Intellectual property

Adidas backtracks on opposition to Black Lives Matter trademark request | Business | The Guardian

Adidas has withdrawn a request to US authorities to block the Black Lives Matter movement from trademarking a design featuring three parallel stripes.

Because of how the politics of it looked (pun noted)…

I dare not show the image, but the BLM had the eponymous words in a black font, with three horizontal parallel lines in green underneath the text.

What next: the whole of geometry?

Really?

A deceit

A deceit at the heart of democracy.

No politician would fly in a plane built by politicians.

No more big letters

Just a suggestion after looking at newspaper headlines at a news stand. That feeling of despair at the world and those who pour dirt upon it.

Could we limit the font size of headlines to no more than size 14 on an A4 page. So, small, but readable. More whitespace can surround the letter above and below. This might make the context come into where it belongs: dead centre.

The penalty for clarity

via John Naugton

‘I’d been reading Clive James’s essay on Stefan Zweig in his magnum opus, Cultural Amnesia’ (writes John Naughton).

“Zweig’s own achievements,” James writes, are nowadays often patronised: a bad mistake, in my view. Largely because of his highly schooled but apparently effortless gift for a clear prose narrative, he attained, while he lived, immense popularity not just in the German-speaking countries but in the world entire, and he is still paying the penalty for it. Except in France, where his major works are never out of print, it is usually safer to call him second-rate. Safer, but not sound.

No offence

‘Dirty wee torturers’: Northern Irish man tells of British army abuse during Troubles | Northern Ireland | The Guardian

A doctor examined Auld and declared him fit for interrogation. For at least seven days and nights he was subjected to what became known – in reports by Amnesty International and other organisations – as the five techniques: the stress position, hooding, white noise, deprivation of sleep and little food and drink. When Auld moved from the stress position he was beaten. Occasionally the hood was removed and lights were shone into his eyes.

Several of the men, including Auld, were bundled on to a helicopter and thrown out, thinking they were high up. They were a few feet from the ground.

Auld assumed he would eventually be killed so tried to end his suffering by hurling himself at heating pipes to break his neck. “But I just hurt my head. That, for me, was the worst because I couldn’t die. That sense of helplessness and isolation was horrendous.”

Auld was eventually transferred to a prison, then a mental health hospital, before returning home. He was not charged with any offence.

In a case taken by the Irish government, the European court of human rights ruled in 1978 that the treatment of the “hooded men” was inhuman and degrading but not torture. Auld received £16,000 in compensation. After 9/11 the Bush administration cited the ruling to defend its “enhanced interrogation” policy.

End of an error

The SVB debacle has exposed the hypocrisy of Silicon Valley | John Naughton | The Guardian

The first thing to understand is that “Silicon Valley” is actually a reality-distortion field inhabited by people who inhale their own fumes and believe they’re living through Renaissance 2.0, with Palo Alto as the new Florence. The prevailing religion is founder worship, and its elders live on Sand Hill Road in San Francisco and are called venture capitalists. These elders decide who is to be elevated to the privileged caste of “founders”.

Error? Era? Hope so.

VIP capitalism

Banks are designed to fail — and they do | Financial Times

But few people are capitalists when threatened by losing money they regarded as safe and nobody is better than a capitalist at explaining how essential their wealth is to the health of the economy.

A long-handled personal earthmoving implement

We should all be asking more questions | Financial Times

As a beloved journalism handbook of mine puts it, you have to be able to “call a spade a spade, instead of bringing in someone from Harvard to solemnly declare it a long-handled personal earthmoving implement”.

Rear view mirror only

Ikea boss says Brexit has caused ‘chaos’ | Financial Times

Shapps bemoaned the lack of homegrown technology giants and promised to ape Silicon Valley, saying he would organise a “scale-up summit” later this year to bring tech and finance expertise together.

Well, that’s alright then.

The head of a sovereign wealth fund, who declined to be identified, said the recent political history of the UK including Brexit was “an unmitigated disaster”, and the country had made a “catalogue of policy mistakes” that would take years to unwind, if ever.

Vaclav Havel

There is always something suspicious about an intellectual on the winning side.

Makes me feel better already. I used to read Havel a lot, but this line had fallen from my RAM. Sadly, not applicable to rugby.