New! Improved! 60% Less Political!

Mostly nonpolitical/nonpartisan today… for values of "political" and "partisan" that carefully ignore Orwell's pithy explanation of the flaw in that objective: "[N]o book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." (Why I Write (1946))

• Every so often, "covert operations" aren't just another excuse for skullduggery. Sometimes — even if unintended — they can be a bulwark against madness. But that requires focus on the arts, not on intentional disinformation; unfortunately, the latter is by far more common. It almost leads one to question whether all of those Ivy League graduates recruited in the 1950s and 1960s were the wrong ones. Maybe they should have been looking for literature majors…
• Speaking of "unwarranted exclusivity," consider the problem of actual creators from "working class" backgrounds. (The stark contrast with "nepo babies" justifies a little scrutiny, too.) The music industry is particularly annoying in this regard, given the pathetically small portion of the revenue stream allocated to them — even paperback writers are better off. (Not much.) Having family support so that "artistic failure" doesn't mean "starvation" requires a family that can afford that support in the first place. "Cui bono?" is almost always concentrated away from those actually creating and/or acting as necessary infrastructure for the arts (like the set-builders and other stage crew for live theatrical productions). Funny how one hears of musicians of the past now surviving on charity, but not music-industry (or Ticketbastard) executives…
• Then there are really, really hard questions, like how much of a father's sins must be visited upon their sons when interviewed in a documentary. Not having seen this piece, I can't even begin to evaluate its substance. I'm reluctant to assume that a 13-year-old boy in a patriarchal culture has views independent of his father's… or in lock-step with them. (Specific example, albeit much older: The just-sworn-in Secretary of Health here in the US isn't exactly in tune with his late father's views, and hasn't been for decades.) Thus, I don't think there's a bright-line rule, in general or as applied to this documentary — especially since there are atrocities on both all sides in the Levant. And "disclaimers" are worthwhile only when viewed, understood, and as necessary acted upon beforehand, so I doubt this particular disclaimer is actually worthwhile.
• Things don't get much better over in the other of CP Snow's "two cultures." Science gets respect in the US only in the abstract, and pretty much only as useful technological applications that make their way toward the general public (especially if useable with no directions or training, like the microwave oven). There are lots of high-falutin' theoretical constructs out there, some more plausible than others. As someone who has had a foot in both of Snow's cultures for decades — I have degrees in both, and indeed in the neglected "third leg" of the theoretical and applied social sciences — I've often felt more like the wishbone about to be torn apart based on superstition…
• "Cui bono?" is also at issue regarding DEI programs. There's a disturbing, much-less-optimistic-than-Manifest-Destiny background in there, whether overtly in the "Great Replacement" handwavery or more subtly, the various "anti-DEI" theories are as much about cutting the pie as anything else. The disturbing background is that individual slices can be a smaller proportion of the whole and still have more "food value" if the pie is growing faster than the number of additional "diners." Consider the Friday Night Massacre for a moment — and remember that the two highest-ranking "DEI hires" identified here managed to achieve their current ranks largely fighting against precisely the assumptions of those who just fired them.

  Or just remember that the opposite of "woke" is "comatose."

I did say "mostly."

Winter Weather

I almost got trapped in a parking lot by a sudden snowstorm — the special snowflakes drifted up to my chest! These particular special snowflakes were driving SUVs (and a couple minivans and pickups). Well, not exactly driving, but parking. Hint: When a space says "Compact," it might really mean it… and "compact SUV" is very much like "friendly fire" (neither one really is, no matter how pervasive the marketingspeak), and taking up two spots in a crowded lot doesn't help anyone. Except that it might save those special snowflakes a few steps while they're preventing other customers from getting in their way in the store.

In any event, lots of interesting IP and related news items even since the last platter.

• Consider the (difficult) issue of copyright in fictional universes. One wonders how much farther the reasoning might extend when considering a completely invented fictional universe, like the United Federation of Planets (Star Trek™, instead of the slightly fictionalized Peckham that played home to Del Boy. Or is the way I identified the Federation a hint, reaching toward the inner operation of (and communicative distinction between) copyright and trademark?
• The purple haze still lingers around the copyright estate of J. Marshall Hendrix, Sony (the successor to Hendrix's label) has found out to its chagrin. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of plantation overseers, could it? Not all transferees actively mistreat the actual creators, but the economic model remains very much the same…
• A couple contrasting, and probably fundamentally incompatible, visions of "fair use" and "training sets for large language model generative systems" have hit the news of late. On the one hand, authors in the UK are (rightly) complaining that a "consultation" on copyright's proper treatment neglected authors' (and other creators') interests. Conversely, WestLaw got the opposite result regarding purportedly factual (and definitely lacking originality by design) case headnotes. Comparison to the last paragraph might bear some consideration of its own.
• One might instead ponder the Advocate General's attempt to leave weasel room around Dastar when applied to European patents. Which is just as bizarrely strange as it sounds. Dastar held that, under US law, a trademarked title (or, more broadly, a Lanham Act claim) cannot be used to protect a thin, compilation only, dubiously expired copyright. The pending CeramTec matter concerns something quite parallel: Marks being used to at least as to commerce extend an expired patent.
• One could just consider that the Doge of Venice Beach has ensured that some of his minions have extracted quite a bit of data tracing back to specific individuals from government computers. Not that any intelligence-collection methods might use this now dubiously or completely unsecured material residing on Baby Techbros' laptops (n.b. cited as a basic open-source explanation, without comment upon or endorsement of its precision or accuracy). That, after all, would be considering potential collateral damage — something that the individuals at the top in the executive branch since 20 January have clearly demonstrated is not within their weltanschauung.

