02 JANUARY 2024 FOOTNOTE: “The opinions expressed by contributors to this information stream are their entirely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of vicsocotra.com.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: DR. Claudine Gay is the 30th president of Harvard University, with other distinctions. She is the second female and first person of color. We are not sure what that means anymore, but she has become a social icon since her testimony to Congress last week. on Thursday, becoming the first person of color and second woman in the role, the university said.

Dr. Gay had been the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 2018, guiding the faculty through the COVID-19 pandemic. At the beginning, President Gay addressed some of the significant challenges looming without identifying the ones that resemble today. “Today, we are in a moment of remarkable and accelerating change: socially, politically, economically and technologically…we enter a moment of possibility, one that calls for deeper collaboration across the University, across all of our remarkable Schools. There is an urgency for Harvard to be engaged with the world and to bring bold, brave, pioneering thinking to our greatest challenges.”

– Vic

Our season is a lot easier. The Legal Section approved the sentiment. They also recommended wen craft something short and officious to cover the other non-verbal aspects of fine journalism. We have seen it tried before, and with mixed success. Here is the nature of the issue. A snazzy or electrifying image usually is inserted right after the title and date of the piece. Below that is a line of text with crediting information if it is available. When it is not, we run words like: “Image is used in low resolution for identification purposes only.”

Other folks feel that voids any legal liability and simply leave it with those words, but our legal Beagles demanded we provide something more comprehensive. We decided to try the NGO- non-governmental Organization approach, which is to say our “NON-PROFIT publishing enterprise is engaged in public service activities and no articles of value were exchanged in the production of this screed.”

You can see the legal nicety in that, since it takes a behind-the-firewall examination of the books, and if there is nothing to be gained financially why would we be dragged before an imposing bench to have our sins removed via our wallets? Trust us. We understand that from practice.

The lady from Litigation sniffed. “That would accomplish something for the average cyber criminals. They don’t want to hurt you, per se, they just want free cash. Perpetrators are probably living in a basement in a nice house in the suburbs. What you have not addressed is the arrival of a legal team with unlimited resources who simply want to destroy what you are as a human and quiet your voice.’

Her summation seemed reasonable, and comported with what we thought the law was about. Like everything else these days, we were wrong. the system has changed to emerge as the go-to instrument of power to do all sorts of things, none of which we can specifically link to something called ‘JUSTICE.’

We periodically go through all the list of footnotes to see if they can remain standing or require modification. Some of the older ones have been distilled to give us additional room for prohibitions as they come. We distilled a bunch of the other old thematic footnotes to try to get them short enough to stand as a nice wooden rack with brass plates somewhere near the front door.

The arrival of 2024 gave us time to look ahead. We worked on learning the new number for this year’s date yesterday. Today, we arrived at a place in the production planning phase of the Daily when it was entirely possible to add any additional legal protection to the process. That may be why we were surprised to see the little Cambridge, Massachusetts story this morning. We thought it would be buried deep by now, since it reveals some of the systemic failings- and unique advantages- of modern life in the vaunted Ivy League academic system.

We could ask the President of one of the big prestigious schools to see if they can explain to us. We have an idea how it might go after drum-roll: ‘due to centuries-millenniums – of systemic violation to human rights common in many current and former nations, we at Socotra House do formally acknowledge our trust in objective and accurate reporting. Some of the facts may become blurry, but are used only in low resolution for identification purposes only.”

We are standing with that until we hear something different!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com