Not on Safari

I can neither confirm nor deny that there's an elephant in the room, nor whether I've noticed (or fed?) any crocodiles near the waterhole.

• I long wondered if Motel 6 left the light on for you to keep cockroaches out of sight, but it looks like the new ownership forgot to leave the light on in its own boardroom. Don't get me started on Kars for Kids (carefully choosing an unmistakeable homonymative after the hyperformalist trademark frenzy that was possible only due to the 19th-century economic concepts underlying trademark law) — or the utterly-misnamed "legitimate theater." Rather distressingly, the entertainment industry is structured on a by-design bait-and-switch, exacerbated when it's hired out for side gigs by the advertising industry — so all of this is entirely predictable.
• Speaking of cockroaches running from the lights, it's not a new problem in NoVa.
• Don't ignore this important message from our sponsors: Leaving aside that QR codes are themselves built on a bait-and-switch system designed to make users not pay attention to what they're doing, the actual use of "you don't really need to know who the sponsor actually is" just feeds the egos of exactly the wrong segment of undesireables (I say that as a not-recovering hacker from the solder-it-yourself era). Just ignore the secondaries…
• Speaking of undesireables, it's all about whose desire is being suppressed, and how, and why. We'll just ignore how actual undesireables speak out; pondering the irony of reducing a complex argument to a t-shirt slogan worn by a less-well-known part of a less-regarded sport is too much for Monday morning, though — even in the abstract or through disfavored language.
• No elephants are being shot here or otherwise harmed in the production of this blawg entry. Not even rabid bull elephants rampaging around the waterhole damaging the entire ecosystem and not incidentally making their own future prospects even more bleak. Just legislators not fully and enthusiastically participating in theocracy. But they matter no more than lawyers defrauding everyone for decades to popular acclaim. Neither does that kind of lawyer's real clientbase, not even Over There.

No Generalissimos

I'm afraid the "song of the day" is not… approving of the day's scheduled events. I've been in military parades before; you, sirrah, are not fit to shine the shoes of a real generalissimo, like Pinochet, Videla, Franco, or even Ioannidis. Even all of those jerks actually served, for some value of that, instead of misappropriating a military in which they had evaded service for their own highly theatrical gratification (not to mention damage to the capital's roads and other infrastructure).

I would go farther than merely "No Kings" (or "No Generalissimos"): Hereditary rule — whether by formally holding office like a Bush, or a Daley, or a Kennedy, or a Saltonstall, or a Roosevelt (a relative of whom laid essential groundwork that made Thursday's nightmare almost inevitable in kind, if not in detail) — is fundamentally inconsistent with, and usually directly opposed to, supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But this is not your father's totalitarianism… is it?

We're a nation of immigrants. That the influx of immigrants of today doesn't look or speak like the immigrants of your parents' time, or their parents' time, or some grandcestor's time, only means that the world has evolved in its predilictions to seek opportunities Over Here. Curiously, nobody seems to be asking Dr Nygren about the flood — the invasion — of immigrants on these shores. Oh, wait, we're not supposed to acknowledge the hypocrisy of largely white, largely Northwest European, almost entirely christian "forefathers" in public; if we did, we'd end up with a soul of/on ICE. The only US Army unit that really, truly belongs in this military parade is the 442d Regimental Combat Team, perhaps with a flyover by the 332d Fighter Group. Oh, wait, that's probably far too old school…

So tell me, Comrade: Who do you suspect will be missing from the reviewing stand next year?

The City Is for Burning

Once every generation:

1933 — Griffith Park
1965 — Watts
1992 — Rodney King
2025 — January wildfires… and now this

What that says about the arsonist in chief and fomenting insurrection — again — is not supposed to be a necessary part of the conversation in a true democracy. Is it? Maybe a well-known former resident of an internment camp already understands the current situation all too well.

