Follow the Money

Reminder: If you took the US income-tax extension in April this year, your returns are due today. Which is both a sad "follow the money" in itself and an indirect issue with the following sausages, none of which leave a rich sensation behind.

• At least in Germany, wallpaper isn't like a mural when considering the right to photograph it. This rather inverts the ordinary result when the same conduct and similar copyrighted work get considered under the Eurocentric "fair dealing" framework versus the First-Amendment-centric "fair use" framework. I suspect that the latter was distorted by the problem with "The Original" in a way not immediately apparent in the opinions, but that's a suspicion only.
• Unfortunately, the "The Original" problem is not limited to the so-called fine arts: It also relates to recorded music, as demonstrated by the "ownership" of performance rights (not copyrights… at least outside the Sixth Circuit) in musical recordings in the US. The "owner" of the reproduction right is the possessor and physical owner of the "master recordings," recently epitomized by the Scooter Braun/Taylor Swift/rerecording of Swift's earlier albums fiasco. It's worth remember that US law is a distinct outlier here, thanks to judge-made law (with more than a whiff of corruption) from the early part of the twentieth century, actually originating with photography and the 1870 Copyright Act. It's also worth remembering that even the "biggest" performance acts may not get paid (admittedly, it's a bit too historical for Generation Z, but at least it's not the Rat Pack).

  The fundamental problem with the entire chain of reasoning is that it grievously misstates the relevant facts and even-more-grievously ignores the "process versus product" problem, then slaps lawyerly/judicial misunderstandings of "what it takes to create a musical performance onto a 'master'" both at the origin of recorded music and now — especially when founded on analogies drawn from eighteenth-century photography and lithography. There are no heroes here, only antiheroes — which should surprise precisely no one. Even thinking about this makes me a bigger nerd than you expected, right?

• The same commercial pressures are impairing the advancement of the useful art of long-form fiction. "Author" is apparently an unduly dangerous occupation, anyway.

  It's not just Over There, either. An enterprising PhD student looking for a dissertation topic in behavioral economics could do far worse than examining how the two-and-a-half-century slide from "encourage" to "necessary and sufficient" has distorted "authorship." (It wouldn't hurt to note the irony of such research being done in the unpaid context of a "PhD dissertation," either.)

• Whether it's real property or larger swaths of the economy, money-laundering of ill-gotten financial capital (I'm looking at you, too, exploiters of scientific and advertising fraud) seems to be a Problem. <SARCASM> But surely that's never been a problem in either "common" or "rarified" arts, has it? We don't even need to consider outright theft…. </SARCASM>
• But at least that's overt corruption. (Which doesn't really make it much better.) That new flatscreen TV is stealing your soul — or at least information that should damned well remain private. One wonders if those content recognition systems extend to material routed in from one's recorded video collection… as might the owners of Potomac Video.

Cultivating Schadenfreude as Electoral Method

After having sat through three football (all kinds!) weekends of election commercials now, it's pretty clear to me which of the two major parties is the lesser evil. This time, anyway.

• The underlying meme of Jackass-sponsored (or coordinated-but-not-really-no-that-would-violate-election-finance-law PAC-sponsored) commercials is either about how Joe Voter can/will directly benefit, or about how The Other Side will actively hurt Joe Voter. When not attack ads based on personalities and distortions, that is.
• The underlying meme of Heffalump-sponsored (or coordinated-but-not-really-no-that-would-violate-election-finance-law PAC-sponsored) commercials is to ignore the Heffalumps' own accomplishments and instead focus on the pain the Heffalumps will inflict on the Other. When not attack ads based on personalities and distortions, that is.

Political commercials of any kind are bad enough; if they were for commercial ventures, they're so far beyond mere "puffery" that they're outright false advertising and unfair trade practices. But that underlying Heffalump meme is nothing more, and nothing less, than cultivating schadenfreude as an electoral method. Joe Voter is (supposed to be) swayed by the pain to be inflicted on The Other, regardless of whether there are actually any objective benefits to Joe Voter. <SARCASM> Increased suffering of refugees and other immigrants? Great! Who cares that the vast majority of their jobs are those that Joe Voter doesn't want? Increased suffering of sexual deviants? Even better! That'll help keep Ward and June in charge. Increased suffering of women with unwanted pregnancies? Not just better, but demanded by the original public meaning of "citizen" (which excluded women)! Plus, they're all ne'er-do-wells improperly competing for good jobs with white christian nationalist men anyway, they need to stay in the damned kitchen and raise the damned kids. </SARCASM>

