Misanthropic (7.5)

Before diving in to any of the details regarding the actual meaning of "final approval" of the Settlement on 20 July, it's fairly important to revisit a couple of context items.

First, and perhaps most important, one must remember that any settlement is a least-worst-outcome compromise. By definition, a difficult-to-value harm has already occurred, and reducing that to certainty — a number of dollars, a clear promise to do/not do something in the future, compensating all of the professionals who facilitated reaching the settlement — is by its very nature an ephemeral agreement that outsiders can find fault with. The very existence of statutory damages in copyright actions (presuming a number of prerequisites have been met) represents recognition that a hypothetical infringer's accounting might not be sufficiently clear to determine "lost profits," let alone any other aspect of "valuing" a particular copyright infringement claim in the moment. Now multiply, or even exponentiate, that by multiple parties, let alone class actions, and one can reach a pretty clear conclusion: No matter what or how a copyright-infringement claim is resolved, via settlement all the way through trial, outsiders can always criticize it as either inadequate or excessive (sometimes both simultaneously!), and even the parties will remain dissatisfied. If there's one aspect of conflict resolution to which the aphorism "It's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission" does not apply, it's "control of individual expression."¹ "Because it would be kewl" doesn't transfer well when an author's mortgage payment is on the line… or, more to the point, the author's ability to pay a professional or agent to review a prospective authorized use of their material in advance of making that blockbuster.

Second, and somewhat less abstractly, one needs to remember that just as the map is not the territory, a settlement — and especially a class-action settlement — does not define the interests of the parties at the outset. Instead, those interests relate to what is recognized and explicated by the parties. In this context, consider whose interests actually control (and that is a relatively simple example, because that author didn't work with a lot of coauthors), and it's incredibly easy to imagine that changing even between the infringement and the expiration of the statute of limitations. Authors are mortal, too… and their heirs and executors usually ill-qualified to judge or serve the interests of either the author or the ouevre. The interests of the individual authors — and other copyright holders — are at most an intersection, let alone a union or congruence, even before considering temporal-change issues. This should, but never does, mean that one should not map "interests served by a class settlement" onto "interests of an individual copyright holder… or infringer," let alone onto "Progress of… useful Arts" related to a specific instance of infringement of a specific work.²

Third, and last for the moment, any judicial remedy reflects the compromise of not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good (or good enough, or satisfactory, or less-bad-than-the-alternatives) when it applies to organizational conduct. The Bartz v. Anthropic matter makes it even murkier because there are multiple organizations, both formal and de facto, on both sides of the v.… including objectively "bad actors" on both sides. Consider, for the moment, a hypothetical supervisor (if that's not an overstatement of power/influence/responsibility) at Anthropic whose only role was to recommend against using this convenient database of material as a training corpus, but who was ignored/overruled, and how that supervisor's reality interacts with this settlement.³ What is having "Anthropic" on one's work history with a job title indicating this going to do in five years when applying for a job at Disney?

Put together, the real point here is "don't overgeneralize" — a generalization that is not itself reflexively too broad.

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1. Techbros generally haven't figured this out yet, because they conflate "identical means of storage and manipulation of information" with "the means of storage and manipulation of information determines the nature of the information." Those who have figured it out warp and/or deny it due to lack of relevant context and conflicts of interest. Consider, for example, the "context" that would be applied by someone whose only experience is abstract manipulation of a large dataset (Newtonian mechanics) to both the expression "That which we call a rose | By any other name would smell as sweet" and its connotations in context and generally (quantum mechanics regarding a single molecule, let alone its constituent parts… or presence and function in a cellular organelle).

   More to the point, as a group techbros have a semiinstitutionalized tendency to overgeneralization, epitomized by shrieking of "Information wants to be free!" at communication by metaphor merely because the literal bounds of the metaphor can be recorded… and imputing motivation and conduct of some prominent bad-actor owners of copyright interests to all of copyright. CP Snow was far too optimistic when he divided knowledge-communities only binarially — there's a lot of fuzziness, and it comes from more than two sources.

2. Put another way, the interests of whoever-owns-Simon-&-Schuster-today are not the same as those who wrote Star Trek™ novels, and contributed to Star Trek™ collections and nonfictional works, that appear in the data set of the Bartz matter. And there are more than a few.
3. As foreshadowing of an issue that I will discuss down the road — I'm not even going to identify the potential conflict because that would give it away and activate the conflict — consider the publisher's claim in the Bartz matter based on a contractual agreement where the relevant contractual clause was itself unlawful, however customary and however "agreed to" by the actual author(s). Consider this the creepy music playing just before the teenagers agree to spend a night in the old haunted house down the road, notwithstanding their later choices (and that's an unduly optimistic view concerning authors!). Foreshadowing: Your mark of quality literature.

Hawley Smoot!

There's only one Canadian product that merits a punitive tariff: Wildfire smoke. But then, I'd say the same thing about coal-fired electrical generators, the Tacoma Aroma, and other negative externalities with unclear cost factors. Whether that should be applied directly to real-estate developers is… complicated.

