We've written previously about the game Evony, for which we received a number of spam comments last July.  We've also written about Bruce Everiss, the UK blogger who runs the site Bruce On Games, and the threat by Evony, LLC, a Delaware corporation which claims to be the maker or owner of the game, to sue Bruce for libel.  That threat has now come to pass.

Despite indications that, at the time Bruce began posting about Evony, stung by the same spam comments that hit us, Evony was owned by a Chinese gold-farming company known as UMGE, the suit against Mister Everiss is being pressed in New South Wales, Australia of all places.  When we wrote about the situation earlier, we speculated as to whether Australian libel or defamation laws are even more lax than those prevailing in the United Kingdom, which is notorious for its plaintiff friendliness.

We have short attention spans, and let the matter go.  But today Bruce Everiss returned to our humble site, posting a link asking for help against Evony, LLC.  (Whether you wish to help him or not is up to you.)  But Evony, LLC's press release about the suit raises a few concerns.  Who actually owns Evony, the game, and who on earth is Benjamin Gifford?

We think that computer and videogames are a trivial hobby, of little importance in the grand scheme of things, but consider free speech, potential legal forum abuse, and corporate quashing of potentially legitimate criticism to be very important indeed.  In virtually all press coverage of this story, about a corporation suing a blogger who criticized its product, this quote from Benjamin Gifford, a director of Evony, LLC , has appeared:

Mr. Everiss' attempts to spread his patently false charges to others in the online community cannot be allowed to go unanswered," said Benjamin Gifford, vice development director for the legal IP strategic division for Evony LLC. "In the digital age in which we now live, online journalists and bloggers – and the traditional media outlets that may rely upon them as sources – must strive for a higher standard of integrity and accuracy. Mr. Everiss' complete disregard for even the most basic tenets of journalistic responsibility have left our company no alternative but to take these legal actions. We hope now, in facing the full light of day before the Supreme Court, that Mr. Everiss will finally come clean and clear the record.

Like Bruce Everiss, we thought that Evony, the game, was owned by UMGE, a Chinese company that specializes in selling "virtual gold" to players of World of Warcraft and similar games, rather than Evony, LLC, which has been described elsewhere as a Delaware corporation.  Chinese "gold farmers" are notorious internet spammers, one of Mister Everiss's principal complaints about Evony.  And as it turns out, at the time Everiss made his allegedly defamatory statements about Evony, the game, Evony, LLC, the American corporation which now claims to own the game, didn't even exist.  Everiss's allegedly defamatory statements were made on July 10, 2009.

According to the records of the Delaware Secretary of State, Evony, LLC wasn't a corporation on July 10, 2009.  The corporation was formed on July 22, 2009.

Now, it may be pure coincidence that Evony, LLC, an American corporation, formed twelve days after Bruce Everiss allegedly defamed Evony, the game.  Products change hands and new owners form corporations all the time.

Or it may not be a coincidence.  Delaware is the forum of choice for incorporation around the world for a reason.  Its laws are notoriously friendly to corporations that really have nothing to do with Delaware, and getting records or discovery from a Delaware corporation can be very difficult indeed.  In an Australian court, doing so might be even more difficult, as that would require transnational court orders, prohibitively expensive for a hypothetical defendant in the United Kingdom who might be required to retain lawyers in Australia and Delaware if he wished to know who was really suing him.

And then comes the question of why this Delaware corporation has a vice director, Benjamin Gifford, who appears to be jointly employed by Evony, LLC, and another, sort of murky entity, known as Assist Strategic Business Solutions, which has a mailing address at PO Box 126, Miranda, NSW, Australia, 2228.

According to his Linkedin profile (no longer available but cached here), Benjamin Gifford, in the greater Sidney Australia area, is indeed the "Vice Development Director" of Evony, LLC, the Delaware corporation formed twelve days after Bruce Everiss allegedly defamed Evony the game.

And if one searches Google for "Benjamin Gifford" and Evony, one finds Benjamin Gifford's Facebook page.

Note that Benjamin Gifford's "services" include Assist Strategic Business Solutions Pty Limited.  According to Facebook, again, Assist Strategic Business Solutions has exactly one fan, and that fan is Benjamin Gifford.

So we'll take it as read that Benjamin Gifford works for Evony, LLC, the Delaware corporation, in computer games, and Assist Strategic Business Solutions, also in computer games.  Except that Assist Strategic Business Solutions isn't a computer gaming company.  It's a … well, I'm not sure what it is.

