Unavoidably Delayed

Unscheduled tech challenges delayed this platter of link sausages. Don't worry, though: With modern preservative techniques, they're just as fresh and wholesome as they ever were. Admittedly that's "not very much," but at least I'm not charging more for any extra ingredients.

• Censorship pisses me off. It doesn't matter whether it's general "think of the children's morals" bullshit (all too often originating with truly upstanding "community leaders"), or just harassment of academics who (peacefully) undermine Establishment narratives (presuming he makes it out). Not so ironically, but rather predictably, many of the prospective censors haven't actually read the books themselves, and just don't get that with many entertainers, "It's an act, lady!" Hell, they're doing better in Blighty.

  Dammit, the entire point of "freedom of speech," and in general of "representative democracy," is that you just might learn something if you hear from — and more particularly listen to — people whose viewpoints vary from yours. It's rather interesting how few of those advocating censorship (and restrictive visions of "morality") have, or have had, those "good factory jobs" on which some want American education to focus (entirely unlike this guy, of course). What that implies about limiting education and libraries and bookstores and music to unchallenging, preapproved pablum is not very favorable; but you'd have to hear it first…

• …which won't happen anywhere near the Pentagon if Major Major Major gets his druthers. Fortunately, it appears that at least some media outlets give at least lip service to their constitutional role over their financial advantage. Right now, that is; we'll see in three to six months, won't we? Not at FEMA, though. Or the Department of Justice. And maybe Blighty has similar problems, so I'm rescinding the faint praise buried in the preceding sausage's ingredient list (right after sodium erythrobate), unlimited surveillance being the flip side of supressing journalistic "oversight."
• How about something a little cheerier? (Uhoh — when he says something like that it's usually anything but.) Consider the social advances that might be made by "AI"-based inventions and patents — at least while they're not hallucinating — and in music, especially the quasiindustrial kind.
• Meanwhile, musicians and authors continue to be underpaid as gamblers unqualified to either perform music or write books end up making all of the critical decisions about which ones to distribute and how to promote them. Not to mention that pay scale in the first place; it simply would not do for expectations of prosperity, or even bland middle-class comfort, of actual practitioners in the arts to take any profit-making potential away from trust-fund kids and techbros riding their luck as if it reflects actual merit, or enhances their private collections of objects in a way reminiscent of formalized magic.
• All of which is substantially less disturbing — at least to nerds like me, of whom there appear to relatively few (perhaps for the best) — than rows over the pending (purported) "Restatement of Copyright" that blithely ignores that at least in the US, we already have a Restatement of Copyright. For all its flaws, the Nimmer treatise is treated almost exactly like a Restatement, quite similarly to other (flawed!) Restatements like Conflicts of Law and Torts. Of course, the "guiding members" of the committee pushing the Restatement and I have had our disagreements in the past, especially regarding misuse of mislabelled, cherry-picked evidence to support a predisposition. It's even been in public, more than once. So I'm not precisely the most disinterested, neutral evaluator of this ALI effort; just because I believe many of its precepts and interpretations are so wrong that they're unworthy of being adopted by the ALI doesn't mean you should believe me uncritically. Which rather brings this ring of link sausages back to the first one, doesn't it?

Another Eye

…for another eye

'til everyone is blind

— Tommy Sands, "There Were Roses" (c. 1985)

I'll just cringe as they gouge a few more eyes in the Levant — a region far more volatile (and historically gefickt) than Northern Ireland — on the second anniversary of an atrocity. Remember (or, in practice, forget) that "Never Again" is meaningless unless it applies to everyone, else one ends up with purity tests for who is AmericanJewish enough to be entitled to take a turn as the bully. That the abused have a strong predisposition to become abusers themselves is at most an explanation — not an excuse, or even a particularly noncringeworthy rationalization. Of course, Mr Sands himself recognized this all too well…

<SARCASM> All that matters is protecting the right grandchildren. None of the others deserve the same consideration. It's not like that neglect encourages anyone else. </SARCASM> If that's too woke for you: The opposite of woke is not righteous anger but coma.

