would be per episode or per film and budgets could grow by at least a factor of five per production over an unlimited number of teams.

Prospective teams, in their own time and at their own expense, would have incentive to pitch productions which are consistent, original, interesting and plausible. Fans would choose the best proposals with their own money prior to production. CBS would take fees while enforcing minimal regulations. It would be easy to trace the majority of money from the largest productions. In particular, it would be implausible to raise significant money on an obscure website without it being discovered by CBS.

Even without this quality control, the better fan productions have been consistent with each other. The Original Series and StarTrek Continues are rigorously consistent to the extent that Gene Roddenberry's son regards both as canon. I know a partially-sighted science fiction expert who is unable to distinguish any difference beyond a holodeck, a counsellor and Vic Magnogna's less stilted delivery as Kirk. And where it differs, it is preferable.

Where StarTrek Continues overlaps with StarTrek: Axanar, it is consistent. Likewise where StarTrek: New Voyages overlaps with StarTrek: Of Gods And Men and The Original Series. Anyone failing to meet this established standard will lose the respect of their peers. With fan efforts, the peer pressure is more important than turnover or licensing. However, with the three most recent StarTrek films and the seven most recent StarWars films, quality has been secondary. Goodwill has evaporated and it may not return.

I'm a fairly typical case where cinemas have lost at least US$60 of revenue. I assume that there are millions of similar cases. I'm willing to forego a big screen experience and put some of that shortfall into quality, small screen, fan productions. However, my favorite options are closed due to a licensor without vision. StarTrek could become a vast fan led franchise of impecable quality. I dare to suggest a commons with a shepard. But, on CBS's current path, I have taken my business elsewhere. The condition to bring it back isn't particularly high but I won't wait forever.

In the interim, I'll watch stuff that I've already seen or find the nearest alternatives. Many businesses compete with their previous work and some preference is due to familiarity. Microsoft is a great example. However, there are few businesses where neophile customers prefer the work from 30 years ago or 50 years ago.

Executives wonder why we prefer StarTrek Continues, StarTrek: Axanar or science fiction such as The Expanse. They have a simple, positive message without being preachy. There is plausible diversity without casual racism or sexism. (1960s style uniforms are the major exception to sexual equality.) For amateur productions, we can overlook a large amount of lopsided diversity because fans represent themselves; often at a financial loss. Meanwhile, official productions are decreasingly successful at casting people who embody Gene Roddenberry's vision of harmony. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were quietly Jewish without issue. George Takei has been as openly homosexual as possible while pursuing a career. I get the impression that Zachary Quinto would rather be omitted from discussion and perhaps I've already said too much. Where did it go wrong? Denise Crosby as Tasha Yar had a robosexual plot and then got written out of The Next Generation. Apparently, appearing in Playboy magazine did not prompt the studio to drop her. Whereas, the alleged actress, Alice Eve, and, to a lesser extent, the Scientologist, Kirstie Alley, have been notoriously transphobic. Alice Eve is best known for being filmed in underwear and next best known as the antagonist in Black Mirror, Season 3, Episode 1: Nosedive. (Charlie Brooker: You are an arch troll.)

Maybe the StarTrek canon has spread so far that it has all become doggerel. However, yet another hero's journey and a shutdown on homages isn't a long-term strategy. CBS is in a unique position that few brands can ever hope to achieve. But it is trashing cultural heritage with a random series and a few cheesy films. Follow the example of Lego. Unfortunately, Lego has at least a 1×16 up its ass about MiniFig licensing. Ignoring that, Lego has sold fan designs on a revenue share basis, encourages conventions and encourages the use of unofficial software in combination with official hardware. We probably like Lego more than StarTrek. We probably spend more on it too.

A longtime business associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted Friday on charges he conspired to obstruct justice as investigators probed a past secret lobbying scheme on behalf of Ukraine.

Konstantin Kilimnik was charged in a superseding indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. The new charges revolve around allegations that he and Manafort tried to influence two potential witnesses in a case involving the failure to register as foreign lobbyists.

Those accusations are part of a recent effort by the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to revoke or revise Manafort’s bail conditions while he awaits trial next month in northern Virginia. A hearing on the bail issue is scheduled for next week. The indictment also charges Manafort with obstruction and conspiring to obstruct justice.

Special counsel Mueller indicts Paul Manafort, Russian associate on obstruction charges

That brings the investigation by Mueller — derided regularly by President Trump as an unwarranted and unfair “witch hunt” — to a total of 20 individuals and three businesses that have either been indicted or admitted guilt and a total of 75 charges filed by the year-old probe.

Mueller’s ‘witch hunt’ snags another witch

While serving as secretary of State, Hillary Clinton disregarded an instruction from the Foreign Affairs Manual directing her to use State Department equipment for day-to-day operations. Clinton almost certainly did this for convenience — since she could not connect her smartphone to the State Department server, the directive made it harder for her to check her email on a mobile device — but the issue somehow became a first-tier national scandal. The bizarre prominence this story took on is worth revisiting given Monday night’s revelation that Donald Trump is doing essentially the same thing.

