Impending "Birthday" Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

Established Sausage Platter

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

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

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

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

  But at least BigMedia isn't FIFA.

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

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

Dubious Competitions

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

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

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

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

An Unnatural Mixture

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

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

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

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

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

Pronouns

If we needed any proof that Major Major Major has no clue about being an officer and has been promoted well beyond any trivial evidence of competence — much like the origin of that name — it was clearly demonstrated with the graduation speech given at West Point.

“The battlefield does not grade on a curve, and you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy,” Hegseth told the cadets. “Combat is the ultimate test, and our best Americans must ace it.”

•  •  •

“West Point is set apart. It’s special. It’s above politics,” he continued. “Success here is based on merit. It’s how you perform that matters.”

This pretty definitively demonstrates that the Secretary of Law of Armed Conflict Violations Defense has no clue about what being a military officer requires.¹

To begin with, military leadership is entirely about throwing pronouns at the enemy:

We. Us. Our.

For all the acclaim for individual heroism (mis/over)stated damned near everywhere, military success is now — and, throughout the gunpowder-and-later era, always has been — about the collective. That's the entire bloody point of "boot camp." That's the historical basis for "military academies," where this ignoramus was spewing forth venom. Those collective pronouns are the only ones that matter; they're embedded in the entire bloody curriculum, and they should be. Indeed, they're actually the foundation for all of that "heroism," and the holiday we're celebrating tomorrow. Every Medal of Honor citation rightly emphasizes the choice of that collective pronoun over any variation on an individual pronoun, or even the existence of a personal interest that might conceivably be expressed in a pronoun. Those are the real "identity politics" that are at issue for all military officers, and most especially for those O–1s to O–3s (lieutenants and captains/ensigns and lieutenants) most responsible for building "unit cohesion"… and substitution of the collective pronouns for individual ones. One does not forge a flexible, adaptable, efficient, and above all competent collective from individuals without respecting those individuals.

If West Point was truly "above politics" (and similarly for the other academies), it wouldn't be based in political favor… like, say, the fundamental admission requirement of political approval for 17- and 18-year-olds. More to the point, though, it isn't — and can't — be only individual merit that matters. Perhaps the best indication of this is a simple one, linking right back into tomorrow's holiday: Living recipients of the Medal of Honor — who have, if anyone has, demonstrated "military merit" — don't become service Chiefs of Staff (or, for the Navy, Chiefs of Naval Operations). They don't even attain flag rank, or the top enlisted grades.³

Maybe Major Major Major is (marginally) qualified to wear a fake mustache and avoid actually engaging with anyone for whom that office has leadership responsibilities.⁴ That does not equate to being qualified to expound on principles of military leadership — not even by virtue of the office. Neither does it concern expounding on the relationship of linguistics and social dynamics to leadership requirements in a military drawn from the entirety of a nation of over 300 million — not even if by adding a new career track for ensuring right-thinking among the officers corps. But then, the политический руководитель/représentant en mission/Nationalsozialistische Führungsoffiziere is perhaps less innovative, or effective, than those who have ardently avoided learning about military history (even recent military history) might think… let alone learning about either military doctrine or actual leadership.

That wasn't a speech about, or to, the cadets. And, as such, it's an abuse of the cadets and a dereliction of duty (by an individual not subject to Article 92… or Article 133). If anyone has demonstrated that they're sly, cunning, and bears considerable watching — without much sign of intelligence — it's this… individual, who would far rather have adjectives of intolerance applied to themself than any pronoun whatsoever.

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1. Unlike an awful lot of armchair generals — and armchair pundits, journalists, ideologues, politicians — I have substantial personal experience. The silence on these issues coming from the officer community, especially from those with command and critical midlevel staff experience, isn't precisely deafening; it's merely definitive.
2. We'll leave for another time exactly whom Memorial Day was originally intended to honor. It's not just that that disrespects every other conflict, but that it's a great example of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of "original public meaning" as binding on later, noncomparable circumstances. This is exemplified by the later extension to a larger conception of "us" to include "the ones who came back."
3. Admittedly, an awful lot of Medal of Honor recipients — nominees, even — are either deceased or grievously wounded preventing later service. It's the complete absence among those who remain eligible for such promotions that matters here, not a comparative statistical study. <SARCASM> Unless, that is, individual heroism is not the only measure of merit; that there is diversity of measures, and even an admission that measuring now and from the past is — as the SEC has required investment advisors to acknowledge for decades — an inadequate predictor of the future (even if it's the only basis available). </SARCASM>
4. In an ironic counterpoint, this Major Major Major spends all of his time apparently in public and preparing for public appearances, rather unlike his namesake. Indeed, he's rather more like Yossarian; I make no accusations or judgments regarding signatures on paperwork.