Of course, I could make much more inflammatory comments here. I could describe the responsibility of European elites for the inevitability of this particular situation, through their own maneuverings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without regard to more than two millenia of history (with footnotes). I could note the sub rosa need for more and more territory… by everyone involved. I could note the uniform history of theocracies creating Torquemadas — and, worse yet, post hoc rationalizations therefore (and even veneration of) — and nod at every government within a thousand kilometers of Gaza, whether overtly or otherwise. But for today, I'll just question the company being kept — historical, logical, ethical. And express the almost-certainly-futile hope for some adult behavior in the Levant (generally absent since, oh, the start of recorded history).

Sublieutenant Ogilvy Reporting for Duty

Clean-shaven (however, no imported razor blades are authorized on base!). Definitely not fat or female. And probably not being led or trained by experienced flag officers (not always a bad thing — ask the ghosts of Ypres about the benefits of moving General Haig's drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin — but not an unalloyed good thing either).

Rated I-22: The intellectually- and/or humor-impaired are severely cautioned. This blawg entry contains scenes of intense satirical content and sarcasm, and may be inappropriate for sociopaths struggling with feelings of inferiority. If you're upset that this warning only followed the opening credits, too bad — you're here anyway, might as well finish.

• Here in true-Blue Seattle, we're getting ready to resist any potential deployment of military force (after it finishes off Portland's miscreants, but they might deserve it…). I was unable to record the session I observed last week, but here's a representative example of using Native American ordnance under demonstration conditions just west of downtown.

  Of course, after forty years of the both-parties imperative for government to meet marketplace standards of "efficiency" when the purpose of government is to operate where markets cannot, even in this liberal enclave, any deployed troops will not get to where they're "needed" because the roads are somewhere between falling apart and under emergency repair.

• There is, however, one group of extremely dangerous noncitizens against whom it would be appropriate — if, in the end, probably futile — to deploy military force: Libertarian crypto dragons.
• What, that's too unlikely (not to mention too likely to include supporters of the current Administration)? Maybe the Administration should consider attacking H'wood, and specifically actors who can't show they're authorized to work in the US, and have no long-form birth certificate.

  Ms Shoard's piece rather misses the point, however. AI actors can't join unions like SAG. They won't demand residuals. They won't skip out on soul-eating publicity tours. They won't rebel against studio standards concerning "discreditable lifestyles" (at least not until being hosted on a Mac gets the opprobrium it deserves). They won't marry renowned human rights lawyers on the way to becoming "second-rate movie star[s] and failed political pundit[s]" (and probably can't be directors or scriptwriters, either — at least not without substantial… reprogramming). They won't be employees requiring constant supervision. Plus, plastic surgeons aren't the most-vehemently-pro-MAGA segment of the medical profession, so who cares if they lose customers?

• Wait a moment. The government is in shutdown. Shouldn't that mean we don't have to listen to any government official (or wannabes) for a while? That would make a government shutdown a good thing… Meanwhile, the "deficit hawks" and "debtmongers" who are actually behind this shutdown are carefully not acknowledging that the shutdown will increase both borrowing costs and borrowing necessities to end it — thereby increasing both the deficit and the cost of servicing already-existing debt (and probably the cost of issuing new debt instruments, whether in support of new spending or to replace existing ones as they mature).
• At least I'm not busy undermining American commercial music. Today, anyway; I'm taking the day off, so I'll leave it to Ms Grimes and friends (even if they weren't as subversive as some of the vinyl I've got — still).

Oktoberfestwurst

Civilization ends at Quantico. Today.^†

• Speaking of obsessions with appearances (see also the note below), I suppose I should be happy that my appearance allows me to pass as an upstanding American of northwest-European ancestry. The contrast with some other people brings the world beyond Mayberry into a videographer's focus.
• One meme that continually annoys me is celebrities (of all kinds) misusing their platforms to spout bullshit, despite their best intentions (which are sometimes, but not always, good intentions). This all too often results from a passionate and personal interest not backed up by any study or exposure beyond their own personal experiences — an argument from authority, with the authority in question being celebrity and not expertise. Two current examples:
  • Jennifer Lawrence — a talented actor — went for the soundbite and missed when she proclaimed that Israel's atrocities in Gaza are "no less than genocide." They are certainly no less than atrocities; they are certainly no less indefensible. However, precisely because the stated target is a political opponent (however virulent and unjustified its positions are), the war crimes at issue are not technically genocide — which requires as its target an ethnoreligious identity.