An Unreasonable Use of Resources

This sausage platter is not a reasonable use of my time and resources —

• Lots of obscure copyright and intellectual property stuff that I've neglected to mention of late, ranging from global applicability of US copyright terminations (n.b. beware broken/inaccurate links in the article) to still more nonsense about dog chew toys and trademark infringment of whiskey bottles. IMNSHO, these judicial opinions got tripped up by the process versus product problem in and around the arts and intellectual property — but that's for another time, another forum, another stultifying set of citations to authority that reflexively fail to engage with the process versus product problem by their very nature.

  But the winners, as usual, aren't the actual creators. Sometimes the winners are publishers (and some classes of reusers); sometimes the winners are TV production companies; sometimes the winners are an entirely different set of reusers. The only guaranteed winners are the lawyers. Well, the general class of transferees, too, but that's also for another time, another forum, another few hundred footnotes…

• …some transferees being less basically honest than others. (Translation: Companies House, in the UK, performs the functions — and more — of US state-level Secretaries of State and their divisions responsible for business organizations.) Of course, it helps the con artists Over There that the UK doesn't overtly prohibit unfair competition, for some value of "unfair" that depends largely on "how much did you pay your lawyers?"
• I'll just shove the politics in one big lumpy sausage for the day, so if you'd rather not barf you may want to skip to the next one. The current administration is trying its very best to be more corrupt than Ulysses S. Grant's, which was so corrupt that Congress established a civil service system to prevent personal loyalty "oaths" from being a criterion for getting or keeping a federal job. Civil service isn't dead yet, but not for want of effort. You want an example of the alternative? Try city hall… in Chicago. That's all too consistent with the only effective way to reduce the felon count among Illinois governors. Part of the problem (and not just the executive branch) arises from how we choose the winners, but even that piece goes not nearly far enough because it doesn't excoriate the corrupt, coopted gatekeepers (who usually epitomize "patronage").

  In the end, I'm not sure which is more disturbing: That cancellation upon accusation remains A Thing in the arts (especially when, no matter how well supported, the accusation is levelled at a creator or performer previously acclaimed as a role model for and around their work, particularly when there are clearly multiple sides of the story — perhaps all icky — which remain untested), but that opprobrium doesn't extend to politicians not just accused, but found liable for the ickiness after a full trial, or refuses to pay legal bills (that's just one example). If character matters for the one…

  What's next? Jackbooted thugs in the military? Unfortunately, that's not that implausible. The public has little idea how close we came to that; the end of the Cold War disrupted a decade of perceived-loyalty buggery, but not nearly enough.

  Obviously, the current administration is trying its very best to deflect attention from Secretary-Designate Brainworm's policy preferences utter ignorance by undermining medical research all by itself. Oh, wait, basic science isn't efficient because the outcome is largely unpredictable.

  "Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, when asked whether she could describe the scientific advances we may expect to achieve from the voyage of the Starfarer, replied with a single word: 'No.' [* * * *] 'Science,' she insisted, 'is not meant to create useful applications of scientific knowledge. [… A] scientist does not do an experiment to prove a hypothesis. A scientist does an experiment to test a hypothesis. You may guess about the answer that nature might give back to you. You may even hope for nature to give you a particular answer. But you can’t know what answer you'll get until you’ve performed the experiment. If you did, or if you thought you did, you'd be back two thousand years when experimentation was looked upon as unnecessary and vulgar, or, worse, back a thousand years when belief was more important than knowledge, and people who challenged beliefs with knowledge were burned at the stake.'"

  Vonda N. McIntyre, Starfarers (1989). It may be a work of fiction, but it's accurate, looking backward and forward… and as previous ingredients in this sausage and the news demonstrate all too well, the stake-burning was less than a thousand minutes ago.

• A little bit less politically — but not entirely removed from it — consider the healthcare problems caused by the division between "mental" and "physical" health. There is an underlying political issue: Convincing those who pay to do so when "the records" don't include clear and replicable "evidence" regarding the "condition" to be "treated"… not to mention that there's so little quantifiable treatment applying to all patients. Determining whether a patient needs, say, a particular dose of atorvastatin (brand name: Lipitor) to control lipid and cholesterol levels can be quantified; even the regimen and results of body-building can be quantified. Getting a trauma victim readjusted to normal function? Not so much.

— but I did it anyway.

In Praise of [In]Efficiency

I offer no apologies to Erasmus¹ for an ironic twist on his ironic twists. Ambiguous, infinite reflexiveness is kewl!

The unsanctioned "Department of Government Efficiency" has been on a rampage of late², because "efficiency" is a necessary universal objective that only a business orientation can achieve — and that "government" (and, in particular, the Deep State) can never achieve. There's a tiny, tiny problem with this pathway, though: Almost by definition, planning for crises is not efficient precisely because there is neither certainty nor sufficiently precise (and accurate!) predictability of the time, place, and context of a crisis.

Consider, for the moment, an objectively-clear crisis: Hurricane Katrina.³ If one actually looks even cursorily at the four years leading up to the devastation in New Orleans and the bungled response thereto, one sees increasing emphasis on efficiency… primarily so that any "savings" could be plowed into responding to another (manufactured? not-objectively-clear? resulting-from-the-response-as-much-as-the-putative-cause?) crisis.⁴ No plan survives contact with the enemy — or reality — because neither one actively cooperates with the plan.