Now before you think I've gone all partisan on you, this is a judgment of the moment. And the Jackasses, however much lesser an evil they are at present, still have a heart of darkness epitomized by (in alphabetical order) Madigan, McClain (not that one), Menendez, and Myers… and that's just (part of) the letter M, (part of) the corruption, entirely ignoring the — well — thoroughly post hoc rationalized and institutionalized ignorance. But it's a lesser evil than a party led by a convicted felon and sex offender, whose backup can't tell the difference between a fact and a rumor, with its own cohort of corruption (and problems with cows).

One might say that America deserves better; but in a representative democracy, there's an undercurrent that the electorate deserves exactly what it elects (which has an aftertaste of schadenfreude in itself). True dilemmas do exist. It remains important after "resolving" them, though, to do two things:

• Take appropriate, effective steps to avoid being put in that position again; and
• Remember that when choosing the lesser evil, one is still choosing evil — and that requires continued vigilence thereafter.

— 30 —

Thirty days until election day. Or, rather, the first election day for the presidency, thanks to an electoral college that today withstands just as much scrutiny as the original text of Article I § 2 cl. 3 — especially in light of their common flaw: Restricting full voice to "the right kind of people" beyond the mere facts of "citizenship" and "adulthood."

• OpenAI is possibly poised to become a profit-making corporation — that is, provide a measureable financial return to investors, in addition to any purported social benefits. The more-subtle change would be allowing outsiders direct influence on what benefits "the board" can establish as objectives (not to mention their operational priority)… because as a for-profit corporation, outsiders can buy enough voting control to "own" one or more seats on that board. (They can arguably do so for a benefit corporation, too, but it's harder.) Given the historical track record of too-early shifts from "basic science" to "economic exploitation of technology arising from basic science," like data brokers, that should scare you.
• In a remarkably-but-not-surprisingly myopic article, James Hibbert asks whether Disney is bad at Star Wars without engaging with the more-fundamental precondition: Is Star Wars badly conceived? I'm shocked — shocked, I say — to find a purported analysis of missteps in exploitation of an artistic property that does not consider missteps in creation of that artistic property. As a slight riff on the recently-deceased central character: I find your lack of questions… disturbing.
• Speaking of forgetting fundamental questions, a German court recently ruled that a specific large-model-inference dataset could rely on a German copyright-law defense to a claim of infringement. The fundamental question that was not asked concerns a confusion generally sidestepped in German copyright law but implicit in American copyright law: What kind of transformative process gives rise to a defense of transformative [fair] use, let alone when the concept of fair dealing (and not fair use) is at issue? That this failed of consideration in its US origin, too, doesn't help… especially given rejection of other defenses in the LAION decision at the lower-level court.
• One might also ask cui bono Big Music, but that's likely to be just as disturbing as the shadowing figures behind the previous two items. Not to mention just as difficult to discern — and just as subject to deception.
• Cui bono indeed when bankruptcy proceedings intervene! A Florida district court recently reached the (clearly) correct conclusion that termination rights are not extinguished by the creator's bankruptcy discharge (PDF at 18–27) without reaching the really, really hard question. It's pathetically easy on these facts to focus on the bankruptcy process, precisely due to the structures of the recorded-music industry. This enabled the court to evade the much harder question — whether, absent availability of the first clause of the § 101 definition of "work made for hire" (employee within the scope of duties), the claim in a contract that it concerns a "work made for hire" that is not eligible under the second clause in § 101 (the nine eligible categories for freelance works made for hire) makes it a work made for hire. That would have been a different question here because due to cui bono-flavored shenanigans followed by a technical correction, there's a clear textual-history determination that "a phonorecording" is not one of the eligible categories. (tl;dr The recorded-music industrial interests got phonorecordings included as a tenth category in an amendment to the 1976 Act, but that was rapidly reversed in another amendment.)
• As noted previously on this blawg, Braxton Bragg was a multidimensional loser (who was so inept that he "resigned" as army commander — under not-well-publicized pressure — after one of his many defeats) unworthy of having a military base named after him, regardless of (misplaced) "sons of the Confederacy" pride in the local community where the base is located. Why doesn't it surprise me that The Orange Menace proposes elevating that pride even further over reality by reinstating that traitor's name on a military base? Might "surprise" require inferring some knowledge of American history, even some knowledge of military principles, on the part of that individual, contrary to all other indications?

