Category Archives: Law and Politics

Law and Politics, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#8: Open Letter to the Editors of The Examiner

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #8, on the subject of Open Letter to the Editors of The Examiner.

I have not actually told the editors of The Examiner that I am not writing for them anymore.  I am not certain that they care; I am not certain that they will ever even notice.  However, I have some hope that as I explain it to you, my readers, they might hear about it and learn something from it.  In my defense, part of the reason I have not told them is that it has become incredibly difficult to converse with them–communication in their direction seems never to reach anyone, or at least not to get anything like a suitable reply.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

img0008Examiner

Let’s start by saying that I have worked with quite a few editors over the years, on my books and on articles submitted to various websites.  Some of them have treated my work in a perfunctory way, that is, glancing over it and publishing it.  Some have made what they thought were corrections and then published without checking with me–I have tried to make a point of informing editors that I expect final approval of anything that bears my name, because I have had some change grammatically correct text they did not understand to grammatically incorrect text that did not say what I meant.  The best editors, honestly, are those who tear apart what I write and give me detailed feedback, then explain and interact until we agree on a final text.

I started at The Examiner in the middle of 2009.  Animator and illustrator Jim Denaxas pointed me that direction, suggesting that the popular Temporal Anomalies materials might earn a paycheck there, so I contacted them and was almost immediately given the title Time Travel Films Examiner.  At that time, it seemed that the editorial system amounted to a writer wrote, published, and promoted his articles, and if the editors got around to reading them they would sometimes push an article to the front page for extra attention, sometimes pull an article and send a message to the writer.  I never had the latter happen; I only recall the former occurring once.  In any case, it was evident that our remuneration was dependent upon readership, and our readership was dependent upon self-promotion; but the turnaround was fast, as one could post an article and promote it immediately.

At some point the process got a bit more complicated, because it was strongly recommended that we begin using Pinterest to promote our articles.  I was already using Facebook and MySpace, but Pinterest meant having images in the articles.  They provided access to Getty Images, but this was only good for national and international news and major entertainment events.  For a writer covering time travel movies, there was nothing there.  I also was given the title New Jersey Political Buzz Examiner in 2012, so I could publish some work on the “Birther” issue, and the Getty images were a bit more useful for that as long as the coverage was national–but there were never available photos of, for example, the candidates running against the incumbent governor and senator.  The writing process just got more difficult, because I had to hunt for pictures.  I was largely dependent on promotional photos for a lot of my material.  (It got a bit more complicated when they changed the Getty Image system:  originally it was possible to search for photos in advance of publication at my leisure, but the altered system made finding the image part of the publishing process, an added complication.)

It should be noted that this effort was bringing me pennies a day.  It should also be noted that I was alway in the top quarter in both of my categories, and frequently in the top ten percent, so it wasn’t as if most writers were making more than I.  I put in a lot of time for a very little money, and it was not increasing significantly.  Of course, I had written many things for no money, so this was better.

The problem occurred this year, 2015, because someone at The Examiner thought they ought to tighten the editorial process.  That’s fine; they have the right to improve quality that way.  I think they recognized the inconvenience, because they promised quick turnaround–the inconvenience, obviously, was that now when an author published an article, he had to wait perhaps half an hour to an hour to learn whether it had been approved, and he could not promote it before that.  Previously when an article was submitted, it appeared immediately, and the author was provided with automated systems to push it onto Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn.  Now, for that few cents a day, he had to waste time waiting for approval.

That might not have been too egregious, but the editorial process itself was a shambles.

The first glitch I hit arose because I had begun republishing articles from M. J. Young Net to The Examiner.  To do this, I had to serialize them, and I ran them as weekly posts on different days of the week from my regular posts.  Abruptly I was notified that the third article in a series (for which the first two had posted and their were two more to come) could not be published because I was not permitted to publish material from some other web site.  Of course, I could not well publish the fourth part without the third, and since I was doing both law and time travel materials it put both in question, but my original agreement with The Examiner stated that I owned the articles and could publish them elsewhere, so there was no logic to an objection that I could not publish articles at The Examiner that I owned but had previously published elsewhere.  I sent a message to attempt to get an answer, and the only answer I got was that someone apparently had changed his mind and restored the article before the person I contacted looked at it–but it took over a week to get that answer.