    Ms Lawrence is right to be outraged. But words matter, especially when they're technical terms, especially near the eightieth anniversary of establishing their meaning — and consequences. That's not just for this instance, either: It's for the future.

  • Ms Lawrence's error is misuse of a technical term (encouraged, admittedly, by all-too-common misuse of that term in general discourse, often by those who should know better). This rather pales, however, next to a celebrity author accusing the actor who played the Mary Sue character in films of that author's most-famous work of "ignorance" for stating views closely aligned with that character — even if the subplot encompassing those views never made it on screen. Perhaps Ms Rowling's views have evolved since SPEW made its way onto the page a couple decades past. Perhaps there's a (private) incident or two in Ms Rowling's past that explain her feeling threatened by those whose gender identity does not match their at-birth genitalia (I feel no need to delve into it; many people have similar otherwise-unexplainable personal reactions, distinct from outright bigotry). But proclaiming that an actor with significant on-set and full-production exposure to the film industry — not to mention an education split between Oxford and the Ivy League — is "ignorant" about the full scope of, and personal rights concerning, those issues from the security of one's Scottish castle without disclosing any nonconclusory basis is more than a bit self-defeating. Or, at minimum, self-deceptive.

    If there's oblivious ignorance in this tiny teapot tempest, it's in the author's extension of unstated personal experiences or perceptions to universal declarations of (non)rights. Sadly, that's far too common a problem; the fundamental difficulty is that "civil rights" cannot be founded on whose turn it is to be the bully.

• On a slightly less obviously emotional controversy (but in the end equally so), consider the value of "a book," whether for outright piracy or to libraries. As to the latter, it appears that the publishers have learned at least a little bit since US v Apple, Inc. — they've done much better at hiding any price-fixing conspiracy from view, just as they have with "e-book royalties are 25% of net." Why yes, I am suggesting the (probable) existence of multiple loci of antitrust perfidy in commercial publishing.
• In a result remarkably similar to "dog bites mailcarrier," a study that appears to have adequate controls has concluded that anti-phishing training for employees doesn't work. What would work better is always reading e-mail as plain text, so that any mismatch between where a link says it's going and its actual address is immediately obvious; that, however, would conflict with sales-and-marketing memes and graphic design pushed elsewhere by many employers…
• I suppose we could just continue to obsess over the unfitness for purpose of tax systems and burdens. Yeah, that's absolutely going to involve fewer hidden agendas, conflicts of interest, ignorance, and bigotry in favor of inherited advantage of original position.

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†  The contrast here with the CINC is beside the point — he's a civilian. The real problem is that the height-and-weight standards (not official) are largely established with a view toward "proper military appearance" (and fit into existing vehicles/aircraft/vessels) and not to capability as a warrior. A 177cm man weighing in at 95kg is more than 10kg over the standard but suitable as a starting running back. This is just slightly off… as was being a rail-thin football player (the other football) at the other end of the scale. "Warrior ethos" my avulsed toenails.

The contrast with the slack/missing mental fitness standards must be left for another time.

Don't Touch That Remote!

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled program platter. Unlike the local Sinclair-owned ABC station. Apparently, Sinclair has no decency.

• So, the military academies may accept the so-called "Classical Learning Test" as part of a candidate's admission package. Somehow, I suspect that text neglects some parts of an education in the Classical Age, so I'm not certain that will be fit for purpose. The academies already have lots of educational blindspots; I'm not sure that encouraging candidates to have even more fits the concept of a citizen-soldier-officer.
• I suppose nobody should be surprised given this Administration's hiring imperatives and screening of acceptable journalists. Not that I've ever seen either of those in action before… oh, wait…
• One might think the current Administration has been inspired by Disney — notwithstanding that Mr Kimmel was/is broadcast on a network subsidiary thereof, and that the current corporation isn't the actual creator. Put that together with largely illogical territorial restrictions and other overclaiming of copyright rights and… it all seems quite usual.^†
• Then there's the information-security-system version of a gun-nut slogan:

  Security systems don't spill secrets;

  People spill screts.