With One Stone

<SATIRE>

I've had a brilliant idea on how the Heffalumps can cast one stone and kill a bunch of annoying issues. It'll deal with the future of the nation; it'll deal with annoying immigrants (and, in particular, refugeesillegal immigrants);^† it'll have yuuuuuuuge public health benefits, with all of the best words.

Childless catladies have no stake in America's future, and therefore are un-American (in the most McCarthyist sense possible, regardless of which McCarthy we're talking about with the possible exception of the ventriloquist's dummy). We should round up all un-Americans, childless catladies first.

But what do we do with them then? Well, we've rounded them up, so they need to be put somewhere. I suggest a new concentration camp vacant houses…

…in Springfield, Ohio. In the part of town where Haitian refugees illegal immigrants have gathered, with the strain they're putting on public services.

And if the executive-branch candidate who currently represents Springfield in the US Senate is right, he'll also be ensuring that the refugeesillegal immigrants in that town have an accessible protein source that actually costs the government nothing! Well, except for the cost of the guards (but he'll probably find a lot of volunteers, so maybe not even that). The only real danger is that fans of one of those catladies might overrun the town and distract the guards…

— A Dog-loving Veteran With Kids

---

†      However, we will make no inquiries whatsoever into whether Friedrich Drumpf was an unaccompanied, undocumented immigrant when he arrived in the US in 1885.

He's Still a Bastard

At the moment, I'm not referring to American electoral politics, at any level. At the moment (it could change…).

• A gentle reminder when choosing allies: Even if he's "our bastard," at the next opportunity he'll prove pretty definitively that he's still a bastard. (Partisan allegiance and gender immaterial.) Exhibit A: Cozying up to Stalin during the Second Thirty Years' War. Exhibit B: The Pahlevis, at any time. Exhibit C: Manuel Noriega, the US ally against the commie menace in Central America (just ignore that little drugs-and-violence side issue). Exhibit D: Ngô Ðình Diệm, and, for that matter, his successors (another prop-up-the-illusory-dominoes-no-matter-what ally). Sometimes we get to see that in real time … Exhibit E (no longer pending): Benjamin Netanyahu. The means used constrict the ends that can/will be achieved — so don't look/act so surprised that the Middle East is acting like, well, the Middle East for the last few millennia ("one bad bottle of tequila from all-out war"). I'm afraid that in the region within 1500km or so of 31°57'N 35°56'E, the present and historical leaders are almost all bastards.

  When no longer in panic mode, it's much easier to see that the enemy (of the moment)-of-my-enemy (of the moment) is not necessarily a friend — especially after considering the body count and assessing collateral damage. The difficulty is the near-constant state of panic…

• It's not just in politics, either. Although I'm no fan of judging a work of art by the character of its creator(s) — purported or indisputable — it's also almost impossible to fully isolate one from the other, especially once transferees are involved. In literature, in musical performance, in recorded music, or in anything else, the character of the rightsholders and creators manages to slime in.
• Once upon a time, purported freedom of contract was the meme underlying capitalist economies. For a while, anyway, we put a small brake on that meme. (This isn't unique to the US.) Recent developments look more like backsliding.

  This problem would be bad enough if just limited to labor law; some of the links in the preceding paragraph more than hint at this. The meme that "business should be able to do anything on which it can make an immediate profit without 'interference' from noncompetitor do-gooders" ignores that Adam Smith's works — the foundation of "modern" capitalism, even when not acknowledged — were in the realm of moral philosophy. Some business models are inherently deceptive, when they (barely) avoid total moral bankruptcy. And whether "moral" or not, any pretense that properly deployed deception is merely good business reduces Smith's "invisible hand" to a single finger — and you can probably guess which one.

• At least in the abstract, property rights are important; even in a (hypothetical and never-achieved) "purely communist" society in which all "means of production" are owned in common, property rights just shift to other aspects. Sometimes those property rights conflict, especially when deployed for noneconomic reasons, on both side of the dispute.
• It's not all about the Benjamins in the arts, though. Even when the creative no longer feels a need to save the world, the arts need to be placed in context.