• Speaking of negative externalities, we just had a six-weeks-long event full of them: The Men's World Cup. (And for anyone who says "men is the default, we have to separately designate women as the inherently less-athletic product," I suggest competing with Abby Wambach for a header in the penalty area.) Whether considering the perfidy of agents or of dubious fanbases — not to mention dubious individual fans with little understanding of the game (especially when their efforts are utterly meaningless) — this quadrennial event always ends up fighting mythology. In two years in/around Los Angeles, it'll be same process/different flavor…
• I've not seen Nolan's The Odyssey, if only because it's not showing in an appropriate venue: My living room. I've beaten the dead horse of miserable cinema experiences well past the glue bottle, so I'll leave that there and just point out that for those of us who wear thick glasses, 70mm widescreen and IMAX are actually less immersive than our TVs. The more-amusing side battle is Mu5k's "promise" to create a "historically-accurate proprietary-LLM-engine-generated version of his own"; one wonders whether it will include the rampant disease, festering post-battle wounds, and… well… adult content. Perhaps more to the point, one wonders if Grok can/will refrain from the Lara Crofting of the female characters, especially Helen and Athena but also Arete, Calypso, Cassandra, Circe, Eurycleia, Melantho, Nausicaa (not this one), and last alphabetically but not in importance Penelope. A "historically accurate" adaptation of Homer — one, the other, together — will have to be toned down to get a "hard R" rating, and that would put it out of reach of the adolescent boys forming so much of Mu5k's fanbase (at least until it comes out on a streaming platform with lots of ads for worthless-at-best crap).
• Meanwhile, Major Major Major has been busy "suggesting" that "older" military personnel have low testosterone (projecting much?), which rather begs the question of what qualities are normally appropriate in "older" military members — that is, more senior, whether enlisted or commissioned. And frankly, I'd much rather any military surgeon treating me after an honorable wound in battle didn't have any steroid-induced shakiness in fine motor control.

  On the Malibar Front (or at least nearer to it than headlines make it seem), journalists are beginning to recognize that among Persian rulers, it's not turtles but monsters all the way down, back to not later than the Sasanids. But then, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia…

• I've been one of the literati since I was writing my age in single digits (well, at latest single hexadecimal digits). I've never been one of the hot literati, though, and there's no chance that I'm about to start.

Comments on the final (snort!) approval of the Bartz/Anthropic lawsuit are forthcoming. Short preview: It's not nearly as "final" as the words "final approval" imply, and nobody should count on payments being made Real Soon Now.

Circadian Link Sausage Platter

(Not cicadian, no bugs approved here.) Given that this Sunday's big game is between two Spanish-speaking nations, I'm feeling somewhat copacetic about being forced to rely on Telemundo due to the incompetence of the local Fox station.

• It's become quite apparent over the last year and a half that we have endemic chemical imbalances at the top of this Administration, ranging from 'roid rage at the DoD to damned near every-non-scientifically-validated-thing down the street to reasonably probable psychotropics, intoxicants, and other "mind-altering" things at 1600. I'd suggest installing some biochemists in senior positions, but "biochemist" has at least one too many syllables to be within the contemplation of the senior officials in this Administration… although, curiously, "testosterone" seems just fine with (at least some of) them.

  And as to military personnel and testosterone: Leaving aside that "'roid rage" is rather the opposite of what one needs in leadership positions, muscle mass isn't going to help maintain weapons systems; or analyze observational data ranging from intercepts to downrange clearance; or evade hostile fire; or prevent unfitness for duty due to cardiovascular disease, or gastrointestinal irregularities, or gynocomastia preventing proper fit of body armor (designed by and for Manly Men); or a host of other side effects of not just supplements used, but lifestyle and exercise changes — consider the obvious problem of joint and other flexion deficits. Much of the time, rather the opposite. And despite Major Major Major's hostility to half of the population participating in the military, testosterone isn't everything; but then, if he'd actually taken advantage of an elite education to bloody learn something or just acknowledge how much he doesn't know…¹

• Meanwhile, this Administration has demonstrated yet again that its main method of persuasion is turning assertions of the inherent perfidy of those not personally loyal to them up to 11 without any factual basis (sometimes in less than an hour). I can't — quite — call it "lying" or "perjury" because that requires self-awareness of falsity; that's a deficit that should have been apparent to everyone who actually read even part of the Orange One's self-congratulatory/aggrandizing publicity tome of the 1980s. (In case that isn't a clear-enough reference, I mean the ghostwritten one that the ghostwriter regrets, the one that's a work of fiction as much as a memoir.) That I can't quite call it "lying" or "perjury" does not invalidate an inference of inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office of the Presidency — a distinction in degree from other Administrations so great as to be a distinction in nature.
• I suppose we could just argue about daylight savings time. Again. I'd prefer permanent standard time, but absolutely disdain the twice-a-year changeovers. And to those who whinge about the dangers of sending children to school in the dark, you're asking the wrong question entirely: Why send them to school that early at all, especially since the agricultural sector is going to work when there's daylight no matter what the clocks say… and there's much less reliance on child-of-farmer labor now than even half a century ago?
• At least Peppa Pig isn't an instrument of propaganda and bigotry.² Well, not much bigotry, anyway; even though it depicts anthropomorphized pigs, it's not about antisemitism. Meanwhile, the stampeding herd of elephants in the room is not only being ignored, but proclaimed as nonexistent by techbros/allies who can't conceive of a distinction between "fact" and "expression" — unable to distinguish between "87" and "four score and seven"…

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1. One of the surest ways to earn the disdain of mid-grade NCOs — the backbone of the military, and this also applies to their civilian equivalents even far from the military — is the pretense of deciveness and certainty coming from ignorance, and specifically when those mid-grade NCOs do have knowledge inconsistent with that pretended certainty. Of course, Major Major Major in his last active-duty assignment was in a role in which everybody (all the way up and down) is ignorant, and often intentionally so.
2. Aside: It wasn't just that the CIA's propaganda alterations of Animal Farm for that wretched cartoon distorted the political subtext of the original; it was that they were objectively inept, both as "fiction" and by ironically weakening the original's anticommunism, quite probably because the idiots involved hadn't read the book, or done any research on its context, or worse yet hadn't read Homage to Catalonia or Why I Write. Either of those last two items would, or at least should, have resulted in a "wait a minute, did we misunderstand the original?" moment or three. That they didn't is rather consistent with the US tradition of marginal-at-best competence at human intelligence.