And I'm not sure what Benjamin Gifford does.  He certainly doesn't seem to have a background in computer and videogame development.

While a military background in problem-solving may be as valued in the gaming industry as proficiency in, say, PERL or Visual Basic, most game industry job postings tend toward the second category.  Although Assist Business Solutions is very close to Evony's law firm and its principal lawyer, Dean Groundwater.  Just down the road, in fact:

So that may explain why Evony, LLC, which incorporated a world away twelve days after Bruce Everiss allegedly defamed its product, chose to sue Everiss in New South Wales, rather than Delaware, or the United Kingdom, or China for that matter.  The game was purchased by Australians from … somebody … not a Chinese "gold farming" and spamming operation, nosirree.

Except, wait, Assist Business Solutions, and Benjamin Gifford, were working with something called Evony, LLC before the corporation ever formed.

Now, I'm no cynic, and only a cynic would suggest this, and so I'm not suggesting it:  But a cynic might assume that the real owners of Evony, the game that according to Bruce Everiss advertises itself through tasteless breast shots and spam, chose to sue Bruce Everiss in Australia on the advice of Benjamin Gifford, a consultant employed to help the company develop its tasteless marketing and to quash criticism from journalists and bloggers like Bruce Everiss.  Of course, I don't suggest that.  And I don't suggest that Evony, LLC, which formed twelve days after Everiss's alleged defamation, has nothing to do with Delaware, or Australia, and that the sole purpose of this suit is to bankrupt Everiss by requiring him to fly around the world in order to defend himself from baseless allegations of libel and defamation by Evony's real owners, who pardon me, may not speak English so well, wherever they may be.

I don't suggest that at all.

Update: On the spam front, this depicts the top results from a Twitter search for Evony conducted at 2:15 pm, Eastern time, today:

That link, by the way, does not point to this post. I wouldn't enter it into my browser for all the tea in China.

If we have a theme here, or a meme, or a leitmotif, it's the notion that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish political reality from satire. Whether it's Tom DeLay appearing on "Dancing With the Stars" or Hugo Chavez declaring war on golf, real-world political developments increasingly resemble indifferently written sketch comedy, and vice-versa.

Clever people realize that one can take advantage of this phenomenon.

Case in point: environmental activists posed as officials with the United States Chamber of Commerce yesterday and held a full-blown press conference at the National Press Club in which they purported to abandon the Chamber's previous lobbying stances on the environment and adopt "green" stances.

This did not get worse when representatives of the real Chamber arrived. It got better.

What followed was a spectacle not usually seen in the John Peter Zenger Room at the National Press Club: two men in business suits shouting at one another, each calling the other an impostor and demanding to see business cards.

"This guy is a fake! He's lying! This is a stunt that I've never seen before," said Eric Wohlschlegel, an official at the actual Chamber of Commerce, who said he'd heard about the hoax event from a reporter who'd mistakenly shown up at the chamber's headquarters.

The video is here. Love the green agenda or hate it, it's hilarious, and looks like something out of a movie. And through this piece of performance art, the Chamber was forced to address questions about its lobbying stances on environmental matters.

It wouldn't work in a less crazy world.

I was visiting a friend in Sacramento over the weekend. The town of Rocklin is like one large strip mall. Really pretty awful. However, we went to the generically quaint Waffle Barn for breakfast on Sunday, and they had a menu item I had never seen before.

If you really hated yourself, you could get a bacon waffle. A waffle with bacon baked (grilled? ironed?) right into it. I didn't order it, but I was sort of tempted.

One of the little-known perils of ballooning is hot air:

The Colorado parents accused of concocting a publicity stunt by pretending that their young son had climbed aboard a homemade helium balloon and was hurtling through the skies above Fort Collins, Colo., will voluntarily surrender to authorities as soon as charges are filed, which is expected to happen on Wednesday, the lawyer for the father said Monday morning.

We were as freaked out as the rest of America by last Thursday afternoon's "Balloon Boy" strangeness, but the behavior of parents Richard and Mayumi Heene afterward was as strange as anything else in the situation.  Admittedly, normal people don't build backyard UFO-shaped balloons, but it did seem unusual that the first thing the Heenes did, seemingly moments after learning that their six year old son Falcon had not fallen 10,000 feet to his death, was to book an interview on Larry King.