• How about something cheerier, like music? (That look on your face says "You've got to be kidding me.") How about some real patriotism from pop stars, who did not dodge the draft? Sometimes I do have upbeat stories on the music segment of the entertainment industry! But you don't actually come here for the cheeriness, so I'll return to normal grouchiness pondering Corruption at the Top: The Next Generation, all the while speculating about how bad things must really be if that source is criticizing management. Nor is it really any better across the Pond.
• Well, how about the rising gaming industry? Surely there's some extravagent claim to be made that will entertain us! Just consider that he probably never would have been able to work on games like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, or The Winter's Tale (that last with its definitely-made-for-gaming "Exit — pursued by a bear"), because he was 40 or older and — notwithstanding the Age Discrimination in Employment Act — old fogeys of 40 and up have real trouble getting interviews (let alone actual jobs) in gaming. Any grey hairs had better be from a bottle…
• At least the House of Lords is showing some understanding of the natural-person-creator's needs and perspective on "exceptions" for AI use of copyrighted material. Not at all by coincidence, the charge is being led in the House of Lords by an actual, active, natural-person creator — something we haven't had in Congress for quite some time. Now if we'll just get everyone, or even anyone who actually has a voice in the matter, to understand and accept that "machine learning" on a Von Neumann-architecture computer doesn't resemble "human learning" except by coincidence, we could have a real conversation. Which, in the current environment, would turn into a war on social media rather rapidly.

The Moon in June

…being what I'd like to show current-Administration buffoons. They wouldn't look, though — that sounds too much like science. Oh, you thought I meant the other "moon"?

• About a month back, the Chicago Tribune demonstrated its conscious ignorance of history. It probably wasn't the reporter, who actually works for AP. There's actually only one word — ok, one acronym — that you really need to know to understand air-traffic control problems in the US: PATCO. The same complaints and problems from the 1970s have resurfaced now — overstressed controllers (and not nearly enough of them), unreliable and out-of-date equipment and communications, purported military training exercises planned without regard to, well, reality that impair traffic control (perhaps inevitable when groundpounders fly, especially off-base; a little interservice rivalry never hurt anyone, right?), a management attitude that the lowly employees don' know nuthin'…
• How 'bout a little more of that interservice rivalry? Perhaps pointed at this Administration's pretty-much-universal mishandling of military personnel, or maybe at just SecDef? I'd refer those undereducated blithering idiots to historical studies of which I'm aware bearing directly on "the meaning of 'warfighting' in conflicts without rigidly-defined front lines," but (a) that would mean they'd have to actually read them and (b) letting them handle that material would just create more opportunities for mishandling of classified information (notwithstanding that some of that material is at minimum overclassified). That last parenthetical reflects reinforcement of "civilian" ignorance and, thus, the classification itself causes grave damage to national security that can be specifically identified, but that's for another time… and might well itself be classified.

  Perhaps part of the problem is that those "warfighters" — like SecDef wants to portray himself — don't have a clue about what it takes to fight a war above company/single-vessel/single-flight level. Or to train for it, get to the battlefield, sustain operations for longer than a couple of gaming sessions, plan for all of the above, train for all of the above… The American Way of War is now, and has been since the late 19th century, to pin the opponent in place, degrade the opponent's logistics while building up friendly in-theater forces, and then overcome our own generally below-average top leadership with well-trained and well-motivated working-class cannon fodder deployed forces. It hasn't ever been about being a superior first-person-shooter player… especially considering that in the real world, you don't get a new life by restarting the game.