Nonendorsement From a Dog-Loving Parent

…that is, about as far from a childless catlady as one can get…

OK, I lied; I will make an endorsement here. I hereby endorse ensuring that your voter registration is up to date (non-US citizens, too, but the link is for 'murikans). Many jurisdictions (not just US, either) have thirty-days-prior-to-election restrictions, such as not being allowed to vote in non-Federal elections if registration is updated less than 30 days prior to the election. And that's even more common outside the US.

• Although I'm hesitant to give this self-righteous jerk a platform, the MIT Technology Review already did, so the marginal damage is minimal. Chris Lewis bloviates — on behalf of the organization of which he is President, and I'm burying the lede here — that the Second Circuit's decision declaring that the Internet Archive's piracy is not protected by fair use will lead to the downfall of western civilization, brutal whipping of puppies, and destruction of all libraries anywhere. I'll grant that the current "ecosystem" is unfair to libraries, but this sort of "self-help" solution has already been rejected rather thoroughly in the context of book availability.

  If Apple is suggesting that Amazon was engaging in illegal, monopolistic practices, and that Apple's combination with the Publisher Defendants to deprive a monopolist of some of its market power is pro-competitive and healthy for our economy, it is wrong. This trial has not been the occasion to decide whether Amazon's choice to sell NYT Bestsellers or other New Releases as loss leaders was an unfair trade practice or in any other way a violation of law. If it was, however, the remedy for illegal conduct is a complaint lodged with the proper law enforcement offices or a civil suit or both. Another company's alleged violation of antitrust laws is not an excuse for engaging in your own violations of law. Nor is suspicion that that may be occurring a defense to the claims litigated at this trial.

  US v. Apple, Inc., 952 F.Supp.2d 638, 708 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) (emphasis added), aff'd, 791 F.3d 290 (2d Cir. 2015). (Ironically, many of the publishers Lewis would attack regarding their e-book pricing policies "pleabargained down" in that matter.)

  The real problem here is that Lewis is conflating publisher misconduct — and a pattern and practice of imposing publishing contracts that facially violate the Rule Against Perpetuities is certainly a window onto misconduct — with the impact on the author community of the so-called "CDL" (far worse than musicians legitimately complaining about Spotify). Any claim that his organization and/or the Kahlebros are merely engaging in "civil disobedience" paints the wrong house with too broad a brush, because those who will be most harmed by involuntary "CDL" acquisitions are the authors who have no control over pricing policies… and, because "commercial publishing" is in the strange position of being both an oligopoly and monopsony, never reaches the actual interior-decoration misconduct.

  Then, too, the broad brush spatters all buildings (and appurtenances) as if they convey only mere "fact," without regard to originality of expression. But that's for another time… and, more to the point, careful examination of the "lending records" to discern both (a) how much is nearly-pure creative expression like "fiction" and "poetry" and (b) how much it's just an attempt to move Grokster's goalposts without ever admitting that's what they're trying to do.

• Speaking of Apple, schade. It's worth pondering how this relates to the conduct at issue in US v. Apple; whether a quick note of parallels, a deeper examination of repeat behavior of (unpunished) natural-person miscreants, or a broad-ranging consideration of how bullying relates to multinational corporations, that pondering will be disquieting.
• As Judge Côte implied in that quotation above, there just might be an antitrust problem in the part of publishing that is Lewis's legitimate concern: Scientific (and quasiscientific) journals. (Keep in mind that, because PW has more conflicts of interest in reporting on industry financials than the world-champion catlady has cats, the financial figures appearing in the article substantially understate the profitability of those journals.) All before citations themselves go rogue, which is at the opposite end of the problem and reflects the "academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low" meme.
• Interestingly, we may learn more about Ozymandias and other portions of the classical "canon" for which we have only fragmentary third-hand descriptions. Advocates of "original public meaning originalism" should ponder the equivalent — discovery of a trove of documents from the 1770s and 1780s reflecting the thoughts of ex-slaves (manumissed or otherwise) and how they used and understood terms like "person."
• Offered without further comment, there are changes afoot for prepublication review.

Sittin' on a Sofa on a Tuesday Afternoon

Listen to the candidates "debate"
Laugh about it, shout about it,
When you've got to choose —
Every way you look at it, you lose

— Paul Simon
(with slight contextual updates since the 60s)

Shockingly, virtually nothing happened in last night's "debate" that was either surprising or, in fact, "news."