  Schlage didn't produce an "insecure lock" when the resident left a spare key under the flower pot by the front door. Unfortunately, the packaging of passkey systems — and especially the use of "the cloud" and "automatic device synching" — practically suggests that the flowerpot really is the best place to leave your spare key…

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†  This is probably more about civil procedure (at least in the US) than it is about the true substantive rights at issue. Burdens and types of proof, remedies, and a variety of other considerations put an anvil sufficient to knock Wile E. Coyote into next week on the scales in favor of suing under, or at least including, a copyright-infringement theory. (Oops, wrong studio…)

Who Controls the Past Controls the Future

Forty years ago, an attempted "lone-actor" assassination of a politicoreligious leader — blamed upon an out-of-power political disorganized viewpoint with trappings of religious dissent — was less successful than the recent attack on Mr Kirk. The 1985 attack was followed by months of vicious, and yet at times almost randomized, suppression of all opposition, usually asserting that all opponents were ungodly and dangerous to the very fabric of society, invoking religious orthodoxy as the foundation for determining a viewpoint's (or individual's) merit. This included cancelling-although-they-didn't-call-it-that of a prominent comedian.

If you searched your memory, or even the 'net, for attempted assassinations in the US in 1985, you're probably wondering if I was riffing on New York City mafiosi or a cult in Oregon. I'm afraid you were looking in the wrong place entirely, at events not nearly as parallel. It was that "in the US" that let you down; my source material was a few thousand kilometers distant (N.B. despite the URL, this item is not paywalled).

Why yes, I am comparing the MAGA movement as epitomized by Turning Point to extremist theocrats whose justifications for particular doctrines rooted in bigotry shifted unpredictably between the archly political and sanctimoniously religious, depending upon rhetorical convenience of the moment more than anything else. This inherent tension between two clauses of the First Amendment — free exercise and sectarian nonestablishment — is one that the Founders were themselves too close to to recognize, and their rhetoric failed them. And us.^†

The true "Orwellian nightmare" alluded to in the quotation-title of this post is founded upon an intentional rhetorical device in the service of totalitarianism — the depersonalization built into Newspeak. Most of the time, people who quote 1984 actually misquote it by inserting personal pronouns: "He who controls…" This necessarily misses the point of Newspeak, which more than just reinforcing whatever present views the Party wished to present was about removing the ability to dissent by removing the individual: No individuals, therefore no individual thought, therefore no dissent. The irony that the only path toward understanding of the magnetism of the distressingly parallel religious nationalism of 1980s Iran and 2020s MAGA/Turning Point/hopefully-not-all-of-America requires rejecting Newspeak and embracing consideration of the individual at a fundamentalist (!) rhetorical level is definitely too far from mainstream discourse in the respective communities. They don't want anyone to even have the ability to express such dissent. And that's rather my point.

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† Perhaps the greatest irony — and one in distinct contrast to the "beliefs" of some prominent Founders — is that neither the language of the First Amendment nor the language of acceptable political discourse since acknowledges even the existence, let alone validity, of choosing the ultimate disentangling of politics and religion: Rejection of religion. With very rare exceptions, atheism and agnosticism are just as much a part of the American conversation as (in America's cramped perception, anyway) sex was to upper-middle-class Victorians — that is, let's not talk about the icky thing and maybe it'll go away.

The Blame Game

Since I like to think my emotional maturity is greater than eight-year-olds excusing their playground bullying by yelling "He started it!" — or having their gang members do so for them — I'm obviously unsuited for contemporary political discourse. That said, I am completely unsurprised by the utter bullshit in both rhetoric and other reactions surrounding Mr Kirk's untimely and inappropriate demise.

It was an assassination, and worse yet a private-actor-on-private-actor one. Therefore it was wrong. That Kirk engaged in hate speech, that his organization did so, continues to do so, and will do so long into the future is just as irrelevant as a "justification" for the atrocity of assassinating a non-government actor as Hamas engaged/engages/will engage in hate speech has as "justification" for the atrocity of the Israeli response to the people of Gaza in the last two years. Put another way: There is no number of wrongs n that makes a right — and that's especially so when we've got unaccountable private actors doing the counting… or identifying what is "right."

The FCC chair can go perform unnatural acts upon himself with a splintered 2x4 for his threats and overreaction to a less-than-fully-informed comedian's speculation about the accused assassin; so can management at ABC. Kimmel's remarks were inappropriate… and entirely expected in the current media environment. The FCC chair going medieval in response because those remarks could have been interpreted as attacking an ideological group that said chair needs to at least placate violates said chair's oath of office. Hint: Comedians tend toward indecency in their remarks; that Mr Arouet had to spend a significant part of his life in exile is sufficient "precedent" regarding government misconduct in response.