After initially believing the Heenes’ story, investigators grew suspicious after Falcon, in an interview on “Larry King Live,” said to his father, “You guys said that, um, we did this for the show.”

Mistake number one.  Reporters and the media are not your friends.  Assuming that the Heenes are innocent of filing false reports and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, the ghost of Richard Jewell could have told them all about what can go wrong when ordinary people in strange situations talk to reporters.

The Heenes, who had appeared on the show “Wife Swap,” have made no secret of their television aspirations, and Falcon’s remark prompted authorities to reinterview the parents. At a news conference Sunday, the Larimer County sheriff, Jim Alderden, said that the entire series of events had been an elaborate hoax drummed up by the Heenes to gain attention.

Mistake number two.  Assuming, again, the Heenes' innocence, it was should have been pretty clear by Friday morning that the police weren't calling because they wanted to find Falcon.  He'd been on Larry King the night before.  Yet, like lambs on a television reality show about the meat industry to the slaughter, the Heenes did not answer with the only response that makes sense:

"Gosh, I'd love to talk to you, but my lawyer won't let me. Why don't you call him.  His telephone number is 555-1212.  Thanks and goodbye!"

One assumes that, as good parents, the Heenes have taught their children never to talk to strangers.  The media and the police definitely fall into that category.

Reactions today to the Department of Justice memo to U.S. Attorneys regarding prosecution of marijuana crimes in states with medical marijuana laws have been, for the most part, restrained. And they ought to be.

The memo is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a blow for federalism or a significant step towards de-criminalization. It's couched in language about resource conservation, and simply says that prosecutors generally ought not exercise their discretion to spend scarce investigative and prosecutorial resources on targets whose conduct is in "clear and unambiguous" compliance with state medical marijuana laws. The memo explicitly preserves the feds' standard argument that federal drug laws trump state laws under the Supremacy Clause:

Of course, no State can authorize violations of federal law, and the list of factors above is not intended to describe exhaustively when a federal prosecution may be warranted. Accordingly, in prosecutions under the Controlled Substances Act, federal prosecutors are not expected to charge, prove, or otherwise establish any state law violations. Indeed, this memorandum does not alter in any way the Department’s authority to enforce federal law, including laws prohibiting the manufacture, production, distribution, possession, or use of marijuana on federal property. This guidance regarding resource allocation does not “legalize” marijuana or provide a legal defense to a violation of federal law, nor is it intended to create any privileges, benefits, or rights, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any individual, party or witness in any administrative, civil, or criminal matter. Nor does clear and unambiguous compliance with state law or the absence of one or all of the above factors create a legal defense to a violation of the Controlled Substances Act. Rather, this memorandum is intended solely as a guide to the exercise of investigative and prosecutorial discretion.

In other words, it's a mere gesture.

"Keep going." Those were the only two words I heard as the massive light rigs above me swayed as if in a stiff breeze. The sound was like a clog dancer running from one end of the building to the other right down the middle of the roof (we later learned that sound was bolts in the roof popping). I didn't perceive the rolling of the stage as much as I noticed the seats in the audience moving in impossible ways.

It was 5:04PM on October 17, 1989. I was rehearsing for the play Beyond the Horizon in my high school's new theatre (completed that year), and the Bay Area had just been hit by the Loma Prieta earthquake. It is a perfect theatre moment that as the quake hit, our director told us to keep going. We had no intention of doing so.

Continue Reading »

The President is due to appear at a fund raiser a block up the street from my office. Sadly, his handlers are so afraid of protesters (and why would liberals have any reason to be angry with Obama? Oh, right…) that he will not make any public appearances. To San Francisco's credit they have not established the despicable "free speech zones" this time, and Union Square (directly across from the hotel) is jammed with protesters and media. Oh, and a few police. Sorry these pictures aren't great, they are from my phone.

The dependably satirical Red State has an impassioned defense of the civil rights of the most persecuted man in America, Rush Limbaugh.  It bears reading, if only for the hilarious scope of it. Apparently, dropping Rush from an NFL ownership position is the equivalent of the Holocaust.

The post suggests that "Tonight Rush became the metaphor for all of us… every man woman and child in this great nation of ours." Really? So a cabal of rich white guys (most of whom probably agree with Rush on just about anything) decided that another rich white guy was too much of a bad PR move (because of his own actions and words – see McNabb, Donovan) and that makes him a victim?