• These moderators were slightly better than the last time around… they earned a C-minus. They were handicapped by an insane format, of course. They get some points for at least sometimes calling bullshit on, well, bullshit. But they lose points for the condescending banality of their questions… and even more for letting candidates get away with not answering the questions before them, and for going even farther off topic in their "rebuttals" (which were actually "responses" but whatever).
• Ms Harris nearly blew it initially, because she really didn't answer what was very much a softball question. The obvious response to what boiled down to "Are you better off than four years ago?" would have been something like

  You and many, many Americans are alive. Our economy has, under President Biden's leadership, largely recovered from the largest public health crisis in a century. And you didn't even need to drink bleach to get here!

  followed by whatever canned nonspecifics the don't-offend-anyone idiots advising her had force-fed into debate prep.

  But that's not what we got. We got Aunt Fluffy, for at least a few moments… and precisely because this was the first question, that was at best inept strategy. Her actual answer was obviously nonresponsive enough that some undecided voters might well have made up their minds at that point… and missed her improvement later in the session. "Sandbagging" only works after establishing a position of at least some strength — it depends upon already having established a prima facie position, thereby requiring the opponent to respond.

• Or maybe it wasn't that Ms Harris "improved" so much as she let her opponent be himself — allowed him to demonstrate to anyone not blinded by tribalism who had two brain cells to rub together that, no matter what policy disagreements one might have with Ms Harris, they pale in comparison to the utter inhumanity and unsuitability for any office (even business leader… or gameshow host) of that opponent. In a representative democracy — and that includes elected chief executives (and elected judges hack phhhht), not just legislators — one isn't voting for policies; one is voting for persons who, when they are confronted with the unknown, can be trusted to do something appropriate regardless of personal benefit to that elected representative. "Concept of a plan" eight years after the issue became live, since that opponent was campaigning on the same subject in 2016, is short of the mark — and that was one of the good points!

  But there's one aspect of that candidate's obsessions and answers I cannot let go. At risk of violating Godwin's Law, it's worth recalling certain rallies that were extremely well-attended… and marked by speeches (not just from the "main attraction") long on tribalist bullshit and very, very short on facts and actual policy. It's not that this particular candidate is as evil as Hitler (or, for that matter, that most of this candidate's supporters are comparable to Nazis) — he's not that competent and doesn't have enough competent people in his inner circle — but that the methods and obsessions are so disturbingly parallel. (And with Party Congress sessions two decades later a couple thousand kilometers east-northeast.)

• Last, a bit of amusement in the aftermath. I'm a dog person, and I have children (much to their chagrin). I'm not a fan of That Childless Cat Lady… but I applaud the timing of her endorsement in that she left it until after (a) the candidate she was endorsing didn't embarass herself and all sentient beings and (b) the other one… did. Indeed, this cat lady made the point that she had actually watched the "debate" prior to issuing her endorsement. That doesn't make her music more to my taste, but still…

Weird Duck Sausages

You know things have gotten — well, weird — when the Prince of Darkness announces he'll be voting for a Democrat because the guy nominated by his own party is too evil. Ms Harris, I recommend politely RSVPing "no" to any invitations to go duck hunting; any implications that target selection (and downrange clearance) may be equally off now are entirely intentional.

Meanwhile, early next week things will get even weirder with yet another non-debate debate.

• Across the Pond they're proposing to eliminate more feudal lords with inherited titles from the House of Lords. Although I think Charles III's head is safe (or at least safer than his namesake's), the future William V just might want to look into opportunities for making a living (like his little brother has) — but he'll have a hard time getting legacy/donor preference to attend Stanford (or USC) business school. Schade.
• Meanwhile, the (ex-)commies over in Ukraine are demonstrating that they've learned the right lessons from prior atrocities in their region. Yes, war is a contact sport — but at least throw a penalty flag on late hits out of bounds, ok? (And definitely no running into the stands to demonstrate one's martial arts "prowess," guys.)
• The world of internet piracy has taken a couple of hits. First, a major anime/manga node (source for a number of sites) went dark. Then Brewster Kahle's arrogant selfrighteousness, his reductionism of all "original expression" to "mere information," got far more credibility than it deserved at the Second Circuit and still got trashed (large PDF). And his little dog, too!