• Let's ponder something a little easier than "effective civilian control of the military by means other than Stalinist purges leading to Russian Roulette." Perhaps we could just ponder what constitutes antisemitism, or if we can't agree on that appropriate responses thereto. That latter failyuah to communicate reflects a more-fundamental failure: Not understanding that "Never Again!" means everyone; it means always. Objecting to what's going on in Gaza need not be "antisemitic" — maybe it's just "antiatrocity." (We just don't need to get into the technicalities — legal, sociopolitical, linguistic, propagandistic — among "genocide," "genecidal acts," "unlawful selection of targets for military force," or any of the other buzzwords; "atrocity" will do just fine, focusing on the act more than the rationale.) That some who are objecting to what's happening in Gaza really are, or at least are really expressing in the mode of, the antisemitic, doesn't mean everyone who objects is; "one," "some," even "most" is not all… and making that error is the very foundation of European antisemitism.
• It was bad enough when McCarthy et al. went after "the arts" with their witchhunts seeking to identify any of the fifty-seven card carrying communists in the Department of Defense. Now they're going after those who would respond (within the decade) to Sputnik (an undoubted Commie achievement!). Of course, this latter is perhaps inevitable when virtually no member of this Administration has even been in a laboratory in decades (and even that was probably a freshman-level survey course). Even history professors right across the river from disreputable, uncooperative private colleges like Hahvahd understand that. That said, one must wonder if there's a history of rejections from (various parts of) Hahvahd somehow at issue…
• Next it'll be the humanities faculties. Then, probably at "less prestigious" institutions that don't study "popular" fiction on the grounds that if the great unwashed like it, it must be easy and therefore unworthy, we'll see many of the mistakes in this screed — from which I dissent, and align myself with Voltaire (and, ultimately, Tolkein — however much I disagree with some aspects) and against John Crowe Ransom. The content revealed by "close reading" of the text while ignoring its context is somewhere between merely ignorant and actively misleading.

Where Stolen Roses Grow

Fortunately, this Memorial Day I'm not annoyed by the vegetarian crawling out of the marinade; fish don't crawl, because they'd just flop around on the kitchen floor. Unfortunately, that's given me some extra time, as a veteran of a time of increasing internal divisions and dishonesty about their sources, to fear somewhat for the Union.

It's worth remembering that in the aftermath of the nearly-ultimate Othering¹ that's most prominent in US history — and, perhaps inevitably, descended into partisanship and excuses and greed, and has been thoroughly twisted since to the point that almosts no conversation can take place without self-contradiction — Memorial Day originated to celebrate deaths among Union soldiers, whether POWs or in the field (without yet acknowledging Andersonville for, well, Reasons). The difficulty at this time is a slight — ever so slight, given yet more inconvenient precedents — target shift both backward to religion and sideways to place of birth (notwithstanding that statue in the harbor and the nearby island). No, that doesn't make it "better."

And for all that, the US is still at least somewhat better than just about everywhere else (even Canada; just consider the word "Francophone" for a moment); that we even have an argument about "sanctuary cities" demonstrates that we're not all nutcases. Which, frankly, should embarrass and shame everyone. I don't think the US is to the point of truly working toward a "more perfect Union" quite yet, but at least in our critical document (and lawful object of allegiance) we admitted that we had work to do. Still to do.

Conscious acceptance of that would be the real memorial, whether to those Union soldiers, or all American military casualties, or more generally those who fought for it despite — not because of — "assimilation" and cramped visions of "America First".

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1. The Ultimate being actual extermination, or at least attempted actual extermination, with obvious historical exemplars (and that's just Europe, just rationalized-in-the-moment by religion). Whether you believe the trailer or the prologue to the first episode, Murderbot is right: Humans are assholes/idiots.

Don't Have to Live Like a Refugee

Warning: Some contents satirical. The humor- and/or intellectually-impaired are severely cautioned.