Zombies

So the DNC commissioned a "post-mortem" on its failures in the 2024 election… that even aside from its other flaws (like actually providing/citing evidence) failed to consider whether the deceased had multiple terminal conditions, and most especially whether any of the contributing factors had public-health implications. In no particular order, this purported death certificate didn't just fail, but actively refused, to engage with the deceased's pre-election debilitating conditions:

• Ask yourself a question, but without using any lookup or reference materials: Who established party strategy, and how were they selected? In particular, who "elected" Mr Martin as the Chair of the DNC? Probably people like this asshole, but the processes are so hidden even from party members and activists that they might as well be the Party Congress of 1927.
• The primary characteristic required of candidates who are actually endorsed by the Party is loyalty to the existing party leadership — and, in particular, to the part of the leadership selected by the process questioned above. The young, the insurgent, the doctrinally-aligned-but-independently-thinking, the questioners of that "established" doctrine, the different-priorities-within-established-doctrine, are absent from the ballot and from this report. These are precisely who were exploited by the Trumpistas.
• The purportedly left-leaning core of academia is completely absent from consideration, either as intellectual/research resources or for fine-tuning policy and candidate selection. Failure to listen to the most-discernable segment who are already thoroughly aligned with one's loyalty/doctrine (at least according to the opposition) seems rather like failure to wash one's hands in the kitchen, let alone before performing surgery.
• There has not been a major change in party leadership, roughly equivalent to allowing Typhoid Mary to continue preparing her peach desserts after diagnosis. In this instance, the typhoid is inherited wealth — and these idiots put Mary in the White House with their neglect.
• There's been no attempt to deal with the obvious demographic of superannuated leadership and candidates. Even if not a formal ballot qualification, no party that expects to not stumble after Biden, Feinstein, Pelosi, Madigan (see above) and … I'd break the internet listing all of the "old, wise party elders" — who were also electoral candidates — who had instead demonstrated they were decrepit, hidebound, and incapable of adaptation to change. No coalition actually seeking either power or policy consideration should be endorsing candidates for office who are eligible for Social Security/Medicare. At least not until we've got, at minimum, "Medicare for all" that puts healthcare back in the hands of providers (for all the inefficiencies) instead of insurers (for all the individual neglect); yet that's precisely how both parties are structured. My g-g-generation's time has gone; we didn't die before we got old, we monopolized the ballot instead.

And that's just a starting point. (The RNC is no better after its utter failures along the same lines that — in the 2024 election, but not on all indications in the forthcoming election — just haven't proven fatal. Yet.)

This patient was a chronic alcoholic, long-term smoker (or at least resident of smoke-filled rooms), at least fifteen years over demographic life expectancy, and hadn't exercised effectively in nearly half a century. A death certificate citing only a single fall in a nursing home as the cause of death is… not professionally (or legally) sufficient. Especially so because it leaves the zombies in charge. Democracy doesn't work by "predisposition" and "loyalty to incumbents" — it works by persuasion. That both parties appear to have completely ignored that demonstrates that neither is fit for leadership roles in a democratic republic; perhaps not even a dictatorship of the proletariat (and/or bourgeosie, and/or feudal overlords)…

Joe Isuzu Salesmanship Award Platter

Almost no-one engages with the undercurrent: Isuzu was, in fact, selling not-so-great vehicles. Sort of like LLM-based chatbots^† selling not-so-great answers ("if the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum"). Nor with the place that most deception takes place: The "Finance Manager," because deception includes intentional omission (especially when disclosure is already required).