More disturbingly, consider the particular rampage noted a couple paragraphs above. There might be a microefficiency possible through a fresh-eyes oversight of payment systems. Assume, hypothetically, that the deterrent effect of knowing that the DOGE⁵ Is Watching will automatically cut all fraud to zero. (Yeah, right.) Has anyone considered the costs of any of:

• Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from internal misuse, like some staffer at DOGE using the payment data to track down his ex… or estranged daughter?
• Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from external attack, like hackers choosing to attack off-the-shelf software now being stored on dubiously-secured computers in Alexandria? Or, more to the point, hostile foreign governments doing so?
• Distinguishing between the fact of a payment and the reason(s) for that particular payment — an effort (if actually undertaken) that inherently requires correlation of individual payments with specific, private, oft-protected-by-other-law personal information?
• Actual enforcement efforts against any discrepancies actually discerned (whether or not factually/ethically verified)?

I didn't think so; and even that comparison assumes (with no warrant, let alone relationship to reality) complete success.

Beginning down the path of internalizing negative externalities⁶ — necessary to determine the efficiency of a system even more than the efficiency of a particular incidence — further exposes the real problem. DOGE is attempting to count the number of angels (or, in this instance, devils⁷) on the head of a pin not by assuming just the existence of the angels and devils, but by assuming that they are necessarily — and accurately — countable through the magic of modern accounting. It further flies in the face of a critical lesson of both the events of military history and the theory of conflict resolution. "All teeth and no tail" is a losing strategy precisely because it presumes that the world is a chessboard, that no pawn ever repels the actual assault of a knight, that the terrain is known and fixed and unchallenging, that the simplest case is always an accurate model of the real world — and that no one ever responds to a demand to surrender with "Nuts!," but instead accedes to the "inevitable." But it's only "inevitable" to those making the same set of a priori assumptions, and slavishly following the same path of reasoning, as those making the demand.

Mu5k's Schlieffen Plan to remake the government as smaller and more efficient is little more than an attempt to convert the slogan "greater efficiency is always good!" into reality. Instead of considering the facts, or the law/other methods of reasoning, railing against "government inefficiency" is merely pounding on the table⁸ — or, perhaps, the on-screen keyboard in 140-character soundbites that couldn't even complete this sentence, or include the footnote. And the footnote(s) is/are part of the point: The "inefficiency meme" is at best a postulate that has not been proven.

---

1. Desidarius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (1509, this trans. 1876); see also Anthony Grafton's helpful context-setting foreword to the Princeton University Press edition (PDF) which, nonetheless, glosses over a critical aspect of the work: That it also functions as a pre-Enlightenment criticism of the argument from authority, and in particular transferrence of authority between fields of expertise. Directly confronting this problem would need to wait a couple centuries more…
2. Keep in mind that it's still during the government/business day in DC as I'm writing this. There is a nonzero chance that something even more outrageous, or at least even more remarkable, will have occurred between its writing and whenever you read this.
3. This concerns the fact and context of the response, not its competence. It wasn't a heck of a job, by any means. It's also important to remember that the management-level response failures came from those appointed to "supervise" the Deep State by the political masters, not the Deep State itself — and included a substantial proportion of "successful" businessmen (dubious genderization entirely intentional) brought in to make things more efficient.
4. It would be rather churlish for me to point out that the sum total of all such "savings" didn't make much of a dent in the cost of that earlier crisis (PDF) … and even that is just the immediate cost, as the human and consequential costs have yet to be acknowledged (let alone quantified). Consider where you're reading this: "Churlish" is probably the most-civil thing you should expect.
5. I propose giving the publicly-known leader a floppy hat and status as a spokesbacterium, carefully neglecting conflicts of interest, monomaniacal focus on twigs and not trees, not-well-hidden agendas, and attempts to deflect attention from nonmonetary (indeed, inherently inefficient) intentional side effects. Just like a disturbing nominative ancestor. Wait, you don't really think I'd suggest ridicule of a government official in a blawg piece that explicitly invokes satire, do you? Or that such ridicule just might be merited?
6. See, e.g. Prof David Zilberman, chapter 4 of course texts for Spring 2006 (PDF), and it's worth noting that this is from an introductory-level course.
7. "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911) (quoted at Britannica.com).
8. Cf., e.g., Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (1936) (convenient direct quotation).

From Rubashov's Cell

Earlier this week, we were only a couple minutes off (Eastern Standard Time) — and the treatment of former comrades is already all too consistent. Which should shed quite a bit of light on whether this has anything to do with "ideology" or "principle"… before it Snowballs too much, on the perhaps-inevitable slide toward Shostakovich's fate.

• There's been some rather bizarre and, at least cumulatively, disturbing news in the last couple months in and around publishing.¹ Perhaps the most obvious is yet another shoe dropping in the single-most-profitable area of publishing: for-profit restricted-focus academic journals. Nobody is looking at oligopolistic practices there, of course; and certainly not for stock photography frequently relied upon for cover images (sometimes with dire consequences due to rampant incompetence and deception regarding "permission" throughout publishing, but who's counting?). At least there wasn't outright forgery… this time; no guarantees concerning "AI-generated art" slipping in without proper attribution, though.
• That's less disturbing, though, than silent defaults for writers' drafts to be assimilated by the Borg a large-language model. This is, or should be, a big hint to anyone who handles confidential information — especially, but not only, lawyers: Cloud-Based Executables Are Not Your Friends. Or at least not your clients' friends. It's not going to be long at all before a FISA warrant issues (if I'm not already late with that).
• We don't blame you — you were only doing your job, Mr Parsons. Given this sort of effort, one wonders just how accurate the information making its way to the Inner Party upper-management MAGAts is going to be. Perhaps they'll end up tilting at the wrong windmills, despite their intent to blow them up.