A few days later I published another “republished” article.  I had been putting an opening paragraph in italics introducing the articles and the fact that they had been previously published but were now being edited for serialization.  I had done this with every such article to this point–but this time I got blocked with a note that said I overused italics.  I could not help wondering whether the editor had even read the article, but with some grumbling to myself that it was going to create an inconsistent appearance I removed the italics from the opening paragraphs and resubmitted it.  A few hours later I received a notice that said they were not certain I had permission to use the image.

I don’t know whether I had permission to use the image; it was a movie poster, published for promotional purposes, so I’m assuming the movie producers wanted it circulated.  I can understand blocking the use of an image if it might not be a legitimate use (after all, that Image A.S.C.A.P. proposal has not been adopted).  My objection is that they should have said that on the first submission–I’ve already put several hours into what should be a ten minute publishing process, and they want me to put several more hours into it.  It is one thing if in fixing one part of an article you break something else; it is entirely different if the editor is going to raise one objection at a time, over the course of what can turn into hours or even days.  This is supposed to be published at the speed of Internet News.  It is not supposed to take me all day to earn those few pennies.

So I wish The Examiner and its editors and its remaining writers well, but am removing my articles from their publication.  After all, after having refused to publish one of my articles they had the nerve to remind me that if I don’t publish them often enough I don’t get paid for traffic to the old ones, and I don’t see any equity in allowing them to profit from my old work when they put up such obstacles to the new and failed to provide a means for two-way communication between the writers and the editors.

The Examiner materials have now all been relocated to Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies and to the law section of M. J. Young Net.

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Law and Politics

#7: The Most Persecuted Minority

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #7, on the subject of The Most Persecuted Minority.

Around the world, many groups of people are being deprived of basic human rights–

img0007Turkish

Persecuted, driven from safe homes, their lives counted as worth less than animals, less than livestock.

One group in particular faces death,

img0007Iraqi

daily, at the hands of those who ought to be there to defend and help them.

Our hands.

Yet these helpless, homeless, defenseless people are deprived of rights,

img0007hunger

put to death without a trial.

Routinely.  Uncaringly.

Even in America.

As if they were not human at all.  As if they were livestock, or pests, or parasites.

They are the unborn.  They are being exterminated.

img0007Ultrasound

Defend the rights of the most helpless minority.  You were once one of them.

This article is perhaps a response to my own article, The Republican Dilemma, in which I suggest that Republicans need to create ads which explain and defend Republican/conservative positions that will make sense to people not already holding those views.  This is a suggested model for one such ad, a sixty-second television spot.

Earlier M. J. Young Net articles addressing abortion include Was John Brown a Hero or a Villain? and Professor Robert Lipkin, the Concert Violinist, and Abortion.  Also see Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues:  Births and Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues:  On Negative Population Growth, incidentally related topics.

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Law and Politics

MJY Blog Entry #0005: An Image A.S.C.A.P.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #0005, on the subject of An Image A.S.C.A.P..

At one time, if you wanted to hear music, you had very few options.  You could learn to make your own, have family or friends perform for you, attend a concert (either buying a ticket or attending one paid for by a government or arts patron), or hire musicians to provide it.  Technology changed that drastically, beginning with Thomas Alva Edison’s discovery that audio waves could be transformed into physical etchings and recreated as audio waves–the beginning of recorded music, the analog record.  At that point you could buy a Victrola and purchase originally cylinders and later disks on which musicians had recorded their performances, and you could listen to them whenever you wished.  (There were previously of course music boxes which provided a much narrower choice of songs and lower quality of tone, and player pianos and orchestrions, which were far more expensive and demanding to operate.  Recorded music was a game changer, and these others are now novelties.)  Musicians who once made money only by live performances now could make money by selling their performances to record manufacturers so that they could be heard by people who never saw them.

The game changed again with the advent of radio.  It was now possible for the operator of a radio station or radio network to play someone’s music for audiences which quickly went from hundreds to hundreds of thousands.  At first the Federal Communications Commission frowned on such stations playing pre-recorded music, and so music was mostly live concerts–but often such live concerts were also recorded and replayed later, so it was becoming a moot point.  Now a musician could be heard by many people from the sale of a single record–but the sale of a single record would never support the artist for even one day, and he could not produce enough records in a day to do that.  It was agreed that a radio station who played a recording by an artist owed that artist–and indeed, also owed the composer and the publisher–royalties under copyright law.  However, as the number of radio stations burgeoned and the number of available recorded songs multiplied, that was going to be a prohibitive issue.

