I am familiar with legal Eagle, and I generally like him, though this underlines that these are entertainment videos and not law review submissions. By the same progression, law review articles, even those about legal history, generally aren’t sophisticated academic history papers. Same goes for those that touch on other field’s nexuses with the legal system. Lawyers are arrogant and get outside their lane regularly, and law professors are arroganter. :-)

I reckon either Devin or whoever else wrote the script was going off memory, and it all got conflated. It’s a miss, to be sure, but if I were inclined to cut him some slack, the CTEA was basically an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1976, and the whole Sonny Bono thing is more of an aside in the much longer video. Frankly, calling it Bono’s major policy accomplishment is a bit off in general, as Bono was just a co-sponsor on a similar bill, probably because the the entertainment industry backed his campaigns, and he had passed away by the time final version of the CTEA further extended 1976’s similar extension.

I would say just be careful with Legal Eagle, and view it as informational but not unimpeachable. In the videos I’ve watched, I haven’t seen anything that makes me think he’s communicating in bad faith or regularly being sloppy in how he analyzes issues. He of course has an agenda to serve his audience and to get content out in between whatever real legal work and firm management he does. I do feel pretty smug that I was complaining about law school not putting things into historical context, and here we see that’s exactly where our friendly neighborhood popularizer drops the ball.

Seriously, there is virtually no discussion of how language changes over the decades, how events of the day influence legislators and judges, and how all of that impacts future interpretation. The rise of “originalism” and “textualism” is specifically because law students are taught that they’re equipped to understand 250 year old texts just as well as the original drafters, and that the drafters were invariably operating with what we would consider acceptable morality. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that pretending to do so gives you the necessary cover to interpret the thing in exactly as retrograde a way as you need to satisfy conservative elites.

Laminar flow is a cruel mistress.

There is not nearly enough history of law in (US) law school, and absolutely zero required classes placing law and legal language in their proper historical and linguistic context. You read and discuss a few foundational cases at the beginning of each first-year course, and then the power of the pure legal mind, unmoored from idle distractions like “history” or “science”, is all the reasoning one needs.

Doesn’t want the brave public servants of his majesty’s constabulary to contract her communicable conjunctivitis. Very thoughtful, really.

Raiders and Last Crusade.

They were free because they expired three and a half years ago.

I was kind of torn on that one, which sort of struck me as the one trying hardest to look and feel like a TOS episode, but it still leaves us with three out of the first four with an identifiable “gimmick,” and the muppet epsiode to come. In fact, it seems like they’ve intentionally leaned into it:

“There’s a cadence between kind of classic ‘TOS’ sci-fi thriller and then the thing that actually makes us ‘Strange New Worlds’…which is our worlds are genres,” Goldsman said. “Those are our strange new worlds. It’s the lens that allows us to tell stories in a way that typically, or at least consistently, hasn’t been done in ‘Star Trek’ before.”

I’m not even entirely sure I hate it, but it’s not adding a fun factor on its own anymore, so if an episode is weak, like the last one, there is nothing particularly refreshing about the fact that they cast Dave Foley and tried to make it funny.

Also, there’s too much Kirk.

When every episode is a “special” genre homage, none of them are special.

I appreciate that there’s an almost palpable march towards TOS camp, and TOS had its share of backlot-leveraging genre scripts, but TOS also had its share of episodes done as straighter sci-fi, sometimes building off really solid and thought-provoking story ideas (leaving Shatner and the production designers to add the camp factor on their own).

Yes, I’ve lived in the DFW area for over twenty years. It’s home, for better or (lately) for worse. Still, I don’t think any place is hopeless, and even today in Texas there are four blue voters for every 5 red ones. We just need more Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Willie Nelson, and fewer of these Christofascist assholes.

They also don’t realize that there’s a reason Abbott had to spend millions of Wilkes and Dunn’s money to primary a bunch of Republicans in the boonies. Those Friday Night Lights rural school districts, the ones that provide any sense of place, any average-paying jobs, and any excuse to go ahead and raise your kids in BFE, those are the first ones that will get ground into nothingness by the path envisioned for vouchers and ending recapture, which the rich suburban districts want.

Of course, that frees up more land for datacenters and fracking, so…

This is pretty much it.

The 2021 freeze still looms large in people’s minds, so while the grid actually has seemed to be hanging on better in Summer and Winter, things that threaten the still-isolated power supply draw attention. Then, Oracle/OpenAI set the precedent with Stargate in Abilene that you just stand these things up in the middle of nowhere because of cheap land and easy regulatory capture of the local politicians. The evolution of municipal governance in Texas also meant that the metro areas have fairly small core cities densely surrounded by independent municipalities, which often means that the tech companies can push that model into somewhat more densely packed areas, though it’s still often the exurbs (though not always… stupid Dallas city government). That means it’s the reddest parts of the state that are seeing them spring up and fuck the residents’ personal quality of life badly enough that they actually complain. There’s a big emphasis on the “M” part of NIMBY for them (because isn’t there always?) but the fact remains that no one else in the state has a big enough “BY.”

Very few of these people are ready to bail on single-party state government because they still buy the line that everything is regulatory hell and woke BS anywhere but God’s Own Property Texas, but if they see the state completely ignore them the one time they politely ask the republicans to not fuck them quite so roughly, then it’s going to be easier to stay home during the midterms. This is particularly problematic in a year when the Dems found a candidate with a pulse but who likes the Bible and looks like a Republican, and the Republicans are stuck with their primary voters’ pick, an asshole who is as corrupt as Trump but lacks even that weird sheen of “I’m your asshole” that Trump gives off to his base. Also, and this is shallow, when you’re the party that tries to project strength and vitality, having a ticket that consists of a droopy-eyed slug and a paraplegic in a wheelchair is something you have to figure out how to downplay.

Worst part of it is that they’re probably still gonna win. A little part of me hopes this is the year, but mostly I’m just hoping it’s close enough to drag out the spending and fuck the GOP’s budget in Maine and elsewhere.

I was going to try to defend these guys and say that a sunburned neck suuuucks, but then I remembered where the sun needs to be in order for you to desperately need the bill to shade your eyes…

Both Rocky and Bullwinkle were given the middle initial “J” as a reference to [creator Jay] Ward.

Interestingly, despite morphological differences, they’re rather closely related to the silver-necked metric socket, of which the 10mm subspecies is sadly presumed to be extinct.

About 25 years.

The flexi-tube is certainly a… choice… by the artist, but it’s just a back-outlet or rear-discharge toilet.

While I don’t want to presume that science that feels intuitive is bad science, I’m not entirely sure how newsworthy it is to talk about how getting used to heat helps one deal with heat. People did live in hot places before AC.

It starts to feel like instructions and socialization rather than simple science journalism…

If both people come away with the same understanding, what difference does it make?

You’re not wrong, but this statement is doing a LOT of heavy lifting. By the time I am paying close enough attention to something on audio for there to be no difference, reading would have been more efficient.

This is just how you (slightly) expand the gene pool of Archaic era Ithacan elites. We’re gonna King Ralph everybody except Odysseus!

Their books are on these devices. They don’t have physical books anymore.

Frankly, probably the best part about them, potential eyestrain notwithstanding. Having a sack of bricks strapped to your back all day, or constant retreats to a locker, wasn’t contributing to my quality of education, LOL. Having an electronic device as a reading and writing and proctoring tool, sensibly extended with the bare minimum of other capabilities, is not a bad thing at all, IMHO.