• Professor Tushnet describes a consumer-deception case involving claims that A and B were separate entities when they were in fact the same. This is disturbingly parallel to this morning's 9–0 Supreme Court decision (3 concurring opinions) regarding potential liability for wire fraud by deceptive identification of a "separate" minority-owned "subcontractor".
• I ran into some white refugees from South Africa this afternoon. They appeared fairly comfortable to me, although their name doesn't sound very "white." However, when I asked for any documentation concerning a risk of genocide, I got no response.
• At least they were refugees. This… individual from South Africa was not a refugee so much as a draft-dodger. That makes him a good fit for this Administration, with its occasional focus on the military accomplishments of others. At least it wasn't an attempt to rename Memorial Day, which would be a bit too much regarding a holiday originally about Union soldiers. (I tried to link to the VA's explanation, but as of this afternoon it's returning a 404 error…)
• When a newspaper long known for its hostility to "creatives" (notwithstanding the "new ownership") prints a page of "book recommendations" from one of its "content partners" filled with AI hallucinations, things are getting just a little bit too weird — and disturbing. It's not so much the "we were fooled by an AI hallucination" as "we did no review or factchecking whatsoever on something from a 'content partner' — nobody tears off and prints from a teletype any more, but we tried!" Then, of course, they blamed their own failure to follow journalistic standards on someone else. I guess I'll need to go elsewhere trying to find literary immortality, or even prestige — let alone a reading list likely to be available through the public library (which only actually acquires and circulates real books).
• Note to executives at Universal Music Group: It's not a good-faith effort to "resolve" a dispute or disagreement when you reject a claim that arose from your overt and intentional deception and violations of law. Those works couldn't have been "works made for hire"… unless they were by (a) employees within the scope of their duties, in which case I'd like to see the W2s you issued to them at the time, or (b) a freelancer's specifically commissioned work falling into one of nine categories, none of which can be mangled to include "phonorecordings" either at the time of the creation or now. Since it was after 01 Jan 1978, just declaring "work made for hire" in the contract was insufficient (and the transferee/recorded music industry's near half-century of refusing to acknowledge that 1909 Act precedents were statutorily overruled is not, I'm afraid, an AI hallucination).
• Sympathy to President Biden regarding his recent medical diagnosis… and a kick in the crotch for those attempting to turn it into continued criticism of Vice-President Harris and others for not "disclosing" this or any other "health challenge." WTAF? If they had, y'all would have screamed about violating Biden's medical privacy. We still wouldn't have had younger candidates in presumably better health… oh, wait, he's not exactly younger himself, is he?

  Everybody is entitled to a voice in democracy. Not everybody is entitled to be on the ballot. If your birth year appears in the "presently eligible to draw Social Security benefits" table (like mine does!), get off the ballot. Otherwise, events like this are inevitably accelerated, or at least more prevalent.

Just Eat It

I think I've finally gotten the sausage grinder under (at least temporary) control. The last four months have been almost non-stop output, even without any real inputs.

• So, the Orange Menace thinks that WalMart should just "eat" price increases caused by his tariffs. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose: If costs increase over time at his "luxury condominium and apartment complexes," perhaps Trump Tower (Chicago) rents should snap back to their 2007 levels (from what I've been able to determine, about half the current rate). Oh, that's not what he meant? He meant that just the price rises due to tariffs he personally and imperially imposed should be eaten? (We'll just ignore how much the steel to build that luxury complex came from, or had price influenced by, import tariffs on steel.) Oh, wait, he's a special snowflake; this is about appropriate behavior for the little people, not for Very Important Real Estate Speculators (With Substantial Histories of Bankruptcy and Tax-Loss Carry-Forwards, resulting in at least a decade of not paying any federal income tax despite Being Yuuuuuuuugely Rich)…

  No kids in Japan were starved in the production of this link sausage. I cannot say the same, however, for the kids of those holding "good manufacturing jobs" in Japan once the tariffs hit — that would be trickle-down economics, wouldn't it?

• Speaking of "the little people," consider early-career (and popularity-passed-them-by-with-no-other-skills-developed) artists. Or, as is all too apparent, don't; the objective of "ensuring" that there are more "good manufacturing jobs" for Real Americans has much more to do with ensuring that those Real Americans have not the resources, time, energy, or education to object… or retrain for new "good manufacturing jobs" fifteen years or so in the future, when the products and processes of their current jobs will no longer result in above-market returns for passive investors.
• The NEA, however, is just a tiny piece of artists' property interests. Like in their good government jobs… oh, wait, she's not an artist, never mind; I therefore shouldn't be considering the interests of a black woman doing an impossible job, well out of public awareness… It's almost like there's a hidden agenda involved, such as replacing the de facto Zeroth Restatement of Copyright Law (immensely flawed as it is, both in detail and in its underlying assumptions that favor transferees over natural-person creators and reject "creative process" as at all relevant) with one more favorable to techbros.
• But perhaps it's time for a sweeter, apple-flavored sausage (although nobody really wants to see how that one was made). Perhaps Mr Cook should just eat it… like he didn't do almost exactly a decade ago (just in case you're wondering, cert. denied).

