Don't Have to Live Like a Refugee

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

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

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

Just Eat It

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

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

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

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

Vox Populi, Vox DEI

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

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

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

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

{quantity of each slice n=6}

≟

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their Lips Were Moving

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

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

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

After-Bedtime Sausage Platter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ministry of Silly Talks

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

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

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

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

  (1) Military plans, weapon systems, or operations

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

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

 
 

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

The 'net Has Ears

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring Is Here

Life, however, is not skittles and beer — not even a "lite beer."

• Musicians and composers can't afford even "lite beer" on their typical earnings. Spotify has been a disaster, funneling even more of the revenue streams to distributors (and definitely not the musicians or composers). Worse, the scramble for pay distributed via algorithm inhibits creativity.
• Things are little, if any, better for those who create art from text. Ignore the expected but there are too many books! lament (virtually always expressed by someone with a conflict of interest that's not very hard to find). Dig a little deeper and you'll find a somewhat flatter income distribution than Big Legacy Publishing provides¹ that nonetheless hides the poverty-level medians — which, in turn, means that the creators need another source of income. It probably won't be a support job elsewhere in the arts, though.
• Indeed, one need not even be a "content provider" to be ripped off by transferees. Ask yourself a question: How much of the revenue at ProQuest (or EBSCO) ever finds its way into the authors' account? (Ordinarily, less than Spotify pays musicians!) I can almost hear cryptolibertarians saying "But the authors agreed to the one-time-fee contracts! They have nothing to complain about!" I'll be in the corner, muttering about how contract enforceability presumes equal access to the relevant information, most especially future market conditions for a "transfer" of at minimum 70 years' duration (and that's if the author drops dead immediately after signing the contract).
• At least ProQuest and EBSCO actually have rights granted by the publisher (even if that's not always proper). Not everyone who, umm, "reads" electronic texts does. <SARCASM> Oh, my, did I inadvertently point to another potential source of LLM training materials that really is public domain? If only the standard of writing in those materials wasn't so poor… </SARCASM>
• The push to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion often goes more than a little bit too far. It's almost like they don't care that their real motivations are in full view. The one thing they're far too careful about is they hide who's actually going the work… not the signature on the orders but their text…
• If it's spring, barbecue season can't be too far off. Even — especially? — on Capitol Hill.

Hand me that bag of peanuts, please. No, the other one.

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1. There really isn't a good term here short of snark. "Traditional publishing" ignores that the "tradition" — measured by "most titles," the only independently verifiable count — until just about a century ago was a vanity publishing deal. "Commercial publishing" is my usual term, but it seems a bit inapt in considering the commerce of publishing.

Dress Right… Dress!

Speculative fiction isn't prophetic — or at least not in the sense of predicting, in detail, what will actually happen. That goes exponentially for filmed speculative fiction, which leaves no time to ponder between sentences, little opportunity to back up and reread a passage. Instead, it uses a perspective shift to think about something in the present, ranging from destruction of multiple civilizations through misunderstanding and a hubristic desire to enlighten (e.g., Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (1995)) to use of utopian/dystopian tropes to comment on present social structure (more examples than I can conveniently count)¹ to the continued power of the Rule of Names — that names have and grant power over people and concepts — in even relatively-near-future "pure science fiction" stories (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin, The Diary of the Rose (1976)).

Sometimes, however…

CMDR LEVITT	Captain, I wasn't about to let Captain Hall get the rest of my crew killed defending [President] Clark's policies. I happen to disagree with those policies, but that doesn't mean I agree with your actions, either. It's not the role of the military to make policy.
CAPT SHERIDAN	Our mandate is to "defend Earth against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Now Clark has become that enemy. Your oath is to the [Earth] Alliance and to the people back home, not to any particular government.3
CAPT MACDOUGAN	You're splittin' the hair mighty thin, John.
CAPT SHERIDAN	Am I? Night Watch. Ministry of Peace. Ministry of Truth. Is this the same Alliance that you joined, or has it become something else? The orders you've been getting — do they represent the ideals of the Alliance… or of a dictatorship? You've been ordered to open fire on civilian targets! Is this what you signed on for? •  •  •  • I'd like you to join us. We'll kick out Clark, and the Night Watch, and the rest of that bunch, and we'll turn it over to the voters. Let them decide if what we did was right or wrong! Because in the final analysis, those are the people we work for.
No Surrender, No Retreat, Babylon-5 (Seas. 4 Ep. 15, 26 May 1997) at 37:42 et seq..