A solution was found.  The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers came into existence.  Now a musician simply registered his recording with the society, and the society negotiated with radio stations to collect royalties for airplay of songs.  The theory is that every time a radio station plays your song, you split a penny with several other people who also get paid (like your record company and, actually, A.S.C.A.P. itself).  Of course, it was not then possible for anyone to count how many times every song was played on every radio station, but A.S.C.A.P. had a simple solution.  Every week some sample group of radio stations–a different sample group each week–writes down every song it plays, and A.S.C.A.P. compiles these lists and extrapolates from them how many times each song was played on all radio stations in the nation.  Every radio station then pays a license fee to A.S.C.A.P. (there are numerous factors determining how much is paid, largely based on how many people are likely to hear it), and that money gets paid to the musicians.

The system has expanded over the years.  Today churches who wish to sing songs that are not in their hymnals without buying sheet music for everyone buy a license to print or display songs for use in services, and the composers, authors, and sometimes performers of those songs are compensated from that.  It certainly has been taxed by the development of file sharing and the Internet, but thus far it has managed to expand to meet the changing times.

I am going to suggest that it expand a bit more, or perhaps that it be imitated.

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One of the problems on the Internet is that there are a lot of pictures–“images”, whether photos or computer drawings or scans of artwork–and that it is extremely simple to copy an image and use it somewhere else.  For most of us, that’s not a big deal–what little artwork might be labeled mine is of meager quality.  We would object to our personal photos being used in some corporate advertising campaign, but probably wouldn’t think twice about someone using something we drew somewhere else.  In fact, we frequently post and repost probably thousands of images per day on Facebook, knowing that they are gone beyond our control and we will never be compensated for any work we invested in them.  However, there are people who are dependent on being able to sell their images–photographers, artists, animators–and when we “steal” their work we are robbing them.  Often, though, we have no way of knowing whether any particular image we encounter is free to use as is, free to use in other ways, or something that requires the purchase of a license.

It might be argued that in a world in which everyone carries a digital camera in his pocket there is no longer a place or a need for professional photographers.  When was the last wedding you attended at which “a friend of the bride” did not shoot the pictures?  Photographers may be a profession of the past.

That is not necessarily true.  We do not get many photos from tourists visiting war zones, or admitted to peace talks or legislative sessions; for these, at least, we need professionals.  We probably need them for many other things.  If, though, we do not compensate them (not to mention others in the visual arts) for their work, they will be forced to cease doing it.  Yet it is a simple thing, a small thing, to use an image that you find floating out there on the web and float it a bit further, without any notion of its origin.  Is there a solution for this?

Certainly it is possible for photographers, artists, animators, and filmmakers to surf the web seeking their stolen images, and sue any offending web site; however, absent some clear indication that the thief was aware of the ownership status of the image, United States law only allows for an order to remove the image from the site.  Something more is needed for compensation.  Yet the tools all exist to launch something like A.S.C.A.P. for artists and photographers.  We already have systems monitoring traffic to various sites, so we know how heavily any site is visited.  We have “spiders” crawling the web, and Google has demonstrated the ability to identify images by subject matter.  Digital signatures can be implanted in images that alter nothing visible but make the image recognizable to such a spider.  Let’s let people who create such images sign their work digitally.  Then every company that provides web site hosting space can be required to buy a license on behalf of those whose sites are hosted on its servers, price based on server size and traffic volume, costs to be passed to those who build the sites.  Then if you happen to use a photo from an Associated Press photographer, or an image from an unfamiliar artist, or any other work on which someone holds rights, the system will count it and tell A.S.C.A.P. to compensate the owner.

It works for registered songs on the radio; why not for images?

I have previously written on copyright law, including Freedom of Expression:  Copyright and Intellectual Property.

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Law and Politics

#4: Just Do the Job

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #0004, on the subject of Just Do the Job.

There has been an increase in “self-driving” features on new automobiles.  The popular one is the car that parallel parks itself.  I remember that parallel parking was one of the most difficult parts of the driver road test, not only when I took it but for several of my sons.  People failed on that frequently, and here in New Jersey we joke that you know you’re from New Jersey if you could negotiate a traffic circle before you could parallel park.  What, though, if you take your road test in one of these self-parking cars, and when instructed to park you simply activate the car’s self-parking feature and remove your hands from the wheel so it can do what it is designed to do?  Would the instructor be obligated to pass you, or to fail you?