Trump continues to use personal phone because a secure phone is too inconvenient - LOCK HIM UP!

Trump’s clear double standard between Hillary Clinton’s emails and his own cell phones
Trump's Unsecured iPhones Make Clinton's Basement Server Look Like Fort Knox

The school shooting near Houston on Friday bolstered a stunning statistic: More people have been killed at schools this year than have been killed while serving in the military.

Initial estimates put the number killed at Santa Fe High School at eight, but, even without those deaths, nearly twice as many people were killed at schools than in the military. (The figures for the military were compiled from Defense Department news releases and include both combat and noncombat deaths.) Including only students who died in school shootings (excluding, for example, teachers) the total still exceeds military casualties.

2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members

I'll get right to the point: libertarianism's fatal flaw is that it commits a fallacy, the name of which I do not know, in assuming that the fewest up-front restrictions on personal freedoms necessarily and inevitably translates into the most freedom for the most people into the indefinite future.

The BSD vs GPL licensing example is perhaps the single best illustration of this I've seen in the tech world to date. Debate, and I use the term charitably, rages on still about the merits of each license, with the BSD partisans making almost verbatim the exact same argument just laid out above: that the BSD license is morally, ethically, and pragmatically superior because it places fewer restrictions on who may do what with the code.

By contrast, they say, the GPL is infectious, inserting itself like a retrovirus into the replication machinery of any code licensed with it and forcing certain behaviors (redistribution of source) the BSD types disagree with. As I understand it, the reason they give explicitly for disliking this is that it means fewer people will use the GPL compared to the BSD license, which theoretically therefore translates into BSD-licensed code both proliferating and persisting more than its GPL'd siblings.

What this *actually* means, on the psychological and perhaps subconscious level, is "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Sorry guys, but it's the truth: dress it up however you like, but the underlying principle here is "I don't wanna share."

It also betrays an almost stunning naivete about human nature, the very same one that small-L-libertarianism itself seems predicated on. There is a sort of ceteris paribus assumption at work here, one which assumes that the wide world of coding is meritocratic (it is not), equal-access (it is not), and measures worth solely on quality, correctness, usefulness, etc., of code (it does not). It is the Just World Fallacy writ small and in C, you might say.

It *completely* fails to take into account human nature, and such wholly non-technical yet pervasive and powerful human engines of corruption as the corporation. Witness Theo de Raadt's anger, entirely justified morally but also entirely his own fault, over the lack of gratitude from corporations who took OpenSSH and OpenBSD itself for their own use and contributed back, perhaps, a single laptop, which took over a year to arrive.

From the outside, this makes perfect sense. I mean, if you leave a plate of cookies out with a sign that says "free cookies," you don't have a right to complain when someone comes by and takes the entire plate for him/herself. But somehow this simple and obvious line of thought seems to elude the BSD-license partisans, or maybe they quash it for ideological reasons, such as faith (and it *is* a faith position...) in the idea that their code will conquer by virtue of spreading far and wide and continuing to evolve.

In addition to being an oddly r-type strategy for the kind of people who, well, think in terms of r-type and K-type to begin with, they neglect to reckon with the fact that entities with larger resource bases than they do can close the source. Oh, yes, you still have the original code and can fork it, but de facto, the original code *becomes* the fork, due to lack of reach and distribution. Hobbyist coders, who are mostly the ones who use the license, simply cannot compete with BigCorp Inc's programmers, not on time, not on money, and in some cases not on talent, at least not collectively. The world does not work like a cartoon (there's that Just World Fallacy again!); the plucky underdog usually gets beaten nine ways from Sunday and loses everything.

Far from being the unwashed moon-unit closet Communists they are accused of being, the GPL's partisans understand human nature all too well, and in particular have come to grips with the fact that we are not angels. They understand that sometimes a couple of well-placed extra regulations can end up preventing a lot of real restrictions on freedom later on.

Mandating that the source be redistributed while allowing charge for the distribution of binaries is actually much more free-market in the long term, in that it ensures that should the distributing entity get greedy and stupid, current, relevant source is available for immediate forkage. Now this doesn't solve the problem with the gap in power and reach between the underdog and BigCorp Inc, but it *does* mean that the value and hard work put into the original code is not lost to the greater community, i.e., the barrier to entry is *lower* in this case since one need not attempt to reverse-engineer everything that happened since BigCorp Inc acquired and closed the source after forking it.

The real point to all this is that this BSD/GPL dust-up is a microcosm of small-L-libertarian thinking and the central fallacy therein. In life, as in coding, the smallest up-front number of restrictions on personal freedom does *not* translate into the most freedom for the most people for the greatest amount of time. In fact, it doesn't take too much brainwork even from a purely deductive standpoint, with no empirical observation whatsoever needing to be done, to see that this is so: game theory and the iterated prisoners' dilemma, for example.