• Speaking of deception not just by, but about the ownership and profitability of, LLM-based chatbots, here's an excellent example of "Why can't they both lose?" The lawsuit over whether El0n Mu5k lost billyuns more when OpenAI changed its "charitable" structure has exposed that nobody (or almost nobody) in the industry trusts one of the decisionmakers — and the other one's trustworthiness (or lack thereof) was already, shall we say, in the public domain.

  Further, it's not a "charitable structure" when virtually all of "management" is busy becoming multimillionaires with top-1% compensation packages, nor when one initial financier sues because he didn't earn a far-above-market return on his financing package.

• Which is marginally less dishonest than entertainment-industry royalty accounting and practices. And that's in a part of the industry in which end-user sales are "certified" by a third party (which is admittedly impaired by conflicts of interest so severe that even the tobacco industry wouldn't engage in them)… unlike, say, print publishing.
• At least Mr Clinton isn't a (starving) early-career artist… although once upon a time, he was. This exposes the serious logical problem with entertainment-industry compensation for content providers (individually, like authors, or multielement/multirole teams, like cinema): The circular transfer of "greater risk justifies greater reward" in both directions between individual transactions and commercial-segment-wide practices.
• Financially, all of the above represents a self-defeating type of cost-minimization: Don't pay for what you think you can get away with taking for free, because that will only harm someone else. Even when that "someone else" is a party that you rely upon for continuing production of the raw materials of your business model (and even when your business model is excused as "charitable"). I find their lack of payment… disturbing, and at least equally so as to permission.
• Every sausage on this platter results from turning "creativity" into "someone else's profit," whether through participation in the chain from creator to audience — or not, in the present or the past.

Don't worry — now that the fairness hearing has been held, I'll have more substantive comments on the proposed Bartz v. Anthropic settlement. Or, maybe, do worry…

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†  They're not "artificial intelligence" — not even when the term is modified with "generative" — because they neither exercise independent judgment nor alter their behavior/output in instance n+5 based on being instructed that their behavior/output in instance n was incorrect. That this resembles stereotypical politicians and stereotypical used-car salesmen isn't beside the point; it is the point, because "generative artificial intelligence" is an inherently deceptive term, much like "a chicken in every pot"… or "dealer-applied anticorrosion undercoating."

Zero-Dimensional Chess

One of the memes put forth by ignorant narcissistic power-seekers — usually, but not always, from an extremist element (more often rightist than leftist) — is that their leader demonstrates that he's so much smarter than the inferior opposition by playing "multidimensional chess" instead of "checkers". The meme is ignorant not just because soundbites don't actually win disputes, but because its underlying analysis is flat wrong.¹

As an illustration, consider the following two-dimensional chess opening (in modern notation):

Mamedyarov v. Kasparov
Queen's Gambit Accepted Grand Tour (Croatia), 2021
	1.	d4	d5
	2.	c4	d5 x c4
…

Leaving aside that the superior (or at least higher-rated) player — Kasparov — actually lost this game, Black's second move illustrates the real problem with analogizing the real world to chess of any number of dimensions (or, for that matter, checkers): Deterministic outcomes. In the real world, there's a nonzero chance that Black's second move doesn't result in an actual "capture" because White's pawn on c4 fights back — maybe it destroys the attacking d5 pawn, maybe it merely repels the assault;² "attempting a threatened action" isn't always successful. Then there's the alternating-serial-turn issue — show me an actual live conflict in which that happens.

One of the other problems with analogizing chess to the real world, obvious upon even fleeting thought, is that each player has instantaneous, complete knowledge of the entire board… which, in turn, is the entire universe. Everyone starts from the same position (even in Chess960); everyone has the same "player constraints," usually the amount of time to complete the match (or it's an automatic loss); and, at the grandmaster level, a plurality of games end indecisively — with a draw. Even this ignores the "everyone is playing by the same rules" and "everyone has the same objectives" problems, not to mention imbalanced forces, asymmetric boards, even cheating.