  One also wonders if the real "deep state" actors are the self-righteous apparatchiks who keep ensuring ballots have only the same bad choices, I probably shouldn't say that as I just received my ballot in the mail this afternoon.

---

1. Remember, there is no "publishing industry" — just the (multiple) bastard offspring of a three-century-long orgy among thirteen distinct industries.

The Way It Isn't

[Dr] Martin Luther King [Jr] Day was formally established as a federal holiday in the 80s, falling on the third Monday in January. This year, it happens to fall on 20 January — the first time it has been on Inauguration Day {ETC: of a new Administration}. So Dr King's commemoration coincides with… this. And this. And this. I think I'll have to shift to a new cliché-like aphorism, perhaps "the paper calling the snowflake white"; I can't very well use the old one, about cookware, as the hue is rather ironic (and they don't get irony — not even, perhaps especially, cast-iron[y] cookware).

• One area that is just not going to get an awful lot of public attention from the incoming Administration (not that past Administrations have done much more) is the region surrounding Mu5k's childhood home — before his adventures with a US immigration "system" that would have astounded Kafka with its arbitrariness and culture of secrecy. At least now, though, Leopold's ghosts are clanking loud enough to be heard; even slightly further afield.

  You can scream "America First!" all you like, guys. All you'll be doing is trying to deflect attention from nearly a century of America screaming exactly the opposite to the rest of the world — which, when it didn't believe it, at least heard it.

• Sometimes, by sticking to their "areas of competence," academic organizations can (often inadvertently) provide a window onto incompetence. In particular, the American Historical Association has condemned destruction not even of historical monuments, but of education and particularly teaching of history in Gaza. One should carefully note two things here: This statement is confining itself to present efforts by the theocratic government of Israel, and making no claims that can support even a conspiracy-theory-tinged claim of "antisemitism" — particularly since Palestinians are a semitic people, too; and the OP is unduly generous in saying "Historically (ha), the AHA has functioned as a moderate-to-conservative organization, often loath to weigh in on political matters." My past professional interactions indicate that "moderate-to-" has little support in the AHA's ahistorical — ha yourself! — silence on a broad range of adventures and the narratives arising therefrom, precisely because in a very McLuhanesque fashion, the historical narrative is the educational/scholarly/political positions because the historical narrative shapes and controls their scale and form.
• The AHA is far from the only "learned organization" with an undeserved reputation for true and neutral rigor; I'm a refugee from four others! Sometimes, those clubs for "experts" don't even try to be neutral (or rigorous); even more often, the hidden agendas are dangerous precisely because they're hidden, and all too often undermine or contradict that carefully-shaped reputation (for example, anyone who claims that the American Bar Association is "leftist" or "liberal" has never actually read the ethics rules it sponsors, let alone pondered the structures and silences).
• The less said about the "evolution" of gaming, the better. It's rather distressing that a pasttime based on a literature of the imagination, of difference, of above all turning failure to conform to expectations into a virtue, has been appropriated via the somewhat misnamed Lamarckian inheritance of political affiliation, of religion, of vice — and of virtue. Ironically, many of those who object to the place of outliers in character-based adventure gaming choose to ignore the vast variations built into character generation, themselves typically rolling a five for wisdom (yes, I still have my original-edition three-volume set and the heavily annotated copy of Chainmail needed in large spaces and outdoors; get over it). Snide remarks about how "wisdom" was/is all too often a proxy for "socialization aligned between sociopathy and extreme conformity" will have to wait for another time, especially when applied to the "original gamers" in and around Lake Geneva… and their corporate successors…
• Unfortunately, there's a common spicing on this platter: The power of (self-aggrandizing) narrative to overwhelm inconvenient, unfavorable-to-self-image/interest facts. The real problem with Mr Walther's piece is that he stops before closing the methodological loop. I'm sure there are some differences, somewhere, somehow, among Goebbels, Alex Jones, and organizations acting the same way — but those differences are not in methodology, and only marginally in viewpoint. Which is not to say that, historically, that sort of thing has been confined to the mislabelled "right wing"; it is only to say that the "right wing" is at present more obvious/oblivious about it.

  tl;dr "Good" and "evil" are seldom pure, no matter how they're presented for marketing purposes. Means used limit and shape the ends actually achieved; when those means rely upon deception…

No, Sir — That Is Incorrect

Saying that too often definitely impairs one's career prospects. Saying it at all far enough up the chain of command/supervision makes that consequence rather more… immediate. As I have precisely no career prospects in the present or incoming administrations, I'll do it, remembering that speaking truth (or advocating alternative viewpoints when "truth" is indeterminate) is not a declaration of sartorial impropriety.

Secretary (Gen) Austin, you have recently attempted to impose what appears to be unlawful command influence (PDF) upon decades-long criminal proceedings involving specific defendants and alleged offenses — proceedings that began outside of your personal purview — by rejecting plea agreements. This decision cannot be justified either in principle or on these facts. In short, sir, you are in the wrong here, and your attempt undermines both the justice system and the chain of command. Not just the military justice system, but the entire apparatus; not just the chain of command to GITMO, but every chain of command involved with post-activity consequences to be imposed on non-US persons (which, ultimately, is all of them). That imperils your oath of office, and everything you've stood for in the past half century — since you took that oath upon entering the United States Military Academy to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I respectfully suggest that you trust your learned subordinates, rescind your statements, disqualify yourself from further "supervision" of the process, and allow proceedings still in pretrial mode to continue.