Casualties in the Ostrich Brigade

Fortunately, not all of these casualties have been fatalities. The VA will no doubt resist treating those that are just maimings as "service-related" — rather unusually, with substantial justification.

• The fatality involves the bafflingly (even though wilfully) ignorant Sen Graham. His ignorance extended far, far beyond the usual-for-politicians "I'll viciously attack members of a different faction and excuse the same conduct in those of my own" posturing that has become normal since… well, not later than 1954, albeit without parallel consequences.

  Instead, Graham's ignorance extended to things he learned — or at least was exposed to and required to teach — in his pre-politics days: The laws of armed conflict. Not just because he was an officer, but because he was a military lawyer in an operational-immediacy zone, whose office participated in providing required annual training. The contrast between that requirement and Graham's quarter of a century of advocating cultural and military imperialism — both of which implicate Geneva and Hague Conventions restrictions — is at minimum cautionary. Magnanimously, I'll leave his selective ethics and knowledge acquisition/assimilation regarding various domestic and other foreign-policy issues for another time, if only because he's far from alone in them.

• In the "no fatalities — yet" set of casualties (no Purple Hearts, the wounds aren't visible enough) we can ponder distractions from education, specifically athletics. Budgets and institutional priorities are bad enough; this attitude, extending back half a century, is one of the main reasons that I chose to avoid this institution, despite its 500kg-gorilla status in my hometown. (That it was all too often just about as sophisticated in the arts as a gorilla mattered, too.) This is definitely the tail wagging the Dawgs.

  Much worse, though, has been the continued misuse of athletics to advance evangelical agendas inconsistent with a broad education — most especially by those who proclaim/think that they're concerned only with the "integrity of athletic competition," and ignoring that they're allowing "principles" applicable to athletics to overwhelm everything else. This is epitomized by the poorly-reasoned Supreme Court decision in BPJ not quite two weeks ago; admittedly, this poor reasoning was invited — but not compelled — by poor writing of the underlying statute and regulations and vague writing of the Constitutional provision. More to the point, it was completely ignorant of the Establishment Clause issues presented by ignoring the religious aspect of defining "biological sex" without noting that the purported "original meaning" was already — at the time the statutes and regulations were written — divergent not just from any technical meaning within "biology," but from even the undergraduate level understanding of "biology."^† This ostrich-like devotion to only "understood and recognized by lawyers" material as the source of meaning dives into the rather vicious positive-feedback loop of theology in general and evangelism/evangelicalism in particular.

  But the combined effects of these considerations are what really matter: Subordination of education to outside agendas. That's what's above the sand here. Given other methods of subordination in the news of late, the ostrich should be paying a lot more attention to sounds making their way into the hole that sound like hyenas. Even if the metaphor does not actually relate to actual ostrich behavior, but only to popular mythology — which rather makes my point.

• The third set of casualties is a little harder to identify. Ultimately, it's most probably the voters of Maine, not either the Maine Democratic Party or any particular candidate.

  Initially, one must note a critical premise gone awry. Maine has used ranked-choice voting for quite some time… which removes the actual need for "primaries" and "single endorsed party candidates" in the first place. And it's not only possible but routine in fully-tabulated RCV elections for an initially lower-ranked candidate to overcome a more-monolithically-supported candidate; that is, a party putting forth a Unity Candidate has little practical advantage over a party putting forth several others (see, e.g.,, 2025 Hugo Voting Statistics at 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25 (first-place candidate on initial ballot was not the ultimate winner; and do not kid yourselves, there are definite "party politics" involved… all of which should use a jackass as an anthromporphized logo)). So, in reality, it did not serve the voters to reify Platner as "the" Democratic Party candidate — particularly in light of the incumbent's vulnerability and problems — but only (at most) the gatekeepers.

  More subtly, though, Platner demonstrated his unsuitability for office long before the current allegations (upon which I'm withholding judgment because I've seen no evidence, not because I'm "believing" or "disbelieving" anyone; I don't make liability/liability-like decisions on the basis of initial public posturing, and you shouldn't either, not even when that public posturing is ultimately vindicated). In a representative democracy, we don't vote for specific policies; we instead vote for intermediate decisionmakers, who may or may not express an initial policy preference. When they make those decisions, however, those decisionmakers will have access to substantial nonpublic information to inform their choices, ranging from expert testimony to often-odious-but-sometimes-appropriate lobbying by specific interests to intelligence data leading to other unexpected decisions, for good or for ill. I can't trust someone who puts a permanent mark on his/her body without understanding its associations… presuming that one accepts the excuse that he really didn't, which I find implausible even for a Marine on liberty. At least a somewhat sober Marine, which may be expecting too much on a foreign-port liberty call — but sure as hell isn't expecting too much from a candidate for an office that votes on declaring war (or not).

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†  By the early 1980s, undergraduate textbooks and lectures — especially for upper-level courses in vertebrate embryology and development — treated gonad expression as fluid, and did so as established doctrine. But now we're into the questions of the meaning of "ordinary" and "public" related to meaning, and more particularly as to "what is evidence of meaning?" that we can see getting screwed up by lawyers who should bloody well know better (after having been warned about it). When lawyers outsource their datasets and analysis to small and overtly nontechnical language models, they're committing the same error. Demonstrating that, however, might take a few hundred footnotes… shooting at a very-much-moving target with high deflection in the first place.