Only those ignorant of chess would compare any real-world conflict resolution or strategic conundrum to chess.³ I'll just end with a classic chessboard-inspired problem — a consequence of thinking of the pieces on the board as manipulable things easily replaced: Place one casualty (or war crime) on the lower-right-hand square of the board, and fill the board to the opposite side from right to left, then front to back, every time doubling the number of things on that square. How many casualties (or war crimes) are littering the board? To those playing any kind of chess with the real world, it doesn't matter.

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1. We'll leave aside, for the moment, the startlingly-above-expectation rate of serious mental and behavioral issues of chess grandmasters, perhaps epitomized by Bobby Fischer (but he's far from alone). More important in the abstract remains the ethical abyss created by treating human beings — individually and in aggregate — as easily-manipulable token-like pieces (of specified colors!) with no internal or inherent value. Not to mention contemplating the source of ivory used for the white pieces…
2. In the real world, the c4 pawn probably obtains a preliminary injunction, or Security Council resolution, or pressure from the tournament organizers, so that the capture attempt never takes place. And, in the meantime, the players are playing enough other simultaneous games to give even Kasparov and Carlsen serious difficulty.
3. That the military moved from deterministic to probabilistic "games" just after the Napoleonic era — and that every major "wargame failure" since has resulted from overdeterminism, such as the Schlieffen Plan — should be a hint about playing chess in the real world. Even the later attempts to blame the Schlieffen Plan's failure on von Moltke's modifications ignore the actual starting conditions… and that there was an opponent making other than rule-forced responses.

In Search of an Alternate Soundtrack

Not just to the news, either.

• Definitive evidence that the Arabian Gulf aggression is nothing but a dick move…
• The increasingly irrational statements from the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seem to be encouraging Democratic Party leadership to advocate for the 25th Amendment. (Unfortunately, there's no equivalent to deal with the party leadership, much of which displays similar evidence of "cognitive challenges.")

  The problem here is that they're not looking at the calendar, not reckoning with the egos on the other side of the aisle. Any grousing about actually invoking § 4 — nonvoluntary removal due to inability "to discharge the powers and duties of his office," upon a certification of the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet — needs also to consider the 22d Amendment, § 1. No matter how obvious such "inability" is, the egos (at minimum verging on narcissism) involved among the Heffalump leadership will desperately seek to avoid doing anything prior to 22 January 2027, because a removal on or after that date would allow Vice President Vance, upon assuming the Presidency, to appear twice more on the electoral ballot. And these nutjobs don't believe they'll ever lose another election, if only because in the words of an astute British political operative: "[F]irstly, we shall fight this campaign on issues, not personalities. Secondly, we shall be the only fresh thing on the menu. And thirdly, of course, we’ll cheat," if only by creating more rotten boroughs — even if Colin the dachshund is a yellow-dog Democrat, he wouldn't be able to vote. So by waiting until one full day less than two years remains in the current term, they get to reelect Baldrick Vance twice.

• Of course, we really don't want to hurt the delicate feelings of the self-appointed overclass, either. The irony of a "real estate" titan complaining that things are "like" racism, given the real-estate industry's history of redlining (overtly and otherwise), is more than a bit much. So, too, is Ken Griffin complaining that anyone else's policy proposals are "creepy and weird."
• I suppose it beats nepo babies in "serious publishing" as a reason for frothing at the mouth. It's not like the self-appointed overclass has nepo babies of its own, right? It's almost like inheritance of "titles of nobility" aren't prohibited, but encouraged, in the Constitution. (And I didn't even have to reference Chicago politics…)

Have a Nice Day, Todd Blanche

It's 04 May.^† Fifty-six years ago today, ill-prepared and ill-led members of the Ohio National Guard fired on a group of protesters against the Vietnam War at Kent State University, killing four (including one quite some distance from the protest), overtly wounding nine (or more) others, and horrifying uncounted others.

Unfortunately, it appears that some government agencies have learned many of the wrong lessons from both the incident and its aftermath. That the singer is himself an immigrant (and was a durned furriner at the time of Kent State) just makes the connection a little bit more disturbing.

I can only hope that wishing the current AG a nice day doesn't mean that some time soon, we won't be transferring the same dismay to another cabinet post — not even the Geheimstaatssicherheitsbüro. I'm afraid that I'm not optimistic.