Vox Populi, Vox DEI

…until it appears to impinge upon someone's sense of entitlement. Then, it's NIMBY Time.

The ahistoricity of the anti-DEI movement is rather amusing to those of us with a really, really sick sense of humor. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a substantial portion of this nation's colonial history was as a destination for those who were disadvantaged by the lack of DEI in the Old Country (not just Europe, either). If one plots the regions of origin — especially England — of major immigration in the New World against religious preferences in those regions, things begin to get rather interesting. Consider, for a moment, the virtual lionization of the Puritan immigrants to what we now call New England… separately from witchcraft trials, which are usually treated in courses and books on American History as slightly quaint exceptions to the all-around goodness of the Protestant Work Ethic, and then ignored all the way through Executive Order 9066, after which the post hoc rationalizations shifted to "we've learned and wouldn't do that ever again." That last is rather a forlorn hope, I'm afraid.

The real problem with the anti-DEI movement is apparent in something all too visible when those proponents appear as talking heads: Irrational fear that DEI programs will adversely impact those very proponents by increasing competition for perceivedly-limited benefits to which they are entitled by virtue of their ancestry.¹ In this, it is parallel to NIMBYism ("Yes, we're all in favor of shelters affording treatment to drug addiction among the homeless, but not in my neighborhood"). The irony is that the most virulent NIMBYism I've directly observed is in the purportedly "liberal and therefore unAmerican" parts of Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle with the highest proportions of real-property-passed-down-through-inheritance.

Consider, too, that there's a mathematical presumption underlying the anti-DEI movement. That presumption is best illustrated not through cake-cutting but through slicing pies of varying sizes. The anti-DEI movement presumes that the proportionate share of slices must remain constant. Of course, this is inconsistent with American perceptions (especially, but not only, Manifest Destiny) because to be true, the overall size of the pie must either remain constant — therefore resulting in a measurable diminution in the amount of pie provided to those already sitting around the table — or, slightly less pessimistically, grow at a slower rate than the increase in the number of diners. One representation of the argument looks something like this:

{quantity of each slice n=6}

≟

{quantity of each slice for n>6 after growth of the pie by proportion p}

Whether the pie is "economic" or "job opportunities" or whatever, if the pie grows by 40% (p) and the number of diners grows by 33% (n), each diner gets more pie. In a Rawls-compliant universe, the greater quantity of pie on each plate (or, at least, not-diminished quantity of pie on each plate) is a satisfactory outcome… except against greed and in light of the endowment effect as applied to an entitlement to the share of the pie, rather than the quantity of pie on the plate.²

Even inside this illustration, there are several different assumptions that bear very little scrutiny, especially when considering a non-Rawls-compliant universe:

• That a "just society" requires, in at least a general sense, "fairness"
• That past performance does indeed predict future performance, meaning that we can readily predict both n and the overall size of the pie
• That entitlement to "scarce" outcomes/opportunities is valid (and sound)

And we'll just leave aside for the moment that the very worst sin that can be visited upon sons (to the third or fourth generation³) is "unfortunate/nonmajoritarian birth circumstances," ranging from economic class to race to place. Not for too long, though.

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1. Of course there are exceptions — but they are almost always exceptions traceable to a narrower view, and often a nonconsensus view, of not what the entitlements are but of to whom the entitlements must benefit to be valid. There's usually one "shock factor" in these exceptions that, on closer examination, operates as a distraction from other alignments.
2. I am carefully ignoring later health effects of weight gain from consuming too much pie at a sitting — but only because this metaphor is already somewhat overextended. This is about letting the entitled eat pie…
3. Compare, e.g., Deuteronomy 5:9 with Deuteronomy 24:16 in whatever translation you prefer. Of course I'm being subversive with those citations — and their fundamental conflict. That, however, is for some future discussion of the parts of the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37) seldom acknowledged — such as that the entire parable makes sense if, and only if, one presumes that stereotypical views of "Samaritans," priests, and "Levites" (not to mention Jews) have been validated by consensus — are both factually correct and justified.