  I'll have far more to say about this at another time. Of course, my position shouldn't surprise anyone at all… why yes, the choice of repository source was entirely intentional, with malice aforethought, and really does concern "fact" and not "original expression"; did you really need to ask?

• It appears that artificially-stupid large-language-model "AI" programs aren't hallucinating. Neither are they lying. They're just… bullshitting. I suspect that The Blues Brothers (1980) was an essential source work for all of the major large language models — that's why they can spew forth about that Picasso.

The Devil We Don't Know

This election season is a funhouse¹–mirror image of another election, in another land. One that I had a somewhat-sideyed professional interest in observing: Chile, 1988. That election wasn't competitive between candidates — it was a yes/no referundum on continuing Augusto Pinochet in office.² Pinochet had little support in urban areas, but considerable (often terrorized) support in rural areas, meaning that the referendum was largely considered a toss-up before the actual election. We'll leave aside, with our 20/200 hindsight, the very real threat that Pinochet intended prior to the vote to ignore an unfavorable result — and would have been successful in doing so.

Even in the poorer areas, where most people live in modest wooden homes and battle to get by on salaries as low as $2.50 a day, voters indicated a preference, as one put it, for “the devil we know.” Few here have been touched by the civil rights issues that arouse emotions in Santiago, the capital. Young people seem as likely as older adults to vote “yes” in the “yes” or “no” poll to decide whether the 72-year-old Pinochet should remain another eight years in power.³

So we have a choice this fall: The devil we reallyreallyreally know, and the devil we don't know very well at all. And in some states, the second-generation devil derided by the other devils as stupid (but he at least admits that worms ate his brain), not to mention a passel of devils less powerful or tempting than Wormwood. Partisan politics — between party apparatus and fundraising imperatives — gives us only devils to choose from.⁴ It's critical to remember that when one chooses the lesser evil, one is still choosing evil.

Anyanka You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?

Giles Because it has to be.⁵

Acton was fundamentally wrong: It's not power that corrupts, nor absolute power that corrupts absolutely, but the striving for power that corrupts (and the striving for absolute power that corrupts absolutely). This would have been obvious considering his first name: "Lord." So, I suppose, we should be thankful that we're choosing among devils who didn't get on the ballot due to inheriting their initial power bases.⁶

But we're still choosing among devils. <SARCASM> Just make the wisest choice you can among the lesser of "who cares?" </SARCASM> But do choose; do register and ensure that the devils who want to take that choice away from you — the real evildoers — don't win.⁷

---

1. "Fun" meaning "fouled-up nonsense"… or something sounding a lot like that.
2. We will, for the moment, leave aside the role of some… past professional counterparts… in making that referendum possible or even necessary (IMNSHO, there's an aspect of excessive even-handedness to that article, and it's still rather damning). There's a pretty obvious funhouse–mirror image here, too…
3. James F. Smith, Rural Chile Leans Toward Pinochet—'the Devil We Know', Los Angeles Times (17 Sep 1988). I heard that phrase more than once — even from (junior) officials of other Latin American nations, often referring to their own nations' dictatorships.
4. At best — and it's a really, really poor best — we end up with an on-the-surface somewhat well-meaning outsider surrounded by devilish advisers and cronies who themselves wreak havoc after not even being elected. At worst, we end up with "businessmen" and "investment advisors" — like, say, one of the current candidates for second fiddle in Nero's string quartet — whose weltanschauung of "government" has been so thoroughly warped by the combination of "modern accountancy and efficiency studies" and "the boss never needs to compromise" (not to mention self-righteous arrogance seldom seen outside the Spanish Inquisition) that those other advisers and cronies are even more in control.
5. The Wish, 3 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 9 (08 Dec 1998). That this screed cites to an entire program that was, at least on the surface, devoted to "fighting demons" should be entirely unsurprising.
6. Oops. And oops. And yet again oops. Seems we haven't actually learned all that much from our own secession from inherited power in favor of representative democracy.
7. That [representative] democracy is the worst form of all human governments that have ever been tried, except for all the others, should not be comforting. It's not supposed to be comforting: It's a prelude to work and agonizing choices, no matter what form of government there is — most especially including the bullying that inevitably results from replacing a government of flawed accountability with nongovernment strongmen (ask any refugee from the Horn of Africa in the last half century).