Your post-plea decision to reject the plea deals in this matter appears — so far as is in any currently-available public record — to be unaccompanied by specific implied threats of retribution against the officers (and others) involved in making a decision on the facts before them.¹ That, at least, is somewhat less egregious than it could be (and has been). The standard, however, is not "somewhat less egregious." It is to not only do justice, but be seen to do justice — and as Gilmet and similar matters imply but seldom state explicitly, that includes nonjudicial decisionmakers. That is the point of having a military (and related) justice system, of the general concept of the rule of law, of both the entirety of and specific provisions in the Constitution.

The particular sequence of events at issue here rests upon two decades of (entirely understandable) public outrage.² This points at the fundamental tension between "democratic will" and "professional judgment." You are not a lawyer, so you are not charged with that particular version of "professional" (although those who negotiated and accepted the plea agreements at issue are, a fact that should inform your own decision process). You are, however, by training a professional military officer — and you have retaken that oath you took in 1971 to place loyalty to the Constitution above all else. It is bad strategy to undermine one's own principles of command and control in pursuit of small immediate advantages, and especially so when that pursuit seeks an irreversible escalation on the spectrum of conflict.³ These plea agreements seek to impose the only sanction short of the individual-instance equivalent of total nuclear war: One cannot deescalate from the death penalty once imposed and executed.

Delegating leadership and execution is a necessary element of strategy, of government, of state policy. The irony that the real reason delegation is both necessary and appropriate when dealing with individual, tactical matters is that the lower levels of leaders making those decisions have specific competencies and information not available to their superiors, as often as the converse presumed in "civilian control of the military," appears to have escaped almost everyone. This tension is implicit in the precommissioning programs throughout the US military (and that of most democratic nation-states), and throughout further professional military education and command-selection criteria thereafter.

Please reconsider your decision to overrule the underequipped leaders in actual tactical control who — very much like Operation Eagle Claw — have detailed appreciations of tactical specifics that you do not. Unless, that is, your decision is based upon what must be at minimum breaches of attorney-client privilege, which would very much resemble destroying the village to save it.⁴

Mr Secretary — General — please reconsider. Conceive that just as you believe those who negotiated and accepted these plea agreements might be wrong (from at minimum a certain perspective), so might you. Trust the years of training, the years of investigation, that have gone into those decisions made by those in a position that you might well have been in yourself. Trust the remainder of the Constitutional process. Remember that under these plea agreements, those individuals are pleading guilty and are being incapacitated from repeating their conduct, without achieving a martyrdom whose attraction is literally foreign to you and especially to those to whom you answer.

In short: Do not demand complete victory in a context in which victory is inherently incomplete.

---

1. I have precisely no confidence that those around you, in both the present and incoming administrations, have similarly refrained. Unlawful command influence occurs by proxy, too; that is precisely what was at issue in Gilmet. And, for that matter, at Nuremberg, in post-Yugoslavia proceedings, in… Delegation does not remove command responsibility.
2. I do not believe that I am saying anything you have not considered, particularly since you held multiple command positions concerning the conflict zone. Neither am I saying anything not already said behind closed doors: That the very nature of these proceedings arises from information-gathering sources and methods — indeed, from specific information — that nobody who actually knows anything wants revealed in public. Not even, if it thought about it (which almost by definition it cannot and will not), the Mob.

   The disturbing corollary here is that rejection of these plea agreements — agreements which would keep the defendants in custody for the remainder of their lives, just short of the maximum possible penalty — appears based upon not just policy imperatives, but relevant information that has been withheld from those charged with making individual-case decisions. That is not good military strategy.

3. See, e.g., Frank Hoffman, Examining Complex Forms of Conflict: Grey Zones and Hybrid Challenges, 7(4) Prism 30, 32 (2018) (PDF). This is not at all a controversial or unfamiliar concept; in broad strokes, it has been a fundamental part of officer training throughout the nuclear age, and is implicit in centuries-old doctrine. Cf. e.g., Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege ("On War") (1832, this trans. 1874)("War is only a continuation of State policy by other means").
4. The controversy over both the origin and later uses of this statement is not just relevant, but is indeed the point.

Survival

Four years ago, there was a serious possibility that this nation would succumb to something that hasn't ever happened on this part of this continent before: A successful violent revolution by the loser at the polls. The First War of American Secession came about precisely because there weren't any polls, so the colonials could hardly be accused of sore-loserdom. The Second War of American Secession beat back the attempt (after four years), although we're still recovering from it in many ways. This time around, the loser was more graceful, more respectful of a quarter of a millennium of men and women who fought, and bled, and died — and of those they never came home to — in defense of "voting matters."

What damage that former loser will cause is for the future. It may be mostly "just" policy failures (as I remarked here just short of a couple of decades ago, stupid ≠ unconstitutional); it may be the executive this time instead of Congress; it almost certainly will result in needless suffering, casualties, and probably deaths. But we're not quite at the death of the American Experiment

We interrupt this rant to return to the irregularly-scheduled platter of link sausages.