Viking Row Link Sausage Platter

Well, FIFA has once again moved ahead in the battle to be recognized as the most-corrupt sporting organization. The irony here is that FIFA set itself up to fail, both with its "rules" regarding appeals (note: for all practical purposes, there are none… in particular, there are none regarding non-sporting-origin pressure tactics by oligarchical assholes) and the "rules" regarding the VAR review that led to the problem in the first place ("zero tolerance" and "death-penalty-equivalent only" systems just don't work to actually control behavior — ask any third-grade teacher). I'm sure the IOC will make this competitive in the next two years, but I'm afraid that just trying harder isn't going to help the NCAA.

• Somewhat more mundanely and more importantly, the illusion of privacy on the 'net appears to be getting more attention, if not more actual effective control. (Which still beats intimidation by DHS consistent with its internal culture.) Meanwhile, even the "technologically challenged" Supreme Court seems to be waking up a little.

  The thread connecting all of these incidents is simple to state in the abstract and horrendously complicated to confront in any practical sense: Lawyers' (and politicians') ignorance of both the actual methodology used and its means of (and potential for) abuse by nonofficial actors. It's all well and good to establish a prohibition on "the gummint" establishing policies and procedures to invade privacy. When "the gummint" — indirectly, via third-party privacy invasions epitomized by the location-data items in the preceding paragraph, or directly, via wink-wink-nudge-nudge "unauthorized exceeding of authority" by officials as in the last one — that's not sufficient when everything about how privacy is at issue is masked. At the moment, the most-obvious example of this is the underlying rationale for Google's "analytics": The purported benefit to advertisers (not incidentally enabling them to charge excessive rents). Leaving aside whether that benefit is to society as a whole for another time, it's a castle largely built on sand that is most emphatically not linearly scaleable: The relationship between overall, fully-extended costs per transaction achieved, commercial or otherwise, and the failure/success rate of communications seeking those transactions. Worse, the sand is being undermined to make more memory chips for enhanced-Eliza systems calling themselves "AI" without displaying the fundamental characteristic of true intelligence: Judgment.

• And now, ignorance on display. A purportedly esteemed commentator Over There inadvertently exposes his utter ignorance of preparing for contingencies. Perhaps this statement epitomizes the ignorance of someone who proudly proclaims that he was a member of Blair's strategic-review commission:

  When I served as a lay member of Tony Blair’s strategy defence review in 1998, we were bombarded with unquantified abstractions. We were told not to query or quantify concepts such as menace, aggression, force or “nuclear threat”. As for the last, it was said to be “like the Virgin birth”, axiomatic to the concept of deterrence. Today’s case for spending £63bn on renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent must be close to slight. Yet it receives no peep of debate.

  What part of "You have no f*cking clue how long it takes to establish, or reestablish, a discrete contingency-response program, do you?" did you not understand? Leaving aside the amount of time it takes to actually acquire the tools, there's a serious issue with training personnel — and, more to the point, their supervisors, up to three or four levels above the workers. Elsewhere in that ignorant screed, there's an implicit claim that the UK will have three years' accurate, clear notice of immediately-impending military action by Russia against the UK… which, even if true, begs the question of how long it would take the UK to build a full system to respond. Not just buy the guns off the street — recruit, train, promote, support, and deploy counterforce.

  There's quite a bit to be said for keeping things less wasteful in military, and all other contingency-based, programs. (That's not at all the same thing as "improving efficiency" — by definition, "contingency preparation" is not and cannot be "efficient.") It's always easy to pick on obvious, easily-defined-and-denigrated programs like "independent nuclear deterrent" and extend that reasoning to all else. The same for "hurricane preparedness" and "vaccine/antibiotic stockpile" and… well, I won't go on. The real point is that "the hardware" is the easy part of any contingency-response system — and even the hardware is almost always specialized and not fit for any other purpose. Conservatively (and historically), it takes ten to twelve years to establish a self-sustaining discrete contingency-response system where there is none, whether it's a new creation or complete reactivation after dismantling a prior program. That's due primarily to human factors, not hardware issues easily waved away with a finance-industry-provided magic wand… presuming that the hardware being specified and purchased (and usually not maintained because that's even more expensive!) is actually fit for purpose. Particular to this issue, do I hear any echoes of "How long did it take the UK to bring the obsolete-even-then Typhoon Eurofighter into operational readiness?" anywhere? Buehler? Buehler?

  Absolutely there must be a guns-versus-butter debate, and no partisan for any aspect is going to get everything desired. "Lack of immediate threat means ignore long-term threat because we can deal with it later if it's ever necessary," though, is not a valid part of that debate… as demonstrated by global warming, etc. And that's before considering the difficulty of changing resource allocation later, both politically and practicably.

• CNN demonstrates that arguing against someone's high statements of principle justifying a rebellion — specifically, the preamble of the Declaration of Independence — is seldom very persuasive and merely distracts from actually confronting the grievances — the rationale — behind those high principles. But I probably shouldn't be surprised: Civilians seldom learn how to run a checklist…
• Odious art, and "labor relations" in the arts, and educational directives, and even wealth all have their places. Preferably well away from me, as I can make few assurances about minimizing the collateral damage if they get too close.