Digital Drivers License
Digital Drivers License

Bear in mind that most people who receive their standard passenger vehicle drivers license are unable to drive a standard transmission.  I was unable to do so when I got my license, and had only the vaguest notion of the purpose of that extra pedal.  I learned eventually, but know many people who drive all the time and cannot drive “stick”.  It is not really required that the driver is able to operate every motor vehicle in the class; only that he demonstrates the ability to drive one such vehicle.  Further, note that our laws creating opportunities for the handicapped permit them to obtain licenses operating vehicles specially equipped to accommodate their specific disabilities–hand controls for accelerator and brake for those without the use of their legs, for example.  In these United States, driving is for many a necessity, the only way to go to work, to obtain household supplies, to reach medical care.  We attempt to facilitate the right for as many persons as possible.

So if a young driving license candidate uses the automatic parallel park feature on his father’s new car, should he pass, or fail?  There is no evidence that he can park without that feature, and honestly the first car he buys for himself is unlikely to have it.  Yet he did manage to park the car, and there is no proof that he could not have done so without that “assist”.

Yet how far can this be permitted?  If a candidate arrives in a Google® self-driving car, so that all he has to do is give voice directions to an onboard computer which will operate the car using its sensor array, onboard maps, and computer uplink, does the fact that he can direct the car adequately to complete the driving test, without ever touching any of the controls himself, mean that he qualifies for a license?

What if he is blind?

Yes, certainly there are vision test requirements which must be met before one can take the road test, but if cars are made able to drive themselves with their own superior “vision” installed, that could well become “discriminatory”.

Now, imagine that you are a local motor vehicles agency test certifier:  it is your job to test candidates for driver licenses, and to sign a form certifying that this candidate is qualified for a license.  Remember, as I previously said concerning licenses:

…a license is government permission for someone to do something which would be illegal without a license….a license both permits specific categories of conduct and imposes certain responsibilities on the licensee….a license is a means by which the government regulates specific conduct, both to prevent conduct it wishes to discourage…and to encourage conduct it desires….

In the case of a license to drive, the signature of the test certifier asserts a belief by the certifier that the candidate is sufficiently skilled at driving as to be permitted to drive on the public roads unsupervised.  It is therefore the certification that the candidate is qualified for the license.

I have of late seen many Internet images with the suggestion that there are people who do not agree with their jobs, or did not expect that their jobs would require them to do certain things, but they do the jobs anyway because these are the jobs.  They are of course aimed at the Kentucky clerk who will not sign her name to marriage licenses for homosexuals (and to avoid being charged with discrimination, she will not sign her name to any marriage licenses).  Yet this is the heart of the problem:  the clerk does not believe that couples incapable of becoming biological parents can be certified as “married”.  It is her job to make that determination, the determination of whether a particular couple is qualified for such a license; the voters placed her in that position for that purpose (among others–it is not the entirety of her job).  She is undoubtedly expected to refuse such licenses to persons who are not qualified–incestuous relationships, bigamous marriages, applications from minors, cases of coercion or duress.  Her signature on the license is not “just doing her job”; it is certifying that she is persuaded that the applicants meet the requirements for marriage as she understands them.

That to some degree puts her in the same position as the motor vehicle road test supervisor who is asked to sign a form stating that this blind person has passed his road test because he happens to have come in a car capable of driving itself based on his verbal instructions.  It may be that this person has passed all the legal requirements technically, but in the opinion of the person required to make that certification the candidate is not qualified.

There are certainly arguments that Kim Davis should just sign the licenses, based on the fact that the candidates are fully qualified under the laws of her state; there are also arguments that she should not sign them, because under the constitution of State of Kentucky such marriages are unlawful.  This is what is called a conflict of laws issue, and technically the Supreme Court decision requires the State to amend its constitution to comply with the Court’s ruling–but until it does, that constitution is a valid basis to conclude that her personal assessment that these persons are not qualified for a license is also legally supported.  It is a weak argument, but in law it remains an argument made stronger by the fact that her oath of office (which I have not specifically read) undoubtedly requires her to “uphold” and/or “defend” that state constitution.

So stop saying that Kim Davis should just do her job.  She is doing her job:  she is assessing whether applicants are qualified to receive marriage licenses as she understands them.  She is refusing to certify licenses for persons she believes are not qualified, and so as not to be discriminatory about it she is also refusing to issue licenses to persons she might believe are qualified.  You might think that these people are qualified, but she does not, and she is the one who has to certify that they are.  It is, as she has said, her name on the form.