None of which is to excuse Kirk, Turning Point, bigotry, or resurrection of the Know-Nothings rebranded as "MAGA." <SARCASM> Of course, you should expect that reaction from this blawg; its author is an intellectual. </SARCASM> An intellectual who despises hate speech, holds those who rely upon it to advance their (seldom entirely disclosed) agendas and self-interests not just in but beneath contempt… and who, having been professionally concerned with the consequences of active and partisan suppression of hate speech for decades, believes that the medium- and long-term effects of suppressing hate speech are worse (more often than not). So, Mr Carr: It appears that you want to add an eighth word to the seven that a misguided Supreme Court said you can't say on radio — at least when it's applied to someone other than the speaker.

Neither is it to excuse Kimmel's poor word choice (at best, if one believes him that his remarks on antisocial media were out of context) or readiness to use precisely the same mechanism as Mr Kirk did routinely: Equation of a disagreeable (even irrational) belief on one issue with membership in an unsavoury group (especially when that unsavoury group is far less than unified). There's a difference between being utterly disgusted with views and viewpoints, and attempting to excuse execution for thoughtcrime.

I therefore sentence both Mr Kimmel and Mr Carr — and, once I track them down (and their parents), the decisionmaker(s) at ABC — to thirty minutes' detention after school, during which they will write "I will not try to be Pyotr Rachkovsky in public" on the whiteboard. Unaided by any generative-AI or cut-and-paste function. Spelling counts, although I'm not going to require proper Cyrillic rendering of that proper name. And that's the end of it — the cricket paddle will be used only for striking cricket balls.

A Different Drummer

Unfortunately, the spelling here is just about as good as Nigel's understanding of volume controls…

• Perhaps a prediction for the future: Brazilian ex-President convicted of plotting a coup. From all appearances, more than just plotting — however unsuccessful in execution. At least there was a trial…
• …which is more than some people get. Like this one. No joy here — his message was repulsive, and his public conduct and organization not much less so, but he was still a human being (and more to the point a civilian^†). As the entire point of a democratic-republican form of government is that it's supposed to operate by persuasion, assassinations of those who profess opposing viewpoints reflect something much darker, more insecure — even impotent. <SARCASM> It's worked so well in this country for suppressing opposing views in the past, hasn't it? </SARCASM>
• Meanwhile, the impending demise of the Department of Education will leave untouched an educational void right down the street, whether measured on some standardized test or otherwise. Maybe we can get him a good factory job, for much the same reasons as that first sausage on the platter implies…
• Ignore that e-mail from a Nigerian prince — or, perhaps, ponder its connection to the other sausages on this platter (looks like I forgot to separate the links before serving — again).

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†  That matters for Reasons. Even if one considers the current American "conversation" a manifestation of an ongoing civil war…

The Anthropic (Lack of) Principle

Some e-mails and others' blog entries lead me to believe that the class definition in the settlement regarding Anthropic's use of pirated material as training material for its "AI" is causing some needless confusion. Slightly rewording it, the class members who can recover are those who:

• Hold the copyright,
• in works leeched by Anthropic to "train"¹ its "AI" systems
• that were, for US works, registered with the Copyright Office
• with an effective date preceding the leeching
• and within five years after first publication.

It's those last two qualifications that are causing the confusion, because they're not about copyright law — they are, instead, about the technicalities of class certification, and specifically about the problem of class representives having circumstances typical of the class and that the common questions presented predominate. However, it does relate back to copyright law, in a way, too — because works falling outside of these parameters and leeched in this scheme still violates that work's copyright, but it would require further litigation. The incredibly ill-advised registration system — which is inconsistent with the Berne Convention's disdain for "formalities," but for both historical and hidden-agenda reasons beyond the scope here continues to be part of US copyright law — has two provisions that are prone to abusive litigation tactics. The class definition excludes those tactics by defining otherwise valid copyright claims out of the class.