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†  Star Wars fandom can bugger off with its juvenile attempt to claim the date for itself… beginning only a handful of years later. It's one thing to embrace marginally-clever wordplay to publicize one's enthusiasms; it's another, entirely, to cynically discount others' pain doing so. The irony of the Leni-Riefenstahl-lite ending of the first film in contrast to Kent State's events is for another time.

86 Buckley and Citizens United

Unlike Director Comey, I don't think anyone could make a passes-the-laugh-test argument that that is a true and credible threat directed against a living person. That the allegations against him don't pass the laugh test either is either for another time or an exercise in projective paranoia — and I'm not at all certain which would be worse. (Nor is his utterly noncredible assertion, as a former high-level law-enforcement official, that he didn't know "86" had the reference alleged in the indictment; that, too, is either for another time or an exercise in projective paranoia.)

Or perhaps I'll just make a very Orwellian reference, and suggest shooting some elephants. (And donkeys — I don't like their noise, stubbornness, and herbivore poop, either.) Of course, it might help to actually read the bloody essay first before accusing me of inciting violence against members/candidates/officeholders of one/any particular political party — an effort that seems well beyond the capabilities of the current Department of Just-Us.

• But the big news is that the Supreme Court has decided that political parties — not even just individual (invidious) candidates — own voters. In the end, that's a necessary foundation for the mechanism that led to the (ill-considered, ill-reasoned, and non-evidence-acknowledging) opinion in Callais yesterday. Even outraged-but-still-measured comments from those like leading authority on election law Richard Hasen (UCLA Law) don't go nearly far enough. The concept of a "partisan gerrymander" makes sense if, and only if, the party attempting to gerrymander goes beyond the concept of yellow-dog Democrats (albeit the irony of the racial context of that meme is a bit much in the face of the facile reasoning in the Callais main opinion) to presuming not just loyalty, but control, of the voters.

  Any connection between Justice Alito's, umm, defective grasp of both present facts and Bruen-mandated "history and tradition," not to mention the reality that one major party has overtly gone at minimum nativist (and the other major party has largely acquiesced), and especially in light of active suppression of not just "DEI" programs but even college-level academic inquiry and presentations concerning remedies for past race-based injustices, is purely hypothetical.

  Not. Why yes, that is the tip of my tongue extending through my cheek across the country and into the mid-Atlantic (probably over the sunken hulks of slave ships).

• Of course, we're far from the only nation with visible campaign-finance/political-contribution problems. This is not a new problem Over Here, either, stretching back to not later than the early 1980s… when a Supreme Court that was even more unrepresentative (and even less intellectually distinguished) than the present one determined that the free-speech rights associated with dead Presidents may, and perhaps must, be allowed to drown out the free speech rights of live indigents. <SARCASM> It's rather beside the point that all of those white dead Presidents can ban together to drown out the disproportionately other-than-Klan-membership-eligible indigents' speech, isn't it? Or perhaps we should just choose a different number to justify indictments, like 9066? </SARCASM>
• Which leads to my modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to politicians: Do away with "districting," which also does away with gerrymandering of all kinds.^† Instead, all "wholes" — like, say, "the Cook County Council" or "California's members of the United States House of Representatives" — should be chosen simultaneously across the entire maximum span, with proportional representation and other mechanical measures ensuring that "interest groups" of all types can coelesce in sufficient numbers to elect someone to speak for them. We've learned a lot about "building mechanistic safeguards into elections" since the context of Rogers.

  Of course, this modest proposal has just as much probability of adoption as did Swift's, if only because at-large elections don't produce the same (or even predictable) results as single-member districts — not even when those districts are drawn dispassionately. That simply would not satisfy the chattering classes, the political classes, not to mention the gatekeepers (and those who rely upon dead Presidents as a substitute for, like, actual evidence and reasoning). It also does little for the problems of communities divided "more naturally" across jurisdictions that are multidistrict not themselves redrawable — the nation's capital being a prime example with spillover into Virginia and Maryland. So too Philadelphia, New York City, St. Louis, Kansas City, Portland, Cincinnati/Frankfort, Memphis, and a passel of others also demonstrate the increasing probability — now that we're no longer stuck with an eighteenth-century economy, with eighteenth-century travel methods, with eighteenth-century communications, with eighteenth-century consequences of national-government decisions — that a substantial proportion of citizens/voters have core interests divided into multiple districts. There just weren't a lot of commuters in 1787 North Joisey… and complaints that moving away from the present formalized two-party system will lead only to gridlock are rather noncredible compared to the present in any event, leaving aside the underlying presumption that all policy choices are binary in nature.