The NFL is notoriously paranoid about it's image. This is a league that fines grown men for wearing too short socks. Was there ever any doubt that they would want to stay from Rush?

No, Rush is not a victim here. He is not a persecuted minority. He's just a rich white guy.

Pity the parents of a six-year-old boy in Colorado, whose son just wouldn't listen to dad's warning not to mess with the family experimental UFO:

A 6-year-old boy climbed into a homemade balloon aircraft in Colorado and floated away today, forcing officials to scramble to figure out how to rescue the boy as the balloon hurtled through the air.

The bizarre scene played out live on television and prompted fears that the flying saucer-shaped balloon would crash with the young child inside. The balloon rotated slowly in the wind, tipping precariously at times. …

Larimer County sheriff’s spokeswoman Eloise Campanella said the device had the potential to rise to 10,000 feet. Sheriff’s officials last saw the device floating south of Milliken, which is about 40 miles north of Denver.

I have the same problem with my collection of antique refrigerators, which I store in the unused swimming pool out back.  I warn the neighbors' kids not to play there, but do they listen?  NOOOOOOO.

The sad thing is, the law will probably hold the father responsible for his son's stupidity.

(Via numerous sources through Twitter.)

If you aim to be taken seriously as a political force when trumpeting a call to action against a political opponent, you should avoid using the word "Narnia" if at all possible.

What does this mean?

How do we articulate what we have learned in recent decades from a "cultural constructionism" of subjectivity and literary canons with aesthetic ecstasy (both the "old" and the "new" aestheticism)? Deleuze's and Derrida's notions of a "dissolved cogito" and "non-egological" consciousness in the context of aesthetic ecstasy. More generally, in what might life "after the subject" consist? A reevaluation of both the continuities and apparent standoff between phenomenology — Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Michel Henry — and poststructuralism. I.e., possible revisionary versions of the dominant account of French thought from existentialism to the present. For example, were the French poststructuralists really ever the "constructionists" (still less the "cultural" constructionists) they have been claimed to be? Distinguishing between constructionism's lasting contributions and its simultaneous unwitting complicity with the domination of all life-forms by global capitalism.

Camille Paglia is my heroine.

The professor who wrote this botched abortion of a paragraph, by the way, is Philip Wood, of Rice University.  I'll bet his film classes are a hoot.

Calvin Trillin rocks.

Tip to Ralph Lauren:  When a woman, any woman, asks you whether she looks heavy, the answer is, "No, sweetheart, you look lovely."  Or perhaps, "I like that color."

Anything other than, "You'd look beautiful with Photoshop," or for that matter, "You're fired, you fat pig." Especially when the woman is a model who only weighs 120 pounds and, by any objective, non-Auschwitz-survivor standard, is beautiful:

And most especially when the woman, one day, might be able to take her revenge in the press.

Boycott Ralph Lauren!

(Thanks to commenter Becky for the tip)

Remember David Dicks? He was the interim chief of the Flint, Michigan police department who touted that fair city's new policy of arresting people with saggy pants.

“Some people call it a fad,” Dicks told the Free Press this week while patrolling the streets of Flint. “But I believe it’s a national nuisance. It is indecent and thus it is indecent exposure, which has been on the books for years.”

Many of us questioned whether this was a good use of public resources. Many of us also questioned the moral sensibilities of public servants who think that the government ought be involved in policing whether somebody's boxers show.

Speaking of moral sensibilities —

Dicks just pled guilty in federal court to fraud for submitting bogus timesheets to a private job.

Pull up your pants, Dicks. Your unmentionables are showing.

Via.

Poor Mr. X.  I feel for your family and friends.  I don't know much about you or them, but I'm sure I'll meet a number of them when your estate files suit against my client.  In the meantime, this is what I do know about you.

You were a fan of Megan Fox.  I'm sure your wife was pleased by that.

You liked to insert a device known as a "bierstick" into your mouth.

You had degrading tastes in soft-core pornography.

You had a prostate condition.

And that's about it.  Your obituary is already behind a firewall, so as far as the internet is concerned your tombstone is shaped like a beer-injecting plastic penis.  Long may it stand.

As for the rest of you, I know your mother told you always to wear clean underwear, in case you were in an accident.  But are you wearing a clean Facebook page?