Their Lips Were Moving

Let's just skip the medical TMI and get right to the platter.

• If you can take your attention off of the multiline train wreck in DC, you might want to sympathize a bit (or perhaps enjoy some schadenfreude) with the poor, poor executives at Apple. Smacked around by the European Commission and by a respected US District Judge in the same month for antitrust… issues. It's not like they weren't warned about turning the Apple IIe (we'll just elide the Apple III as if it never happened) from an open system to a walled garden with the Mac, although that's nearly half a century ago. More to the point, it's not like they weren't warned about executives-as-witnesses whose greatest economy was with the truth about a decade ago — also regarding antitrust.
• Apple's colleague down the street isn't doing much better. Not only was it also fined by the European Commission (first link in the preceding sausage), but it disrespects all IP that it doesn't own. This is a far-from-unique issue among IP transferees, but it's particularly annoying coming from a company that traffics in personally identifiable data. It's also quite interesting that different divisions, and different product lines, of the same corporation have different, but overlapping, variants on IP rights that end up pointing at the same underlying foundation: Only our IP has value.
• Speaking of transferees taking all the seats at the table (and disrespect of a major actor for everyone else's IP), the ongoing lawsuit by Big Phonogram against the Internet Archive continues to stumble along, perhaps toward an endpoint. Or perhaps not; in any event, this is one bit of IP litigation that I wish both sides would lose — Silicon Valley learned everything it knows about "only my IP rights deserve respect" from Nashville.
• Returning to European concerns, there's an interesting case on the minutiae of trademark law brewing that has important implications for certain disreputable publishing practices. As this blawg's only feline friend the IPKat asks, "Is it deceptive to use a designer’s name in a trade mark if the designer is no longer with the company?" If the CJEU says "yes," or even "maybe," that would have profound implications for works written by other than the identified author. That's not to say the "ghostwriting is to be forbidden" — just that if it's a deceptive act to attribute a design via mark to someone no longer with the company, attributing a book to someone who didn't write it while hiding the identity of who did is also a deceptive act. Hmmmmm, can I think of a political figure implicated in this sort of thing?
• Then there's… this long-running fiasco. Bluntly, Ms Palin, you clearly have little idea of what "incitement" means — and implies.

That's enough for now. I'll try to emerge from the fallout shelter a little more often than I have this month.

After-Bedtime Sausage Platter

I've had several false starts on the blawg this month (not to mention shepherding tax returns through — Beware the Ides of April, even though that's technically the 14th). I've started on several pieces only to have somebody in DC up past his bedtime make things worse.

• Every generation has some variation on complaints that "young people don't read [the right kind of] books, leading to the collapse of civilization." Here's another example, that I'm afraid evades two aspects of "reading" by teens.

  First, and perhaps most obvious, the definition of "book" (and "[right kind of] book") is more than merely "problematic" — note that every single example cited concerns "dead-tree books." I'm old enough to remember Respectable Adults sneering at mass-market paperbacks, even when they were A Clockwork Orange and 1984 and The Dispossessed and, perhaps most to the point, Fahrenheit 451… mostly with covers conceived and executed by people who were not the target audience, let alone teens themselves. It wasn't just judging the books by their covers, but by their very format — and that continues with e-books, especially when those e-books are being read on something other than a dedicated e-book device. (If you spot me on the bus or the train staring at my phone, I'm not doomscrolling — I'm reading We or some other book that the self-appointed Guardians of Culture consider suspect at best.)

  Second, there's a glare of condescension in there — the unstated assumption that "what is worthwhile in Western Civilization exists at 'book length' (usually novels and textbooks) only." A voracious reader does need to read some at book length… but they could do that by reading the archives of this blawg from front to back. More, a voracious informed reader is going to read in the lengths established by the fields of interest/study. As an obvious example, law is far, far more oriented toward individual opinions (whether common law, civil law, sharia, whatever) and journal articles. Even moreso in the sciences, both as to "generalities" and "breaking topics." There's no need to point out the problem of long, descriptive passages revealing that the author was paid by the word and not the concept, especially with fiction: The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas has a great deal more to say about "virtue" than, say, The Faerie Queen. In short, the purpose of reading matters; and it especially matters to teens who have largely been stuck with badly-written, often ill-conceived textbooks as the exemplars of "book length."