Yet Again Burying the Lede

…then exhuming it, without a court order, in time for The Big Finish.

• If you really need proof that markets are not a panacaea — any more than antidepressants, for that matter — consider barriers to actual provision of care erected by the ("market-oriented") insurance industry. Which, in the core sense, isn't "insurance" at all, but is instead an implicit cost-sharing mechanism with exhorbitant losses to friction.
• After all, markets work best with competition. Well, perhaps not so much for economists (or lawyers). This has some predictable negative externalities.
• Speaking of negative externalities, I'm not in mourning for this one. Financially, B&N has been dominated by real-estate speculation issues for decades (including, but far from limited to, strong-arm lease arbitrage back to the early 1990s)… and bad taste long before that.
• I've been pondering this suggestion for changing legal education's focus and methodology for a month now, trying to come up with a pithy comment. I can't: I agree with part of the conclusion (that reinvention is necessary) and disagree completely with the suggested means. For American lawyers, anyway, the biggest impediment to change in the legal profession is state licensing, regulation, and acculturation of lawyers — and the irony that legal education, for at least the last half-century, has focused on federal and default/consensus-national state law appears to have escaped just about everyone.

  This is particularly annoying (speaking politely) when one's practice focuses on federal law; when one's client base is scattered across the nation; and conversely when one's opponents are anything but scattered, but definitely not local. And it's all mandated by law that disputes in that field — that specialty (RPC 7.2 be damned) — be heard only in federal court… unless there's an arbitration clause, which is also a federal-law thingy (even when heard in a state court). Let's not look too closely at who benefits from nonuniform procedural requirements, either… or consider who actually benefits from choice-of-forum and choice-of-law principles. When you signed up with that cellular carrier, did you have the option to establish venue where you are and choose your own state's contract and consumer-protection law? How about when you bought that computer — these days, tablet or cell phone — over the 'net?

  I'm just not going to trudge into utterly predictable state disciplinary failings and established-Bar trade protectionism today. But I certainly could… This isn't federalism, or states as democracy's laboratory; this is Balkanization that ultimately encourages people like this guy (PDF)… and this one, demonstrating that the "laboratories" give undemocratic results absent effective democracy (a predictable result of a "two-party system" that inherently enforces false-dilemma-dominated reasoning).

  So, Mr Jordan: Changing the education system won't help (much), and will be pretty illusory anyway, so long as the actual practice structure — and control over it — remains stuck in the sixties. The 1860s.

Prospective autocrats, you'd better hurry: Only seventy shopping days left to buy the captive politician of your dreams! Or at least enough gunpowder to make for an excellent bonfire.

A Run Through the Jungle

The jungle primary {partial $}, that is. What I found rather amazing was that nobody called out clear (and, to my mind for one of them, disqualifying) conflicts of interest in four of the candidates. And, to be perfectly clear: "Conflict of interest" includes "running for limited-scope office when the candidate or family is A Player within that limited scope." It's not all one faction, either…

• In an almost Kafkaesque twist, Orwell's archives may disappear, bit by bit — perhaps not into the Ministry of Information where one can dial up past issues of The Times for, umm, retrospective editing, but nonetheless to even-less-trustworthy custodians than at present.
• Unfortunately, the problems with Orwell's archives are merely symptomatic of shortsighted, standard-accounting-friendly (in an industry group for which accounting standards apply, realistically, to less than a third of its activities) inept or worse (sometimes outright corrupt) management seeking marginal advantages for corporate bottom lines without actually engaging with the material. Leadership means, first of all, that one must engage with and try to fully understand both the substance and the people…
• …like Medal of Honor winners. Perhaps that's because Medal of Honor winners, as a group, tend to disrespect draft dodgers from a family with a history of dodging the draft in multiple nations, so they don't show "the respect that is due." Even more likely, it's because that individual — consciously or unconsciously — disdains sacrifice for others. I've been unable to identify a single such sacrifice in his public biography; anything even close to it was for his own benefit more than for others. And that is the antithesis of the Congressional Medal of Honor… too, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
• An opinion column suggests that students should study the arts and humanities if they love them — because (good and perceptive) employers already do. Although I agree with the conclusion, the piece aims at the wrong target. Before and at the college/university level, STEM studies are not "the enemy" of the humanities. At least until the graduate-school level, both STEM and humanities (grudgingly, most social sciences, too) are about preparation to learn more, to adapt to and improve circumstances as actually dumped in one's lap. Consider, for the moment, the utterly brilliant programmer who is unable to write coherent documentation, leading others to misunderstand and misuse her work; the claims processing civil servant (or insurance adjuster!) who spots some "common problems" but can't analyze their prevalence well enough to determine the appropriate scope of any policy change; the nine lawyers who can't understand basics of molecular genetics but opine (fundamentally incorrectly) on their partial patentability anyway.