Keeping All of My Fingers

Fireworks are for those with the training, the appropriate equipment, and the appropriate location (and conditions). If you don't have all three — just don't, and leave it to those who do. Big-screen TVs make that a lot easier than when I grew up, when black-and-white console TVs were about the best thing there was…

But I'm perfectly willing to give this King the finger (symbolically, because I'm not detaching it!) because he has no concept of what "democracy," "republic," or "democratic republic" mean, let alone require to function. Neither, for that matter, does the leadership of either major political party (or most of the "third parties" all laying claim to being "third"). Understanding the Constitution, or the preceding Articles of Confederation, or the Declaration of Independence, requires first understanding the model of government to which they aspire and its contrast to what was the norm in the eighteenth century:

Actually democratic/representative government is about persuasion, not preconceived ideology.

Reliance on preconceived ideology as "the answer" to new circumstances — either in detail or more generally — is essentially theocratic. The methods used after decision can devolve to authoritarianism, such as when there's a "permanent majority" in a nonrepresentative or viewpoint-suppressive purported legislature.¹ Neither is actually consistent with a government mechanism explicitly incorporating the Speech or Debate Clause, or more generally adopting the absolute right to (peaceably, however passionately and even incivilly) petition the government (and freedom of expression more generally).

In turn, that means that character, judgment, and persuasiveness/persuadability are — or at least should be — more important to functioning of a representative government than loyalty to any person or ideology.² Of late, there's been too great a tendency toward the easy corollary of "If you can't beat them, join them": "If you can't easily overwhelm authoritarian regimes, be an authoritarian regime (with appropriate camouflage)." There is no decency involved in such aspirations. (Application to "theocracy" is left as an exercise for the student — about a fourth-grade student.)

I'm just as willing to give the finger to the unitary executive, closed primaries, popularly-elected judiciaries, and captured agencies as I am to kings. However, I'm out of fingers on that hand, but I've got another one….

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1. Yes, I am saying that the Hastert Rule and similar "leadership of the majority party can/does prevent floor debates and voting on proposed legislation introduced without their prior approval" rules are at minimum inconsistent with the meaning of "legislative power," and more probably outright unconstitutional. It's worth pondering why — even in the eighteenth century — European legislatures that had any power at all (primarily England and Scandanavia) overtly separated their "speakers" from their "majority leaders," and that neither the US Constitution nor Articles of Confederation contemplated a "prime minister" or equivalent from the legislative branch… late-twentieth-century practices Over Here to the contrary. Fundamentally, these internal rules are designed and intended not to further democracy or representative government, but to entrench elites. That's rather what at least the rhetoric of the uppity colonists deplored; even if actual meaning is far too complicated and self-contradictory for a footnote (or three hundred).
2. Religious or otherwise. Christian nationalism, various forms of nativism, Randism and absolute reliance on/allegiance to markets, virulent anticommunism, etc. are all incompatible. Failure to accept that "sometimes choices are hard and there's a plausible rationale for more than one choice" is worse, especially when combined with personal/ideological determinism.

Accountability

So the Supreme Court issued a pile of decisions this morning, including one in which the only good part was intellectual honesty about being disingenuous (of which more in the future). It is that time of year, after all; and there will be more tomorrow. I'll defer touch-typing anything for a few days, probably while the rest of the country is busy driving under the influence and blowing its fingers right off.

• So even the white flag raised by this Administration over the (latest) Iran conflict has failed to prevent further military action. I'm shocked — shocked, I say — to find disregard for post-absolute-monarch Euro-American concepts of "ending a conflict" in those parts of the world that are not post-absolute-monarch Euro-American… for the nineteenth time in my lifetime. (Just as the meaning of victory is context- and observer-dependent, so is the meaning of ceasefire.) At most, there's deescalation from using military ordnance — on one side, anyway, and definitely inconsistent with GOP norms. And, meanwhile, Big Oil continues to extort from consumers (and do not kid yourself — contrary to the implication in the article that because Big Oil only owns 5% of gas stations, its control over the supply chain virtually mandates quick-rise-slow-fall behavior).
• There are several updates from the Department of Self-Selected Unaccountability. Consider prospective war criminals calling themselves peaceniks. Consider immigrants (of dubious compliance with immigration laws) from shithole countries. Don't forget Big Tech (particularly obnoxious given its purported commitment to freedom of expression). Then there's the problem of official opposition to imaginary slights, and promised prosecution of those who vandalized a national monument while entirely ignoring the real vandal. I wish DOGE had abolished this department…
• The present leader of the royal family the US started to throw out a quarter of a millennium ago is publishing his tax return for the first time. Our dynastic leader… didn't.
• In entertainment-industry news that will largely escape notice, the most-recently-formed media oligopolist is consolidating its "labor relations" in a single office. What could possibly go wrong? Like, say, giving that office responsibility for dealing with freelancers?

Impending "Birthday" Party

Two hundred fifty years ago — give or take a couple months, since it had to be sent by sail and not e-mail — a bunch of uppity colonials provided a convenient checklist of objections to their monarch, whom they accused of tyranny. Here's how the present monarch (however unjustified his assertion of monarchial powers may be) appears to be doing seventeen months into his reign:

Historical Objection†	Status
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.	✅	The President certainly has the veto power, but exercised it on bills with broad bipartisan support relating quite specifically to public good… but inconvenient to this monarch's cronies and sycophants. Indeed, the actual reasons in both instances appear to have been spite unrelated to the merits of the bills. Even worse, he's busy denying effect to bills to which assent was granted.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them	✅	This monarch hasn't precisely forbidden "pass[ing] laws" by state governors, but has issued his own orders overruling them — even when those laws are committed to the states and Congress by higher authority. Between attempting to coerce states to do elections his (not necessarily Congress's) way and defying Congress's appropriations laws to deny funding to those who disagree with legally-dubious initiatives, for purposes of this checklist forbidding implementation is much the same thing as forbidding passage.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only	✅	Both the election-rules efforts — including holding a/the/any national agenda hostage to his SAVE Act and preemptive anti-sanctuary efforts noted in the previous item — would allow one to check this item off the list. The epitome, however, is the Big Beautiful Bill, a simultaneous preemption of "Blue State" policy preferences for their own people and imposition of what is best understood as stealth Jim Crow.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures	❎	As no session has yet been demanded at Mar a Lago, this item is incomplete at present. Maybe he'd just rather call it for the 51st state, whether that's his dream for Canada or for Greenland (but definitely not DC or Puerto Rico).
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people	❓	Although this monarch hasn't done so (yet… pending electoral results this fall), his loyalist regents have by recessing and refusing to call votes when some of their narrow majorities have been less sycophantically loyal than optimal. The recesses called at various times by House and Senate leadership, particularly during the fall 2025 budget/spending-authority fiasco, aren't fully this monarch's fault… although the selection of the individuals holding those posts essentially is. And there have been plenty of other examples; specific as to invasions, at his direction the House and Senate leadership have prevented debate and votes on the invasion of Venezuala and the invasion-lacking-only-boots-on-the-ground of Iran — not just opposed the substance. (And probably will do so regarding Cuba if this monarch makes it a live issue.)
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within	❓	This one fails — for the moment — only due to one word: "Elected." Some of this is almost inevitable due to structural distinctions in both the means of election (particularly the more-rigid electoral calendar in the US) and the validation of ministerial selection from that past monarch to this one. This monarch has refused to appoint ministers who can be confirmed in their posts by those elected (even his loyalists among those elected). In just one ministry, these range from "acting" of a private-life employee at the top (in place of a facially-unqualified predecessor!) down to viceroys (and aspiring Sheriffs of Nottingham) that have paralyzed the government's ability to enforce the law using only the law.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands	✅	Do I really need to say anything about this monarch's interference with state-level, refugee-accommodating immigration law and policy? Others have and will… even aside from directing his minions to do so with force not permitted by the laws of armed conflict — and these are not even hostile combatants.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers	❓	There's little doubt about the obstruction part of this item, and if it ended at the comma would be a solid — even double-sized — checkmark. We'll just have to see what happens with judicial vacancies for which his sycophants prove unable to attain confirmation, and with proposed expansions of the judiciary.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries	✅	The monarch's will alone — particularly as expressed through extreme loyalists — led to the shutdown last fall, which came within days of affecting judges' pay (and did affect judges' staffs). Conversely, opportunities to demonstrate personal loyalty to this monarch have led to judicial behavior, or at least rhetoric, for those seeking promotions. Judges are human, and definitely have egos, but doing this sort of thing in public isn't just gauche — it reasonably raises questions as to their impartiality.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance	✅	DOGE proved rather inefficient, although it's probable that no one will ever know how much — if only because recordkeeping there appears to have been remarkbly incomplete, even… inefficient.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures	✅	Posse comitatus probably prohibits, and certainly restricts, deploying the National Guard in support of immigration enforcement. Let's not entirely neglect upgrading purported law-enforcement agencies to paramilitary status, either.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power	✅	Misuse of the military in a civil-law-enforcement context inconsistent with both limits on law-enforcement acts and authority and the laws of armed conflict.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:		[not a checklist item, it's only a meaningless precatory clause]
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us	✅	Perhaps not literally quartered as would have been understood in the eighteenth century, but certainly deployed domestically for extended periods without military need or operations.
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States	✅	The shockingly inept (and cynical) federal "investigations" of immigration thugs and noncooperation with less-conflicted authorities — those authorities who would ordinarily act on a "Murder" — have been a feature, not a bug. And certainly not isolated, or even unusual. Worse, this is largely in support of a bigoted, unlawful policy preference. The contrast with prior domestic exertion of force by a predecessor monarch is rather distressing.
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world	✅	Just considering exports, remember that requiring a special license functions to cut off exports — and doing so for private expression not consisting of government (legitimate) secrets isn't entirely new, I'm afraid.
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent	✅	Tariffs are taxes, especially because they're ultimately paid by "us" (and not, as this monarch's rhetoric has sometimes claimed, by other nations). Further, general tariffs are within the legislature's authority, not the monarch's.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury	✅	Both us and those who aspire to be us.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences	✅	Especially of prominent critics who've achieved personal success. Prominence isn't required, though; questioning what "our bastards" are doing seems sufficient.
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies	❎	This failure is more for lack of opportunity… thus far. This monarch has certainly demonstrated ambition to comply, but not yet taken action to use a "neighboring Province" as a baseline for new law he would impose in the present ones.
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments	✅	Is that an echo of "unitary executive theory" I hear? How about just reinvigorating Plessy? "Form of governments" is a bit more subtle, but it's wound up in the "no funding for state-level DEI efforts" — in substance, rejecting offices established in state governments, albeit not entire "departments."
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever	❓	Again, just on one policy axis, consider state legislation on climate change efforts that this monarch has challenged on a blanket basis — without regard to individual state circumstances and interests, let alone the consensus of scientists who don't have conflicts of interest — for the primary benefit of his sycophants (who, not coincidentally, are concentrated in other states). But this checklist item is incomplete, however enthusiastic completion of its second clause is, because this monarch has not formally completed the first one. "Denying effect" isn't the same thing as "suspendings meeting," however similar the effect.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us	✅	ICE detentions of US citizens; Renee Good and Alex Pretti; Occupy [insert major "Blue" city here] (a few more examples); and that's just for the narrowest definition of "us," just on one policy axis, just use of military-grade armament. What is particularly notable is that these "deployments" tend to come shortly after those cities announce that more people are "us," even in the face of separate and not even close to equal policy preferences not just implied, but overtly advocated, by this monarch.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people	✅	If you're a member of the 1%, inflation is good. If not, and you're merely one of "our people," not so much — especially after removing what passes for a safety net first. Sure, most of the plundering at sea has been other peoples' seas, but it's the thought that counts — especially for a monarch who thinks his own territory extends to anything within the same hemisphere.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation	✅	Looking just at uniformed military use, as foreign mercenaries have gone out of style (and our standing armies and paramilitary forces have made hiring mercenaries unnecessary anyway), this has been rather obvious. Just ask Maduro and Minneapolis. Death, desolation, tyranny, cruelty and perfidy indeed.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands	❎	Another item left incomplete… if only because the monarch's focus has been on alleged drug smugglers regardless of citizenship (or even confirmation that they're smugglers). Plenty of room for "improvement," though.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions	✅	06 Jan 2021 — and the blanket pardons issued since. Not "merciless Indian Savages" unless you laughingly mean the shaman, but otherwise on point (notwithstanding a later "acquittal" based primarily on the standard of decision, not the proof offered).