• All too often, "old and wise" really means "decrepit and inflexible." It's been a dozen years since there's been an occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who wasn't drawing Social Security, and the average age of Senators just sworn in last week is at least Social Security-eligible. I've been griping about this for quite a while, and I'm glad to see I've finally got company. Well, a little company, in that most Senators might as well be off just keeping their "bad habits" (and short workweeks).
• I'm firmly against the draft, but it's like both Dracula and a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 it (or at least advocacy of it) keeps coming back. Peace Corps veteran Jonathan Zimmerman is here rather overdoing it, though.

  We don't need the entire nation to engage in national service. For one thing, that's a rather fast path toward devaluing an awful lot of jobs that are far more complex to do well than one can train draftees to do. It's one thing to say "build roads" (or even just "fill potholes") with some vision of creating the Transcontinental Railroad with slightly updated materials in mind; it's another entirely to do so safely, effectively, and with few side effects. Rather than reinstating the draft, I propose something a bit more… targeted: Appearance on a ballot for a state or federal legislative or executive (or, hackcoughshouldn'tbeelected judicial) office should require prior satisfactory completion of national service (and, of course, the Peace Corps counts, among many other "nontraditional" roles). That might, at minimum, provide some appropriate — arguably essential in a democratic republic — insight into some of those who don't have much in common with candidates for high office.

• Being a (nonuniformed) lawyer, however, isn't one of them. For example, just consider how much "service" to the nation as a whole was actually being provided by the lawyers in this fiasco. Or this one. Leaving aside that these two matters demonstrate yet again that states are incapable of effectively regulating the legal profession, I find myself unable to distinguish the conduct of counsel in these matters from that of counsel related to the attempted coup on 06 Jan 2021. Oh, wait, many them — including one of the most egregious — weren't disciplined either…

[fade out and static]

…yet.

Not Braving the Mall for Boxing Day

…particularly since the malls near here are a quarter or more empty. Which doesn't diminish the parking lot madness. Or the threat of being run down by delivery vehicles.

• Misconduct in the "c-suite" in corporations is everywhere, from health insurance to water utilities. This is what happens when more than one generation reads the LLM-generated summary of The Wealth of Nations and never realizes that there's a word before "self-interest." It's bad enough to neglect "enlightened"; too often, though, executives forget what the "self" is when they're directing operations of a company with a lot of non-equity stakeholders. Big hint to MBA programs: The "self" in "self-interest" is most emphatically not related to the "take any opportunity for personal advancement and withdrawing an arbitrageur's commission";¹ insurance policy holders are in fact the company's creditors, the water utilities exist at the suffrance of the landowners served, and so on.

  Insert a comment — with footnotes and photographs and a paragraph on the back of each one — about "the reason for the season" being inconsistent with the prosperity gospel (which is, itself, inconsistent with actions by the protagonist, but since we're already in cognitive-dissonance territory what's a little more?) right about here.

• Or maybe right about here. Sadly, the publishing industries (frequently including the "indie" segment) epitomize the problem. Those in charge — whether in editorial, S&M, or "general management" — are almost invariably not qualified to practice in the field.² This should remind the excessively scholarly of Holmes's Lament:

  It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted, for instance, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge. Yet if they command the interest of any public, they have a commercial value — it would be bold to say that they have not an aesthetic and educational value — and the taste of any public is not to be treated with contempt. It is an ultimate fact for the moment, whatever may be our hopes for a change. That these pictures had their worth and their success is sufficiently shown by the desire to reproduce them without regard to the plaintiffs' rights.³

• Which leads directly into musing about blind spots in the law that itself displays an immense blind spot: The inept equation of "extremism" with "ideology," without adequate consideration of deception, of claiming the mantle of victimhood to evade real examination, of rage (however justified/unjustified) relating to self-identity. Bluntly, "hurt feelings" do not equate to, and seldom result in, coherent, or indeed any, disinterested inquiry into details of an ideological position. Justified? Distrust of Manifest Destiny by Native Americans. Unjustified? The disturbingly-corresponding Great Replacement Theory, which is not in fact an "ideology" at all. Hint: Just because the FBI and Geheimstaatssicherheitbüro declare that something has an "ideological origin," coming from agencies that gave us self-interest-masquerading-as-principle ranging from Cointelpro to [redacted, much more recently] doesn't make it so. I do not think that word means what they think it does — let alone what they say it does. This is just excessive fandom — disturbingly similar to belief that if the opponent wins he/she/they must have cheated.
• Issues with bullying, lashing out, and self-interest shading into the cognitive dissonance of limited-scope megalomania (with elements of "simple" narcissism and sociopathy blended in) often arise in retrospective legal proceedings regarding "war crimes." This is by no means saying that, for example, on available evidence a certain recently-fled dictator guy doesn't merit such scrutiny. The irony that, in the medium and longer term, formalized reconciliation really hasn't worked, just points at how hard the problem is — especially when applied to businesspeople, not government officials. When all of the other tools for dealing with misbehavior by the powerful are taken away, "the law" becomes a hammer… and all misbehavior starts to look like nails.
• At least they're not nails viewed in a mirror. Yet. What kind of holiday season would it be without an existential threat? (Not one I've ever experienced.) No more sugar chirality for you, guys. (Or proteins, or nucleic acids, or…)
• Those who lost the last American election are the most likely (not certain) to propose dragging us out of the eighteenth century and landowners' franchise. It does bother me that my vote for President this past election was worth about 82% of that of a resident of Montpelier, just in terms of population disparity between districts… and it gets worse when one factors in that I was "only" voting for one tenth of my state's "undivided whole" of electoral votes. (And the less said about Iowa and the "representativeness" of the caucuses, the better.) The real problem is that every electoral system has distortions built into it; comparison is a highwire balancing act, with very hungry litialligators below…

  That this is a natural consequence of "gatekeepers" is for another time; the US certainly isn't alone in having severe difficulties. The real problem is that our betters don't trust us not to elect demogogues. How's that worked out in the last century, guys? (There's a reason that "divide and conquer" leads almost inexorably to "plurality claiming a mandate"… and the math just isn't that hard. Well, it's hard to put into HTML.)