In addition to the articles linked in this post (Homosexual Marriage and Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues), the author has also written In Defense of Marriage, Christianity, Homosexuality, and the E. L. C. A., and blog posts in both the Law and Politics and the Bible and Theology categories bearing the Homosexuality and Marriage content tags.

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Law and Politics

#2: Planned Parenthood and Fungible Resources

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #0002, on the subject of Planned Parenthood and Fungible Resources.

I’m remembering being a kid.  I’ve saved two dollars from my fifty cent weekly allowance, and now have permission to walk the couple miles down the busy road to the corner store.  I’m planning to spend my allowance on candy and comic books.  Candy is usually ten cents a bar, with gum and Lifesavers® a nickel; comic books are, if I remember aright, a quarter.  I have not decided how much I will spend on either candy or comic books, because I haven’t seen what they have, but I’ll probably split it down the middle, a dollar on each.

Hey, this may sound like fantasy to you, but that’s what it was like when I was a kid.  Also, New Jersey did not have a sales tax then, so I don’t have to worry about that in my calculations.  Only the next part never happened–but it might have.

So as I’m leaving my mother in a fit of generosity gives me an extra dollar–but she says I am not to spend any of it on candy.  So now I have three dollars, two of them my own to spend as I like and one that is specifically limited as “not candy”.

I look over the comic books and find four that I like, and that’s a dollar; so I spend my mother’s dollar on the comic books, and buy twenty candy bars with my two dollars.

Of course, I did not spend a dime of my mother’s dollar on candy; I spent it all on comic books.  However, because I had that dollar from her, I could get four comic books with her dollar and free up my own money to spend on candy.  The result is that I got the same number of comic books (half of the money with which I started would have bought those four books) and twice as much candy, because having my mother’s dollar for the comic books I did not have to spend my own money on them and I could get the candy.

planparlogo

Planned Parenthood swears that it does not spend any Federal money on abortions.  I believe them.  They undoubtedly have strict accounting procedures that enable them to track where the Federal money goes, so they can account for it.  That money goes into services that are certainly valuable to men and women alike.  In fact, those services are so important that Planned Parenthood would probably make the effort to fund them by other means were there no Federal money to provide them.  Fortunately, mom gave them a dollar that they can spend on those other services, which frees up that much money that would have gone to those services to pay for abortions.

Certainly Planned Parenthood does not spend as much on abortions as it gets from the Federal government; for one thing, that would be obvious, and for another they have plenty of other services for which to pay.  It is undoubtedly true that the Federal money makes it possible for them to provide more of those services than otherwise, as well as divert other monies to abortions, and that without the Federal money they would still offer everything, including abortions, but that they will provide fewer services overall to fewer people.  Yet no matter how you argue it, it is still obviously the case that the Federal money makes it possible for Planned Parenthood to put more money into abortions, money which would have to go to other services if they did not have that Federal money to pay for those other services.  The administrators who are paid in part from Federal money are in part running the abortion services of the organization.  The buildings that are funded by Federal money are used in part to facilitate abortions.  Money that keeps Planned Parenthood operational is de facto money that supports its abortions programs.

The argument that no Federal money goes to abortion does not work.  The fact that Federal money pays for programs, services, facilities, and personnel that would otherwise be paid out of money that now pays for abortions means that abortions are being subsidized by that money.  We can argue–we are indeed still arguing–as to whether an abortion is a means of freeing a woman from the enslavement of an unwanted child or the murder of a child by its mother; we can argue whether we want tax money to pay for such things; we cannot argue that it does not enable them rather directly.

It really cannot rationally be said to be otherwise, as long as the one organization receives money from the Federal government and spends money on abortions.  I can argue that I used my mother’s dollar to buy the comic books and bought the candy with my own money, but obviously I would not have spent as much on candy if I did not have that dollar because I would have bought some of those comic books with my money.  Planned Parenthood can argue that the Federal money does not go to abortions, but just as obviously they spend more on abortions because they have the Federal money to pay for other programs that would otherwise come out of their regular budget.

The author has also written Was John Brown a Hero or a Villain?, Professor Robert Lipkin, the Concert Violinist, and Abortion, and the song Holocaust, addressing related issues of abortion, on this site.

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