I'm sure that with just a little more effort and attention to detail, this monarch can complete this checklist of tyranny. There's been substantial progress in less than a year and a half. I therefore propose giving this monarch the finger as a 250th anniversary gift — or more than one from among those blown off by fireworks. That will certainly be more civil than marking "86 47" in the lawn near his official residence, right? And a pile of severed fingers won't constitute a credible threat against a living person, either.

If this be lèse-majesté, so be it. As I am no longer subject to Article 88, I am free to expound contemptuous words concerning this monarch. Presuming, that is, that my attitude improves enough that I express only contempt — this monarch is beneath it.

---

† Assembled Representatives of the British Colonies in North America, Declaration of Independence (propounded not later than 04 Jul 1776).

The 250th birthday of the United States is still a few years off; notwithstanding any agreement among the colonies, there was no "United States" until at earliest the Constitution was signed and sent for ratification (17 Sep 1787), and better — pleasingly close to the dubious "04 July" — would be the date the ninth state ratified and placed the Constitution into force (21 Jun 1788). We celebrate birthdays, not conception, in the West. (Maybe we can have a gender-reveal party celebrating the Articles of Confederation, 01 Mar 1781?)

Established Sausage Platter

Burn sinners at the stake! OK, maybe not such a good idea.

• Next time, read your own bloody book before "peace negotiations" start. Better yet, don't go to war — excuse me, "exert irresistible 'murikan military prowess in pursuit of critical national objectives (not a 'war,' never that)" — without defining the bloody "critical national objectives" and determining whether military force can or will achieve them. As a veteran, I'm carefully avoiding consideration of whether what we've got is irresistible.

  It would obviously be expecting far too much to contemplate preconflict ethical rationales (and post hoc rationalizations/evasions). Or cost/benefit considerations. Or that cartoon. Or any visit to Dover AFB.

• This sausage is made from special cuts from S. zuckerbeast. That a swine is at issue is well demonstrated by legal adventures in the UK and right down the road demonstrating that it's special. Which just anticipates cannibalism among teh piggies.
• At that, another dubious information leech has its own legal difficulties regarding criticism, and this in a nation with no First Amendment.
• Turning from BigTech to BigMedia provides little — if any — relief from the assholery. (Surprised much?) Whether we're talking mergers well within the preexisting scrutiny guidelines for any market definition that isn't artificially expanded or unshared windfalls (that were themselves ineptly handled) — and not at all limited to electronic media — the distributors (and their owners) are obviously entitled to all benefits of freelancers' creativity. And I mean all benefits (this shouldn't be an issue!). Some rights, associations, and rights to exclude interlopers are more equal than others.

  But at least BigMedia isn't FIFA.

• It doesn't have to be mass entertainment, either. As to one recent controversy that remains problematic even after a partial retreat, there's really only one, Taylor-Swiftian description for anyone who knows the conglomerate (and its past conduct) very well: Elsevier gonna Elsevier. This was predictable almost a decade back when Elsevier bought SSRN, and I strongly suspect that it would have happened five years ago but for COVID. Enhanced branding, coming up… notwithstanding one of the ingredients in the preceding sausage (or the intellectual dishonesty of exploiting distributor branding for in draft academic work).
• All of that, however, is the enemy without. The enemy within will remain more dangerous until we get our eighteenth-century concepts of how to elect in the first place into even the mid-twentieth century. Which will not be happening any time soon, if only because it would undermine the individual power-bases of the self-selected political gatekeepers — the unelected ones who determine what's on the ballot in the first place.

Meanwhile, I'm having to watch today's US-Australia match in Spanish, on Telemundo, thanks to the typical neglect of the local Fox station. About 20% of the city has difficulty just in time for major live events (including sport) with the broadcast signal; curiously, it's never a problem for ad-laden local news and/or infomercials, or for any other broadcast group. Hmm, when is their FCC license up for renewal…

Dubious Competitions

In the quadrennial (off-year!) competition to determine which major sporting governing body is the most corrupt, FIFA seems to be winning. At present. And even though it will have another opportunity to demonstrate its superiority on this measure next year, the Olympics will have their own opportunity to excel in 2028. Meanwhile, the NCAA is just pathetically inept… especially as none of those rules appear to apply elsewhere in the system (when's the last time you heard a peep regarding betting by the athletic-training staff?). Nonetheless, much of the world will be thoroughly distracted starting tomorrow. (It's hard to tell when it's not, though.)