  The enemy is monomania, not any particular field of study, although I'd probably make an exception for marketing and "business administration" — even more than the athletics department. Of course, as a holder of degrees across the curriculum I would say that, wouldn't I?

"It's Only Treason If You Lose…

"…and I didn't lose, it was stolen from me."

— Teh Orange Menace

• When one builds and maintains organized crime's favorite no-questions-asked low-commission-per-transaction fencing operation pawn shop, one'll eventually have to answer to Dah Man. This miscreant is either lying through his teeth, or so morally/ethically defective, that some "corrective action" is necessary; the key question is what corrective action, and that's a hard question thoroughly deflected by everyone's public posturing. Distillation of a certain compound from castor beans is a kewl kitchen science experiment… and potential terrorist act and war crime; the former is no justification for the latter, only a post hoc rationalization.
• This guy might be next. OK, probably not next; given the timeline of the previous sausage link, we should look for hints of investigations (into something criminal or quasicriminal) and such some time in early 2031 — mark your calendars now! In this instance, the main deflection is a single word: "Learn." They keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it does (for electronic processors, especially Von Neumann-pipelined processors however massively parallel-linked). Or, more likely, it does, but they're either intentionally or unconsciously in denial (PDF); that just leaves bargaining, depression, and acceptance to go before the grieving can begin.
• I might well grieve for opportunities lost, but I won't grieve for the gatekeepers thrown out of work as literary festivals and nineteenth-century-commercial-model periodicals of all kinds disappear. Nobody is asking the obvious question: cui bono (hint: probably not the kneejerk reaction)?
• The pretense of nonnormative evaluation of facts, of the apolitical/nonpartisan nature of searching for answers {freewall}, actually does nobody any good. "Searching for answers" is inherently normative in that it implies that what is already known (and, more to the point, assimilated) is not a complete description of reality. IMNSHO, that's a good normative baseline; in the eyes of theocrats and those whose power (and often personal identity) are directly tied to avoiding change, not so much. But in this sense, the laws of thermodynamics are "normative" — and it really helps to understand, or even just acknowledge, the fuzzy boundary between "technology" and "science"…
• The problems with illusory neutrality in the search for knowledge pale next to illusory knowledge in the search for power. The key assumption behind this remarkably ignorant editorial is simple: That there are clear, unmistakeable, and most importantly policy-directing answers to be had in the first place — and that these editorial writers have them (even if they're not revealing them yet). As (fictional character) Lord Marbury said, "It is about religion, and I can assure you that they do not share our fear of [thermonuclear] bombs." Or of bigotry.

  Unless and until the West — and, most especially, the descendants of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, and France, and the Ottoman Empire, and to a lesser but still significant extent Czechia and Ha'am — acknowledges that the map is not the territory, that Jerusalem is the City (and the City), the illusion that some single, superior solution exists will remain disturbingly persuasive. The argument will remain which one, when the real problem is the underlying religious bigotry overlaid with ethnic disdain — and the inherent failed-state destiny of every theocracy ever (including all religion-restricted governments not headed by formal members of religious hierarchies). It's important to remember that ethnographically, all descendants from the Levant are "Semitic," despite the self-defeating reflexiveness of how that term is used in the West; thus, my advocacy not of a two-state solution, or a one-state solution, but a zero-state solution. Merely establishing a recognized polity does nothing regarding the underlying problems, especially when the previous/inherited "solution" involved intentionally creating more problems for someone else while deflecting attention from one's own… antisemitism. An eighteenth-century imperial midset led to failures of imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Echoes of calls to prioritize the interests of "Real Americans" (largely based upon whose Protestant Caucasian ancestors were allowed to immigrate and when) are entirely intentional. So is the calling out of the descendants of Col McCormick for the same.

Losers!