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†  Rather incompletely, one must admit: The US Senate, for example, remains permanently gerrymandered by state boundaries. One step at a time, guys; one step at a time. Starting with full statehood for DC and Puerto Rico…

Always Greener

We know what's on the other side of the fence, given both the date and the policy decisions in DC, right? Or at least one might, rather forlornly, hope that those policy decisions are being driven more by overindulgence in mild hallucinogens and intoxicants than by, say, fundamental character defects — not excluding those sniping. Maybe we just disagree on definitions:

• I am still refraining from much comment concerning the merits — practically and theoretically — of the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit. The publicly-accessible reason is that I have conflicts that make most such public statements inappropriate, at least prior to the fairness hearing next month. The less-publicly-accessible reasons, however, are quite a bit more theoretical with distressing practical hooks. One of those underlies a recent parallel action, in which the proprietors of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series have sued separately — and it has taken me a month to make this comment marginally civil.

  The CSS parallel lawsuit exposes two critical, self-defeating, and self-aggrandizing problems with the way American copyright law has developed. That exposure, however, is in the end less about copyright law itself than about who makes it — and who doesn't. American copyright law as it has developed has made the proprietors of CSS copyright claimants with standing to sue, because the misbegotten work-made-for-hire doctrine makes them the owners of the compilations at issue… and abusive (but nonetheless so common as to be default) contracts have made them the owners of the individual-piece copyrights. Or, at least, owners under judicial and Congressional decisions reifying their colonial-master interests notwithstanding the Constitutional definition of the protected parties (which the remainder of that commentary elides — at best).

  In a truly just world, both sides would lose, and all relief would be granted to other victims for the various misconduct. But as they'd have to lose to parties not before the court — those "indigenous peoples" who weren't at the table, both the authors and the public — this is nowhere near a just world. The irony of inserting "justice" (and "ethics") into these musings given the prior conduct of the particular parties is too much for a wartime-in-all-but-name Monday morning. Not to mention that this is the civil version…

• At least in the copyright arena, the conflicts of interest are about 0.5 removes from the underlying subject matter. Not so much with business disparagement, in which the conflict of interest all too often is the actual subject.
• Then there's the complete mislabelling of what's actually going on in the author-turns-down-prize brouhaha. The mislabelling begins with the word "prize": It's not a "prize," but a "paid celebrity endorsement opportunity." And viewed in that light, Ms DeWitt's rejection of the "opportunity" is far more understandable. For all the abuse, at least actors are being paid for and are directly connected to their products on film tours… author tours in support of outside-sponsored "book" or "writing" awards, not so much. (And we're just not going to go into the opportunities for dubious conduct on tours, either.)
• Despite my lack of academic credentials in the discipline, I must profoundly disagree with Professor Larsen's assertion that there's no such thing as a "psychopath". It's perhaps possible to view his position as saying that the term is misdefined, at least in the public imagination; or that what is general known as a "psychopath" should instead be termed "sociopath not amenable to internalization of adverse social-personal consequences," a description both infelicitous and incomplete. It's also perhaps possible that the disagreement arises from experiential and professional interfaces that differ between encountering those who categorically disregard adverse impacts on third parties in pursuit of their own interests and those who relish those adverse impacts on third parties as demonstrating their own worth. "Disregarding the bad and collateral" is fundamentally different from "aspiring to supervillainy." Now I'm not accusing any particular individuals in world governments (now or in the past) of that latter — oh, wait, yes I am…
• The most obvious response to losing the war on poverty is a war on fraud, right? Probably only if one has been overindulging in the allegedly mild hallucinogen that's this date's subject after attempted eradication in another failed war.