• Young people would probably run for office more frequently if the gatekeepers would (a) do a better job of gatekeeping, (b) figure out that elected office has an expiration date, and (c) knock off the "pay your dues, and only in the way that past generations have" crap. Then we end up with wide-eyed credulous crap like this piece that almost entirely misses the point: Party gatekeepers gave us both candidates for President last year, giving us a choice between the lesser of "who cares?" Unfortunately, it's actually difficult to choose rationally between bad alternatives — and people do a remarkably poor job protecting their own interests when all choices offered are against those interests.

  In short, my generation (and the prior generation) needs to shut up and get off the ballot. That's different from not listening to the old farts at all (seeing as how my generation paid the price in Vietnam, we know a little bit — perhaps all too viscerally — about conflicts serving shadowy purposes either forgotten or never revealed). The only dominoes we should be actually making decisions about are the double-nine sets in the rec room, and definitely not for others.

• From the Department of Everything Old Is New Again, a new generation has created its own Gilded Age via multinational "tech companies" that cut corners on the tax bill (translation note: the UK phrase "tax avoidance" doesn't mean the same thing as the American phrase "tax avoidance" — it's much more condemnatory, often reaching what would be called "tax evasion" Over Here). Which, I suppose, beats outright theft, although anyone who actually knows enough sophomore-year computer programming, and how the von Neumann-compliant processors of today work, should have figured out long ago that "generative AI" necessarily gets its input by making copies — precisely what copyright law is concerned with. This is not to say that copyright law couldn't benefit from some considerable rethinking and revision; it is to say that imagining that copyright law has already changed to be exactly what generative-system proponents think it should be (just ignore the massive conflicts of interest) rather resembles a different kind of thinking one's way to success.

The Ministry of Silly Talks

Just to be excrutiatingly clear, this is not an April Fool's Day platter. I'm afraid that with the wackiness of both "the news" and "IP" of late, this disclaimer is all too necessary.

• Since last posting's screed, things have only gotten worse regarding what will no doubt be remembered — or, as personal (conflicts of) interests demand, excused, willfully ignored, and deflected — as Signalgate. Not to mention demonstrate the value of free publicity when someone misuses a product.

  For those who think this was a nothingburger, consider what the intelligence community thinks (or at least those who talk about it¹ say). According to the governing regulation and executive order,

  Information may be considered for classification only if its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security and it concerns one of the categories specified in section 1.4 of Reference (d):

  (1) Military plans, weapon systems, or operations

  Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information (29 Dec 2009) at ¶ 1(b) (emphasis added). Exact time and location of an employment of aerial weapon systems sure sounds like "operations" to this veteran… and that's probably the least egregious aspect of this fiasco.²

• One area that's not getting the attention it deserves, though, is Elizagate: The unlicensed, unauthorized use of willfully pirated text as "training material" for large-language-model-based systems. (Not that I'd know anything about this sort of thing.) Digging a little deeper, one discovers a rather disturbing self-contradiction in the "training model": It depends on treating all text as informationally equal; this is rather remarkable, given which of the publishing industries is the most profitable by virtually any measurement. The irony that the very best case for denigrating the expression per se in favor of the facts it expresses as fair use is precisely that sort of material³ is a bit much to tolerate in this environment.
• But that's less offensive, and certainly less important, than "divisive narratives" in museums. One must wonder if this museum on the Mall received the same sort of directive, especially given recent "immigration enforcement" actions. Oh, wait, no need to wonder at all, when the decision can be inferred as soon as one identifies the "judge".⁴
• That the Dear Leader has a family member who might be asked one of the interrogator's questions from the occasional "song of the day" is probably waaaaaaaaaaaaay too pointed an objection. Fortunately, I need not worry; too bad I know many who should/do. (Knowing one would be enough to rather ruin the day.)