The easiest to understand, and the one with the most validity, is that the effective date of registration² needs to precede the date on which the material was misappropriated by Anthropic. This isn't about copyright validity, but about the availability of certain remedies under § 412. Since those remedies are important parts of this class action, they've been forced in through the class definition.³

It's much more difficult to accept the "registered within five years" limitation. A registration can be made at any time that a work's copyright is in force. The "five years" comes from an evidentiary qualification in § 410 of the Copyright Act: A registration whose effective date is within five years of first publication is prima facie valid, but a later registration is subject to challenge more generally. Excluding the post-five-years-registered works is a litigation decision made in negotiating this settlement (and in the class allegations in the complaint), because it appears that none of the proposed class representatives falls into that group and the additional squirreliness involved in validating those registrations might theoretically impair the "common question" aspect of class certification.

Unfortunately, that last point in particular has been misinterpreted in a number of places as meaning that more than five years after first publication, it's too late to register at all (instead of just for this particular lawsuit). Frankly, that's what some parties here want you to think, because without registration there's no individual cause of action that can be heard by the courts (§ 411, although this is a claim-processing rule and not jurisdiction⁴).

The fundamental problem is that the publishing industries — some more than others — have been at best slovenly in registering copyrights, even when the publishing contract requires such registration.⁵ (It was worse under the 1909 Act, when that failure to register also forfeited the copyright itself.) It is still worth doing late registrations (so long as the term hasn't expired and the registrant is even more careful than usual to proofread the application and ensure it's fully truthful and accurate). This suit, after all, is not going to resolve all questions regarding leeching of material under copyright… and the next set of class counsel to come along, or even individual lawyers, might be more aggressive. However, they can't file if there's no registration.

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1. I'm just not going to express my contempt for this sort of deceptive misuse of language here. Although that misuse is endemic to the general discussion of "AI" and "generative AI" and "chatbots," the point of this blawg entry is misunderstanding of copyright law by affected authors (and potentially many others).

   Don't worry, you sleazebuckets. I'll deal with your intellectual dishonesty and intentionally deceptive acts and practices more directly another time. Bwahahahahaha!

2. Although really not relevant here, the effective date of registration is ordinarily the earliest of the date of actual application (including payment of fees) or — if that application date is 90 days or less after first publication — the date of first publication. Naturally, the "date of first publication" is defined in the Copyright Act only for "phonorecordings."
3. We'll pretend, for the moment, that § 505 provides the only way to recover attorney's fees. It doesn't; the rule governing class actions provides for attorney's fees (regardless of whether the cause of action otherwise provides for them), and on a far more generous basis than does the Copyright Act. Needless to say, I'm displeased with the confusion here, too.
4. Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick, 559 U.S. 154 (2010). This matters because federal class actions can include claims of dubious (or even no) subject-matter jurisdiction if pursued individually.
5. This failure constitutes a breach of contract by the publisher. On one hand, it's probably long past the statute of limitations, since the failure to register "should be" apparent to the author not long after publication. Creative lawyers might use such breaches — especially when part of a pattern or practice — to strike other defenses offered by publishers for other breach-of-contract claims like failure to pay royalties; this is called the doctrine of unclean hands. Of course, the hands were a lot less clean when smearing linseed-oil-based inks…

Ghost Peppers and Classic Rock

This platter gets overspiced rather rapidly, I'm afraid. I'm just trying to cover the faint odor of rot from the less-than-wholesome ingredients.

• The least-spicy sausages on this platter are the IP-flavored ones. These days, IP-flavored almost certainly involves something calling itself "artificial intelligence", especially when hoist by its (their?) own petard. Of course, one need not rely on advanced technology to find IP perfidy — mere humans can breathe deception, too.
• Senator Turtle thinks the present somewhat resembles the past, specifically the 1930s? No, really?

  Leaving aside that he's almost got first-hand memories of the 1930s,¹ and the obvious and parallel counterproductive tariff bullshit, and the overobvious aspirations to become Reichskanzler just down the street from him — not to mention familiarly-named right wingers in the news in Italy — consider "lifestyle" problems all too familiar to the 1930s (as invoked without specific identification in the musical seasoning of this sausage). One might also consider, on a similar basis that also ignored intertwined side issues,² whether "lifestyle" problems like this one are more than just "lifestyle" problems.

  I suppose I'm expected to be happy that Senator Turtle showed up to the party, however late he is. Unfortunately, he showed up while the paid-off-the-books-below-minimum-wage janitorial gig workers were cleaning up afterward. So, no, I'm not happy. You shouldn't be, either — not even with that gold-plated kazoo you snatched from the table on your way out.