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1. Analogies to Maxwell's Demon, Szilard's seldom-challenged-never-refuted demonstration (three quarters of a century ago) that the Second Law problems with Maxwell's Demon apply not just to heat but to information and indeed all ordering, and of executives to demons are entirely intentional.
2. Hell, they're often not qualified to even consume in the field! So as to avoid a defamation action (if the individual is still alive), I am carefully not naming the c-suite executive of a major NYC commercial publisher — one that included a "literary fiction" imprint — who boasted in the bar at a convention a while back of never having read any literary fiction.
3. Bleistein v. Donaldson Litho. Co., 188 U.S. 239, 251–52 (1903) (citation omitted). I'd call this a safe and seasoned precedent, but of late the Court has been ignoring the imprecation to limit lawyerly egos to the law. Take your pick: basic biology, lab technique, nonscholarly 18th century linguistics applied to people whose progenitors had no preserved voice in that era…

Raising the DebtCaffeine Ceiling

I'll begin with the morning ritual: Coffee. Definitely not any brand or type advertised on American television — let alone the UK (foreshadowing seven years of fighting against demons while seriously undercaffeinated).

• Stealth branding efforts continue to be problematic, whether unopposed but later challenged or distinctive only to monolingual boors. But that's nowhere near as confusing as figuring out what conduct, or who, is actually regulated by copyright principles from afar.
• If there's an underlying theme to the preceding link, it's that being a special snowflake isn't good enough to evade generally-applicable, well-settled restrictions on overreaching bullying. Claiming that it's all the users' fault doesn't seem to be much more successful. Means used need to be consistent with ends desired, or one ends up subverting both — especially when the special snowflakes are the ones already in power, unable to tolerate any criticism whatsoever. It's neither "pro-democracy" nor "the rule of law" if what really matters is whether anyone who might object knows about it. (Yes, that's a hint for the incoming administration.)
• Throwing the bastards out is only the first step, of course. The Romanovs were bastards, but what followed was worse. Violent revolution followed by vengeance against those perceived/labelled as the former oppressors seldom makes it a decade without descending even farther — and especially so when religion is involved (just look two nations to the east… or at any of the neighbors to the southwest). (Yet another hint for the incoming administration.)
• That danger is perhaps more obvious with governments than with dominant business entities, whether in large or niche "markets." Indeed, "business as usual" can be even more repulsive in the niches, because blacklists are a lot more effective — and pervasive.

Caseless Link Sausages

Since I haven't finished what little holiday shopping I'll be engaging in, I'm not going to wrap these link sausages either.

• So the rich want to buy into nobility (semi$wall) despite the American prohibition on titles of nobility, do they? Well, that's certainly not the only benefit of an original position advantage. Nobel prizes appear to be directed that way, too. Not to mention the irony-free criticism of a "nepo baby" by another "nepo baby".
• That last note leads to a few musings on the meaning and strategy of President Biden's pardon of his son Hunter.

  First, let's clear something out of the way: So far as I can tell, President Biden did not criticize any action or decision of the judge(s), so the judicial faux outrage is unwarranted. What he instead was criticizing was misuse of prosecutorial discretion — and choosing to elevate these charges to criminal (instead of the ordinary assessment of civil penalties on both the tax and firearms charges) should raise eyebrows, because it certainly presents the appearance that a Drumpf appointee with a history of vindictiveness in his prior Drumpf appointment may have failed to consider the complete context. Anyone who tries to pretend that there's never any pressure on individual prosecution decisions coming from institutional loyalty concerns has never been there, or at least never had misgivings about a particular matter. Let alone any regrets.

  Second, consider the timeframe. This is both legally sophisticated and a slight error by President Biden and his advisors. What he has essentially done is cut off the ability of a new administration to continue prosecution on purportedly "new" charges that are similar to those already raised. It's not just that extending backward to 01 January 2014 includes the entire period during which Hunter Biden was on a Ukrainian board of directors; it's that it extends three years backward from 20 January 2017, slightly over three years — that is, the statute of limitations for federal offenses for all except RICO (four years), continuing conspiracies, and outright murder. In turn, that means that in order to get a subpoena, a newly-appointed special prosecutor is going to have to demonstrate probable cause that something over ten years old by the time Drumpf is in office (another, obscure evidentiary-value issue that would force a judge reviewing a warrant application to at least pause) remains not just relevant, but persuasive. It's a slight error because going back 11 years, instead of 10, would also have related to RICO charges (four years prior to the prior Drumpf Administration initiation — it's a bad argument, but one that can be made in camera with a straight face for political purposes). Of course, this analysis is coming from the outside, without any inside knowledge of what was actually being considered… but in light of some previous frustrations with statutes of limitations.