We have a number of such posters on this board who are frankly completely round the twist on this, as religious as any suicide bomber, and I'm *not* just talking about the "violently-imposed monopoly" spammer. Worse still, they consider themselves some sort of original, enlightened, superior thinkers, as if they're the first ones to do the ideological equivalent of dropping trou and pissing an Anarchy symbol into the snow, reality and human nature and empirical observation be damned. Dunning-Krugeritis affects this crowd badly, and prevents them from having the humility to examine their beliefs critically. Worse still, they act as if they're morally as well as intellectually superior.

Well, libertarians, I leave you this thought: two wrongs might not make a right, but sometimes they can prevent a third, fourth, fifth, or hundredth wrong, or much worse wrongs. Your misplaced purity obsession leads to far worse in the medium and long term, and you're too full of yourselves to see it, or even open your eyes to look. The world is not just, humans are not angels, there are other shades besides #000000 and #FFFFFF, and emergent behavior is a thing.

For the love of Stallman, THINK. As the point of code is not code for code's sake, the point of the economy is not making money for money's sake. Do not let the tools become the masters of the craftsmen (and women) using them. Remember than money was made for humans, not humans for money. The root of all evil is treating people like things and things like people.

Hey look everybody, I've momentarily(?) become a self-indulgent prima donna that chooses to waste everyone's time by posting vapid, self-referential crap on this as yet unused little corner of the web called "acid andy's Journal"!

It was just looking a bit empty so I thought I'd experiment by writing something here. Doubtless it'll annoy a few people, but I'm somewhat used to that, even if it makes me a little uncomfortable on some deeper, more subconscious level.

Isn't writing about yourself in a journal a bit sorta social networkish? I mean, where do you draw the line between a journal and a fucking "blog"? Is this web 2.0? It better not be! I seem to have some religious aversion to that term. It reminds me of disgusting things like F***book and Beta.

If anyone likes or hates hearing my ramblings, I'll probably try this again sometime. I might even come up with a topic. Something technical maybe, or broadly philosophical, or an angry rant about how few people make allowances for nerdy, eccentric, self-indulgent weirdos. Did I manage self-deprecation there? Seems doubtful.

OK, enough! acid andy out. *BOOM!*

P. S. This drivel was fuelled by nothing more than a very unusually excessive amount of exercise and more coffee than usual.
P. P. S. Did I bore you to tears yet?

President Trump on Wednesday hailed the release of three U.S. detainees in North Korea, but in negotiating with Kim Jong Un, the Trump administration may have played into Pyongyang's history of "hostage diplomacy," harshly criticized by National Security Adviser John Bolton when Barack Obama was president.

Bolton admonished Obama in 2009 for engaging in “political ransom” with North Korea after Obama dispatched another former president, Bill Clinton, to negotiate the release of two American journalists. Bolton argued it put humanitarian aid workers, academics and other Americans at risk. It also gave the north "political legitimacy" and emboldened Iran and other autocracies to take similar steps to gain leverage on the United States.

"Despite decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so," Bolton, who worked as ambassador to the United Nations for President George W. Bush, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post that year.

"The reporters' arrest, show trial and subsequent imprisonment (twelve years hard labor) was hostage taking, essentially an act of state terrorism," Bolton added. "So the Clinton trip is a significant propaganda victory for North Korea, whether or not he carried an official message from President Obama.”

Trump adviser Bolton criticized Obama's 'hostage' talks; now welcomes them with North Korea

...worked out so well last time!

Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq

President Donald Trump and the truth have grown more distant in recent months, according to a new analysis.

The Washington Post has been tracking the president’s false or misleading claims since he took office in January of last year.

In total he has averaged 6.5 false or misleading claims a day, but that the number of those claims has crept up since the beginning of his presidency. In the first 100 days of his administration, Trump averaged just 4.9 of those claims a day. In the last two months, that rate has almost doubled to 9 false or misleading claims a day, according to the Post. However, that number is bolstered by Trump’s rally in Michigan last week, where he lied 44 times during an 80-minute speech.

DONALD TRUMP IS LYING MORE NOW THAN HE WAS AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS PRESIDENCY

Trump's longtime personal lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen has now indicated that he intends to plead the Fifth Amendment in the civil case involving his hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, citing the fast-materializing criminal case stemming from that same payment.

"When you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment, taking the Fifth so they are not prosecuted, when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it is disgraceful." - Donald Trump.

“The mob takes the Fifth, If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” - Donald Trump

“Did you see her IT specialist? He's taken the Fifth,” Trump said. “The word is he's ratting her out like you wouldn't believe it.” - Donald Trump

"I am no fan of Bill Cosby but never-the-less some free advice - if you are innocent, do not remain silent. You look guilty as hell!" - Donald Trump