• At least it wasn't a gavel being snatched from the table by rude guests. The fundamental contradiction of completely distrusting the ICC's ability or intent to engage in actual, careful consideration of facts as part of the rule of law, especially when compared to internal dissembling amongst and concerning a plethora of bad actors (and by that I mean the target institutions, not the individual grantees) and/or treating "appalled by atrocities in the Levant, regardless of who commits them" as necessarily meaning "antisemitic," appears beyond the understanding of anyone involved. Which should surprise precisely no one.

  The usual aphorism has things precisely backward: Sure, he's our bastard, but he's still a bastard (and therefore untrustworthy). Delving into that is the ICC's role — even, and perhaps especially, when it's inconsistent with immediate interests.

• Of course, the ICC seldom sticks its nose into mere civil rights when violations are short of death. Whitesheetingwashing that is a domestic issue. (Foreign source chosen with malice aforethought.)
• And then there are apologists who get things partway right (and then implicitly expect praise for their vision and forthrightness). The fundamental problem with both that opinion piece and attacks on the "university system" is that they are searching for "the soul" and "the purpose" in the singular. The entire point of bringing scholarly development, and education, and research (distinct from mere "publication"), and public service together into a university is that there isn't a singular soul, a singular means of advancing civilization — that not all problems are nails to be pounded into well-seasoned wood produced off-campus by less-prestigious craftspeople, meaning in turn that the toolbox needs to be smarter than a box of hammers. Professors Russell and Patterson do not demonstrate any familiarity whatsoever with laboratory- or field-based research in their piece, nor with the interface and implications of with "social and political issues" at the core of their concerns; engineering, healthcare, etc. are right out. This tunnel vision disserves both their rhetoric and their conclusion and reminds me very much of what happened last Friday in St. James's Library. Then, as they're both law professors, an underinclusive understanding of "research" is probably to be expected.

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1. Presuming that there's no dementia involved… which, because I've had no direct observation relevant to that, is only an assumption. "Good faith," "grasp of reality," and "actual intelligence as distinct from cleverness" are each another issue entirely.
2. Cf. my late client (and friend) Mr Ellison's contribution to a six-decade-old TV series, and the implications of attempting to apply "alternate history" models in reverse. Not to mention the costs involved no matter what. <SARCASM> But then, externalizing costs is a good thing, right? It supports higher stock prices, and thus higher executive salaries and bonuses! </SARCASM>

Footlong Follies

Been busy doing statistical analysis of something cautioned against via cliché, so this sausage platter has not received an awful lot of care. As if anyone could tell from contemporary news cycles…

• Legal lore has it that a moderately competent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. A chain-store sub sandwich, however, requires more. It's possible that:
  • …smoked turkey and roast beef have qualified immunity, because there's no established statutory or judicial provision subjecting them to indictment for their discretionary condiments
  • …the US Attorney in question does not qualify as "moderately competent," so the legal lore doesn't apply
  • …this grand jury had exactly as much confidence in the rule of law as the US Attorney in question has expressed for the past few years on Faux News
  • …changes in culture have made the legal lore incorrect — ham sandwiches are generally beyond a contemporary grand jury's experience, due to the increasing prevalence of wraps and fancy variants like panini
  • …this grand jury did not find probable cause that the accused was doing anything other than providing free food to law-enforcement professionals
  • …the accused's intent was to return nonconforming merchandise to the sandwich store (that is just out of the picture in the photo in the linked article), and even this grand jury couldn't find probable cause otherwise
  • …someone on this grand jury was him/herself an immigrant, or perhaps the child of one, and persuasively whispered "Jim Crow" (or "Bull Connor"?) in the jury room
  • …the accused is or is related to a veteran and this grand jury had had enough
  • …this was a hammer in search of a nail, unable to find K Street on a map (further impaired by general reliance on dubious "GPS turn-by-turn directions")
• At least Denmark understands that books need to be just a little bit cheaper without further reducing authors' compensation while enriching noncreative distributors — like streaming has done for composers/songwriters/performers — without the corollary.
• Every so often, it's worthwhile reminding enthusiastic bookbanners that they need to, at minimum, carefully and closely read what they wish banned for themselves. Even when it's a notorious "forgery" (better description would be "propaganda sponsored by the Security Detachment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs"). Of course, actually reading goes very much against the mindset of the enthusiastic bookbanner, so perhaps I'm asking too much. I'd definitely be asking too much of the educational hierarchy in Oklahoma.
• We could just worry about government lies from the perspective of a government official. We'll just carefully forget to consider that (a) those lessons came at the hands of the party that individual is now representing, (b) that the lies were in the service of much the same policy imperatives that individual has supported (and continues to do so), (c) that individual didn't live through Vietnam and Watergate, so he has no concept of gambling occurring in Rick's casino, (d) that those clamoring to get into government (whether officeholders or challengers) don't have a better track record — including that individual, (e) that contemporaneous models for multiple-choice exams disfavor more than four choices.