The Orange One, however, is never distracted from the thought processes of a real-estate mogul whose entire career has been based upon OPM. No, not original public meaning, but the older understanding of it (which might be the original public meaning itself): Other people's money. Real-estate moguls really do love inflation, which benefits them in two ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, they're paying off those big loans with devalued money. Second, and perhaps too subtle for people like the current Speaker, just looking at inflation rates in things that real people (including Real Americans) buy, and most particularly must buy for daily living, is out of context… because historically, real-estate market values outside below-median residential properties have been above the rate of inflation. That is, they profit by doing nothing; buy high, sell higher.

Meanwhile, various attempt to distract everyone from other crises seem to be at least partially successful, which is not a good thing. Especially when that last one is partially illusory, largely manufactured, and has an incredibly simple solution: Remove the cap on how much employment income is subject to Social Security levies, which might even allow reducing its rate slightly. We don't even need to get into the definition of "employment income" and how that definition lets some jerks pay nothing.

Enough for today, I've gotta get the vuvuzela out of storage by noon tomorrow for Mexico v South Africa.

An Unnatural Mixture

Beware the ingredient labels! Not just the sausages, but the news…

• Since no one really knows what an emolument is anyway, I suppose it's just fine for the entire House of Orange evade IRS scrutiny. At least until some judge or another takes a closer look, and another judge limits branding opportunities, and still other judges determine that he has to pay damages assessed a couple years ago. But at least it isn't more weaponized identity politics, right? Right?
• So the Orange One is demanding that applicants for Green Cards return to their home countries to do so, eh? Well, I nominate some prominent naturalized US citizens for similar (retroactive) treatment, especially those from shithole countries. <SARCASM> If you're going to impose the original intent on immigrants, you just can't allow people to take advantage of loopholes, right? Correcting mistaken noncompliance with that original intent by half a century of prior Administrations is the least that can be done!</SARCASM>
• I've long thought that career politicians were cockroaches, scuttling away from light, spreading dirt and disease, able to survive a nuclear strike… here's proof. And mislabelling "political operative" as "public service" among those who never gave actual national service (let alone dodged the draft when it was in force) gives mislabelling a bad name, even for that reservoir of lower-value human capital.
• That, however, seems positively productive compared to providers of writing advice who don't advocate, first and foremost, "read more, you ignorant gits!" Consider the cognitive dissonance that this is merely a book review appearing in a now-disreputable source that actually doesn't want anything truly creative (and hasn't for four decades) — just a fresh coat of paint on little (quasiliterary) boxes (so long as they're somehow about Manhattan rather than Daly City — and the less said about the true problems with "plaster versus sheetrock" the better… particularly as I've both lived in Daly City and repaired plaster walls).

  Here's a hint to the writing-advice subindustry: Maybe — just maybe — y'all can learn something from the scientific method, in which one looks at data first and theorizes afterward, then tries to confirm the theories with more data. That's how one avoids bullshit like asserting that all stories fit within a limited number of (mislabelled) "plots" , simultaneously ignoring substantial material and silently redefining terms. I realize that may undermine your there's-a-secret-method-for-success-that-only-I-can-explain model, but then I've spent virtually my entire life opposing that bullshit in various contexts. Like this one:

• All of which makes much more sense than relying on USNA graduates to explain military strategy and theory. To identify just a couple of fundamental errors in that article (by the guy who popularized "shock and awe" as a way of life — something that doesn't work against the desperate and the ideologically driven):
  • The British and French did not have "superiority in the quality of and quantity of weapons" during France '40. For one thing, their individual tanks lacked the radios found in virtually every German tank — and rapid, across-battlefield communications are just a little bit important in both quality and quantity of effectively employable motorized weapons platforms. And in the air, the quality/quantity disparity was far, far worse (especially as to the French, and most especially of all as to training and logistical support).
  • The Japanese didn't actually care about making the US "capitulate" prior to Pearl Harbor; they only wanted to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and actually preferred nonmilitary means of expansion of influence rather than outright occupation/conquest/"victory" (for values of "victory" requiring acceptance of non-Western conceptions thereof). Yamamoto's writings explicitly denied that anything more than a temporary vacuum, rather than a capitulation, was either necessary or possible.
  • Neither North Vietnam nor the Afghan Taliban were "militarily naked compared to the US and its allies" in their own territories. Abstract measures of the "theoretical balance of forces" without regard to where, when, and how long they will be engaged, let alone for what purpose, have less validity than IQ scores… as demonstrated by the first War of American Secession two and a half centuries ago (c. 1774–81).
  • Ullman's never-explicit (but all too convenient) redefinition of "asymmetric and hybrid tactics" focuses, or tries to, on "the battlefield" rather than the Clausewitzian "what legitimate political objectives can be either advanced or impaired by the organized application of violence." As to the two contemporary conflicts he dances around — Russia-Ukraine and US/Israel-Iran — he never engages with the fundamental asymmetry: The objectives of the various parties. That's the bedrock of "decisive strategic thinking" — understanding and thinking about not just one's own objectives, but one's opponents.' Conversely, the implicitly-redefined "asymmetry" the he does consider never engages with either unconventional forces (the more-traditional context of "asymmetric warfare") or the distinction between force presence and force projection. On the other hand, this is precisely the kind of blindness (and rhetorical shiftiness) that I long ago learned to expect from the Atlantic Council.

  And that's before considering their too-common impulses to prefer immediate policy preferences to the rule of law and the Constitution they swore to support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This BS is not quite as credible as appropriating someone else's comic-book characters as branding for one's weaponry — and less likely to enable conquering the Roman Empire.