…those comments do have uncomfortable predictive value, often playing out in headlines and soundbites and social-media nonsense. The less said about what happens well out of public awareness, probably the better — if only because verification would be impossible without betraying at minimum personal confidences.

One final note to ponder: Voters make mistakes, too, especially when influenced by the Big Lie and/or believing that they can choose only a lesser evil. The alternative — as the course of history illustrates — is almost inevitably worse, and perhaps especially so when an electoral loser foments insurrection.

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1. From a classical-logic perspective, both utopian and dystopian fictions operate by exaggeration. In that sense, they form the fourth type of speculative fiction, with significant overlaps with at least one of the other types, usually science fiction. See, e.g., George Orwell, 1984 (1949); see also, e.g., Alan Moore & David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (ser. 1982–85); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974); Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888).

   The logical landmine in utopian/dystopian fiction is that the means by which the society depicted has been constructed seldom get more than a paragraph — and in the exceptional instances that do pay attention to means of transformation, everything is an off-stage fait d'accompli. Even those epistolic passages in 1984 from Emmanuel Goldstein's "treatise" are mere theory. The actual events appear nowhere, and certainly not with any detail comparable to even a synopsis.

2. See generally James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890); see also Ursula K. Le Guin, The Rule of Names (1964). I think that's enough distracting literary theory for the moment.
3. It is entirely not a coincidence that this oath tracks that of American officers… both military and others. But that is about as close as B5 ever gets to discussing the means by which that universe came to be; at most, there's a presumption of future American hegemony, which was all too plausible two years after the First Gulf War while the Soviet Union was breaking up into its historical antecedants, reflected further in titles, ranks, and monolinguism. Not to mention that it was on American TV.

Mandatory Response

You, or someone you know, may have received an e-mail from the "Department of Government Efficiency" requiring a response listing what you did last week, If so, and if any portion of the job requires access to or working with confidential personal or government information, I recommend this response:

During the week beginning {date}, 2025, I [REDACTED ON NATIONAL SECURITY GROUNDS, SEE E.O. 13526 (2009) AND 13556 (2010), BOTH ORDERS AVAILABLE FOR INSPECTION AT THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES].

The e-mails are being sent by persons/parties via a system not authorized to contain classified information… and mere fiat granting a security clearance does not either magically authorize use of that system, or give the identified recipient a need to know that information (including sufficient detail allowing a hostile party to know which programs are/were active during that period), or provide any assurances that the identified recipient is the only one who will actually see that response. If there's one subject that is inherently and laughably "inefficient" in a market economy, it's the protection of confidential data — and, therefore, someone working for a Department of Efficiency has no need to know about it.

Bonus: Referring to the National Archives as an authoritative source is also the appropriate response to weaponization of the job status of individuals at the National Archives. But I'm mean that way.

Recess Appointment

Well, that was both appalling and unsurprising: A couple days ago, middle-school bullies canned the skinny kid on TV, primarily for the "offenses" of being both insufficiently worshipful of those doing the canning and already under so much stress at home that he really couldn't do much in response.

It was appalling because they just didn't care about the impression left by doing their bullying in public, nor of the substance of the bullying. Let's not consider that there were no adults in the room at all, let alone any with the authority or ability to "redirect" matters. Neither should we consider that the skinny kid was already offering to hand over his lunch money, but attempted public humiliation was more important to the bullies than actually exploiting their extortion.

It was unsurprising because both of the guys doing the canning have histories of being bullies — one relying on his father's status to evade actual discipline, the other on advantages of a kind he later denied and then attacked as related to accommodations he considered unfair. "Unfair" like "demonstrates empathy for others (and Others)," like "upholds principle instead of personal advantage," like "uses an advanced degree in an area related to that advanced degree." (Their gang is all too similar.)

It's been half a century since I was putting up with this shit in middle school. The adults were just as ineffective (not to mention uncaring and themselves devoted to a slightly different manner of bullying) then. The stakes were, admittedly, somewhat lower…

New! Improved! 60% Less Political!

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

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

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

I did say "mostly."