 
 

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1. Those who bloviate about the details of "pending intelligence matters" almost never actually know those details; those who do know the details almost never bloviate.
2. Of course, if these idiots hadn't been trying to live up down to the dubious wisdom of applying business-metric analysis to national security, they would have had a fully trained executive officer (in the USAF sense; one who was already cleared for, and probably involved in, the planning) set up any meeting, whether in person or virtual. A competent executive officer would have directly reconfirmed the identities of all individuals in the group, and warned the authorized attendees not to add anyone else. But this group was — variably for each individual — too stupid, too overconfident, and/or too sociopathically narcissistic to even care. But that would have been inefficient…
3. <SARCASM> Far be it for me to point out that most of the source databases sucked in to LibG3n et al. disproportionately deemphasize these materials in favor of current commentary and especially works of fiction that directly impact the author's total earnings. Or that, ironically, when those repositories receive takedown demands, they'll disproportionately honor the ones from generally-controlled-circulation publishers of factual material (I have a couple decades' worth of data to support this — by no means all self-generated), and will take no steps to prevent prompt reposting of the removed material. </SARCASM>
4. Calling these individuals "judges" denigrates actual judges. They perform an important function, and at least a substantial proportion are even-handed and in good faith despite the biases built into the system; but they're not "judges," if only because the rules of evidence don't apply.

The 'net Has Ears

Yesterday's big story — that the Secretary of Defense included the editor of The Atlantic in a Signal-based group chat discussing forthcoming plans for strikes against Houthi "rebels" in Yemen — is, in technical terms, really, really bad. But even the obvious critics are missing a few critical side issues. In no particular order:

• Why did senior defense officials have the direct contact information — required with Signal¹ — for the editor of a relatively unfriendly general-circulation periodical in the first place?
• Were any (let alone all) of the devices being used Tempest–certified, let alone properly red/black segregated or at the proper level?²
• We know that at least one participant in that group chat was not in an appropriate location (a SCIF) at all times that the chat was occurring; one wonders if any of them were at any time.
• The contrast with the vindictiveness of the Dear Leader's punishment of a major law firm (that at least has "attorney-client privilege" to consider) by, without any COMSEC rationale, withdrawing all security clearances for that firm doesn't look good, either.
• Then there's the contrast with the Dear Leader's prior mishandling of classified information (in all probability, less sensitive than actual impending operational plans) demonstrating a callous disregard for classification.³ I won't gild this particular lily by mentioning other, verified incidents — especially since there might be a listening device in the vase.

  Or maybe there's not a contrast at all. Maybe the distinction is much more narcissistic and sociopathic than a focus on the information; maybe the distinction is "what my guys do is always right or at least excusable, and what our opponents do is always wrong and never excusable." Of course, that doesn't hold up well when considering that the Secretary of Defense had at least some clearance for, and experience with, classified information — as a line officer, he necessarily held at least a Secret clearance.

• Perhaps most disturbingly, one must wonder why a "group chat" involving operational planning was considered appropriate at all. The military maintains extensive facilities — like briefing rooms inside Faraday cages — for face-to-face meetings; it also has lots of communication equipment dedicated to classified information and communication. <SARCASM> Apparently, the lives of those involved in the operation, and the operation itself, weren't important enough to justify missing a tee time or whatever else these dorks were doing. </SARCASM>

Frankly, the implications of each these side issues are much worse than the potential grave harm to national security⁴ of having the discussion in the first place. But I suppose it could have been worse — it could have been Telegram instead of Signal.

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1. Disclosure: I use Signal extensively, as it's reasonably secure for nonclassified-but-still-confidential communications and relatively touchtypist-friendly. Nonetheless, there are some things that are nonclassified-but-still-confidential that don't go into Signal's systems.
2. We'll carefully refrain from pondering that none of a market-leader's devices ever can be Tempest–certified…
3. We'll carefully neglect that, in my own experience, about 70% of all materials marked classified are either overclassified as to level or don't justify treatment as "classified" at all. All near-term-execution operational plans involving live munitions are in the other 30%.
4. See, e.g., this blawg's prior summary, and in particular the still-in-effect executive order regarding handling of material marked as classified.