Gov Mander's Territory

Gerrymandering is once again a thing. These battles between unaccountable gatekeepers — the elected legislators who pass the bills are almost never those who actually draw maps; instead, it's a combination of outside hired guns who lie about their actual purposes and "senior party leadership" seldom in elective office — demonstrate utter ignorance about, invidious stereotyping of, and contempt for voters.

Voters and districts do not belong to elected officials. Elected officials belong to the voters.

A distressingly-large, even dominant, aspect of gerrymandering is a result of continuing to apply eighteenth-century social concepts to even the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. During the eighteenth century, "born, lived, and died within 25 miles of point X" was the default; by the time the Voting Rights Act was passed more than half a century ago, it described only a minority, and today that minority is even smaller. During the eighteenth century, for those who "worked," the "workplace" was within two miles of the "residence" for well over 99% of the population; by the time of the VRA it was somewhere between 40 and 60% (depending upon the definition of "worked" and of the "workplace"), and today — even with the COVID remote-work-from-home disruption — it's probably less than 25%. Education, court appearances, government offices, libraries, shopping for both necessities and discretionary/luxury goods, internet access itself… the list goes on. And it's going to continue to change.

I therefore suggest, in an effort to prevent the legislators of America from being a burden on their voters or country, and for making them beneficial and responsive to the Public, that we minimize use of maps at all.¹ This modest proposal is to eliminate "first past the post" elections in all federally-established multimember electoral allocations and in as many others as possible, and instead use a combination of proportional representation and ranked-choice voting. Regardless of the exact mechanisms chosen, this would ultimately show far greater respect for the voter who, say, lives on the north side of Austin, Texas, but commutes to school/a job on the south side of San Antonio, or vice versa; or Baltimore and DC. Even more relevantly, consider other pairings like Naperville and Chicago, Redmond and Seattle, San Mateo and San Francisco — all of which represent a far-more-common circumstance than two major nationally-known cities whose centers are only an hour's drive apart (traffic permitting!).² The map is not the territory, and it's long past time that we actually acted like it — especially regarding elections, when many of the relevant boundaries have drawn themselves through behavior decades or more after being put in place by all-too-often marginally-literate sailors.

Of course, this is merely a "modest proposal": The probability of it even being taken seriously by people who have obtained power based upon electoral maps asymptotically approaches that of the current Administration nominating any current law professor at Columbia to any Supreme Court vacancy opening before the end of this year.³

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1. "Eliminate" would be even better, but there are multiple Constitutional problems with that, beginning with the fiction of "states." Rigid federalism is all well and good until somewhat gets hurt by the fights on the playground, like a little over a century and a half back… This particular modest proposal requires only statutory change, because the power of internal allocation is in fact committed to the states. See U.S. Const. Art. I § 4; cf. also Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) (declaring a federal right to voting equality within a state, but ultimately after remand deferring to state determination of methodology and division except when the methodology or division implicates another established federal right).
2. I'm afraid that the voter who lives in Kansas City, Kansas and commutes to Kansas City, Missouri; or lives in New Jersey and commutes to New York City or Philadelphia; or lives in Vancouver and commutes to Oregon — that is, has substantial personal and community connections to multiple states simultaneously — is SOL under the Constitution as it stands. Of course, voters who live in New Jersey are SOL for a lot of other reasons, albeit not nearly so compellingly as those who live in Illinois (let alone Cook County)…
3. With all due respect — no, with virtually no respect whatsoever: Bite me, Senator McConnell. Better yet, read both your oath of office and U.S. Const. Art. II § 2 cl. 2, and consider that they refer to the body as a whole and not any subpart thereof.