Of late, it has been mostly "lather, rinse, repeat" from a couple of weeks ago.
- But meanwhile, the organized bar remains afraid of reform while relying on a bar exam that doesn't even try to probe the ability to acquire or assimilate facts as its sole competence standard. Not even in Blighty (PDF) (not because there was no discipline, but because it was nowhere near sufficient based upon the statement of facts). But it has nothing whatsoever to do with the racial, religious, gender, and class makeup of the leadership of the bar, either Over Here or Over There (do I really need to tag that as sarcasm?).
- Color me shocked that the same old pre-harvest sour grapes award bullshit is popping up for the so-called "Dragon Awards" as has for the Hugos. If this fiasco isn't a pretty public demonstration that relying solely on popular voting in the arts at both the nomination and selection stages of a time-limited award is insane and self-defeating, I don't know what is… especially when one looks at the nominee list with some minimal measure of sophistication, such as actually having taken and passed a university literature class — any university literature class. Even if such education is no panacaea. (Disclosure: Due to my IP-and-corporate-governance-related representation over a decade ago of an individual peripherally involved, I am persona non grata at that convention and not all that surprised just on the basis of what I learned about various personalities and their advisors.)
- Both of which are reflected in current acknowledgements of problems with peer review… and it's even worse in trade publishing. With the exception of a single journal of which I'm aware — there might be more, I'm not omniscient, but I don't think it's widespread, and certainly not at top-tier journals — at least in academic journals the sales-and-marketing dorks (who uniformly have not read the works at issue… either those under consideration or those already published) aren't determining publishing decisions.
At this rate, though, I'm going to start checking shampoo for its efficacy regarding fallout before buying any more.