  Third, this is intimately connected to Drumpf's own past and future conduct regarding pardons. Past, in that he pardoned his brother-in-law (cousin-in-law?) and now proposes to appoint that convicted felon individual to an ambassadorship (for which he's manifestly unqualified, but that's a half-century tradition that crosses party boundaries, I'm afraid; at least it's only to France); how this differs from Biden pardoning his son will be a tale told by a fool, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Future, in that criticism of Biden for pardoning his son as a white-collar criminal and for technical regulatory violations that (so far as is known) are unconnected to any substantive offense will underly any conversation about prospective pardons for insurrection. One might suggest that the holier-than-thou of all politico-personality loyalties ponder hoisting by one's own petard, but that sort of goes off the rails once one says "ponder," doesn't it?

  And, frankly, this is a lot more verbiage and consideration than the topic deserves. Don't kid yourselves: Pardons have always been politically dubious, if only because they necessarily involve second-guessing specific decisions by the judicial branch, the legislative branch, or both — not to mention depend upon finding third-party advocates (especially visible/prominent/powerful ones) more than the underlying facts, however those facts have been determined.

• Unfortunately, this just leads into other contexts and considerations of prejudice in action. (n.b. These examples have been carefully selected to offend as many unthinking doctrinaire assumptions as I can conveniently stuff into a single sausage. OK, maybe that's an eyebrow-raising assertion after the preceding one, but a foolish consistency is for small minds — and this is surely about foolishness.)
• Or, I suppose, we could just ponder yet more inaccurate, inadequately considered assumptions about large-language generative Eliza. It's not "intelligence" if it doesn't enable actual, defensible (even if incorrect) reasoning by analogy — and the "teachers' assumptions" built in deserve a lot more consideration than they've gotten. It's not even particularly insightful, however convenient.

Grinch-Approved Link Sausages

These are just the basic sausages. There's plenty of garlic in their souls, but you'll have to bring your own sauerkraut and toadstools.

• If we had an effective national health assurance system, we wouldn't be talking about the CEO of the insurer with the highest rate of claim denial among major insurers (except maybe for the VA, but that's a different issue entirely) getting shot in an apparent targeted assassination — and then seeing teh internets explode with schadenfreude over an act of vigilante violence.

  The legitimate use of violence in pursuit of policy objectives is the exclusive province of the State. It can't be tolerated from private citizens, whether we're talking about a single targeted assassination or a much larger atrocity. Sure, States (and quasistate actors) make mistakes about it — like, say, the assholes on both all sides of the disputes in the Levant — but they're not unaccountable bullyionaires (well, not supposed to be). <SARCASM> Like the proposed cabinet for the incoming administration, some of whom clearly have no clue about how government officials are supposed to act.¹ Oh, wait, maybe that explains why so many bullyionaires want to be in the new cabinet where they can direct violence, or at least the power of the State, against their personal enemies. </SARCASM>

• I did mention unaccountable private citizens as a problem. Their power is especially problematic when it arises from accounting dodges in the first place, whether individuals or entire businesses.
• It's the holiday season so there's lots of dubious intellectual property news. The newly formalized reach of EU designs is highly technical and mostly concerns what we (over here) call "industrial design." But that doesn't — indeed, can't — make "Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй" on t-shirts protectable (for trademark purposes) on behalf of the Ukraine border guards; it's just not distinctive. Katy Perry had only a little bit more success in Australia.
• But that was better luck than the Kahlebros² have had: They decided not to petition the Supreme Court to overturn their abject loss in the Second Circuit. The IA's attitude is extremely common among techbros (and too common among other activists) — "the law already must be what we want it to be to advance our interests, regardless of what that does to anyone else." Admittedly, the law is often ossified, stuck in assumptions (not to mention precedents, and poorly-worded legislation and constitutional provisions) that are overtly out of date, and frequently ignore problems never imagined. The public statements by the IA, however, reflect an almost theological arrogance, an unwillingness to conceive of personal error, an utter disrespect for those whose interests are not completely aligned with those of the techbros — even when the techbros proclaim that they know what those interests are better than do those who have them. This is especially so when what the techbros demand is theirs as of right is totally unencumbered use of what the law treats as someone else's property (literal copies here, creation of derivative works for the egregiously misnamed "generative AI" that has almost zero chance of passing the Turing Test in the next decade, let alone now). The law can certainly do better than it does with science — but one must also remember that the applications and self-interest of techbros are not a congruent set with "science." Or "invariable right."

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1. Or, for that matter, what "treason" is in the first place; one thing that it's definitely not is "providing testimony on personal knowledge in support of a complaint properly filed in the right place," or "filing a complaint regarding conduct that appears to violate clearly-established law." But then, that individual has a track-record with his own whistleblowers, so we shouldn't be surprised.
2. What to call the advocates of conversion of printed books to electronic books without authority from either the publishers or the authors/successors, while the works are still in copyright, is itself an interesting question of deceptive labelling. Making it an even more interesting conundrum, none of the "groups" actually have unified interests in themselves. For example, the authors of mainstream novels have different interests and perspectives on how this conversion might matter to them than do, say, journalists employed by a periodical who knowingly signed an employment agreement containing a clear work-made-for-hire clause; and even within distinct segments, there is legitimate disagreement among members. And that's just the authors; the assumption that publishers' interests coincide with authors leaves me ROFLMAOing (because, well, I know too many of both). This is a problem, similar in nature to whether one wants to be called a "liberal" in today's political environment. So, because this group largely insists on insulting the interests of everyone else, the intelligence of those actually involved in creating original expression, and me rather personally, I'm going to be snide. Get over it.