The Trees Matter, Too

I am rather pissed off at a former JAG's editorial/opinion piece originally appearing at the NYT.¹ Mr French — a former JAG — reaches some of the right conclusions. However, he does so by a fallacious reasoning pathway that fully undermines his conclusions and the desired result. His appreciation of the forest presumes that all of the trees therein are entirely suburdinate, identical, unthinking elements; this is rather ironic because he cited two counterexamples in his opinion piece. In short, he's too easy on commissioned officers because he doesn't understand what "commission" means. There's a lacuna in the JAG mindset (and, especially, the JAG mindset of the Army, the service in which French served) which, ironically enough, is illustrated directly by two chains of legal precedent that he cites in the body of his opinion piece: The circumstances of Lt² William Calley and the defendants at Nürnberg.³

Part of the problem here is that JAGs have (with some unusual-but-not-unheard-of exceptions) achieved their own commissions through a different path than is expected of line officers. They simply don't have the experience of actually implementing the tough calls, in the moment, with personal familiarity with the subordinates who will in most instances be actually pulling triggers. Further, due to their own duty structures, they have substantially less exposure to the immediate consequences of inconsistent orders and directives-not-qualifying-as-orders; similarly, they are insulated from the immediate and longer-term cultural and career consequences of even questioning such. Perhaps most relevant to French's piece, they have no clue about what actually maintaining "good order and discipline" in a combat or combat support unit (or even among REMFs) actually involves… or about how that can be impaired when there's perception among the enlisted personnel (and less-senior commissioned officers) that the officer(s) issuing the order to employ force are unthinking loyalist automatons, even in noncombat contexts.

Perhaps French's real conclusion, buried in the middle of the piece, is mostly valid for enlisted personnel.

In reality, junior officers and enlisted soldiers are often like the proverbial blind man feeling the elephant. We are given only partial information when we’re ordered to war. Our military couldn’t function if individual members adjudicated these questions themselves based on information gleaned from news reports or from their own incomplete review of the relevant intelligence.

Bluntly, this contradicts not just what line officers are trained and expected to understand, but the very passage from the (less-binding!) opinion in the Calley matter from the Court of Military Review that he quoted a few paragraphs above that passage. The obligation of a commissioned officer is to look at every order for its lawfulness under a nonlawyer's perception of what "a man of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful" — and when an order fails that test, obtain further guidance if possible and available but otherwise exercise the judgment demanded of commissioned officers and refuse to implement it. Calley failed that test, both personally and via directives he gave to soldiers under his leadership;⁴ any "man of ordinary sense and understanding" would have understood that encountering unresisting civilians means you can't shoot them until they individually resist. The Nürnberg defendants at all levels failed that test, both personally and via directives given to those under their leadership/command; any "man of ordinary sense and understanding" would have known that participating in the killing of unresisting children (to name only the most obvious instance) was unlawful.

In close calls and less-obvious circumstances that actually do turn upon what French refers to as "the often highly classified intelligence that presidents and senior leaders review when they issue orders to strike," it makes sense for the most junior personnel to rely upon a prior legal clearance in implementing those orders — so long as the circumstances remain less obvious. There's a line, though: The commission, which represents the "special trust and confidence" in the individual holding that commission, that changes what qualifies as "less obvious;" that expands the expected scope of "under the circumstances" from "there's adequate grounds to treat the target as containing combatants" to "collateral damage" to "information the immediately-responsible individual has that those policymaking authorities, at the level of abstraction required of policymaking authorities, do not." French's opinion piece gives at best lip service to that responsibility — a responsibility that, under centuries of the law of armed conflict, extends all the way down to the lowest commissioned personnel. It's precisely why post-Vietnam, commissions as line officers of the United States are extended only to those holding at least a bachelor's degree who are at least 21 years old: A presumption of wider worldview, greater perception, and honed judgment than even that of experienced enlisted personnel. Lt Calley's conduct demonstrates that Mistakes Were/Are Made — but that does not diminish the responsibility.

Another underlying failure of French's opinion piece arises because he conflates high-level, abstract responsibilities for ordering the use of military force by lower-level units with the immediate responsibilities of those looking through the gunsights, and affirming the current, immediate validity of what is in those gunsights as targets. Another historical example comes to mind: Flight 655.⁵ That wasn't about being "ordered to war," it was about interpreting higher-level orders in light of what a commissioned officer of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances known to that commissioned officer, know to be unlawful.

Ens/Lt/Capt/Maj/LtCmdr Ordinary Officer is not responsible for determining the lawfulness of the order to "go to war" against a properly-designated threat to national security.⁶ He or she is, however, responsible for determining the lawfulness of the second-level order to fire on a particular target, or class of targets — especially an order to destroy after incapacitation. French's piece elides the latter despite his citation of Calley and Nürnberg. That pisses me off and disserves the public in general; it also subtly insults the capability, integrity, and trust placed in nonpolicymaking line officers. <SARCASM> Bravo. </SARCASM>

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1. I read this at the Seattle Times, some time after its initial publication. Once again, assholes: If you aspire to be the "paper of record," you can't put a paywall between the "record" and the "public at large." Unless, that is, the only "public" that counts is that portion of the public that pays in advance for access to that record. And if that's the case: You're not actually "of record."
2. I refer to Calley as "Lt" or "Lieutenant" because relevant parts of the matter — and, in particular, relevant failures of judgment on both his part and the Army's training and evaluation elements — occurred while Calley was a Second Lieutenant (O-1, the lowest commissioned officer grade). Calley had been promoted to First Lieutenant, under the pre-1980 system, by the time he was referred to court-martial, so the case caption reads "1Lt." This would matter even more, under the post-1980 system, had it been a promotion from Captain to Major (or, in the Navy, Lieutenant (s.g.) to Lieutenant Commander; either way, O-3 to O-4). These are, perhaps, subtleties that don't matter… for this, particular, historical incident. The subject of French's opinion piece, however, is prospective, not retrospective, so at least a shadow of these distinctions is (or should be) apparent.
3. In a typical bit of Anglocentric linguistic imperialism, this city in southwest Germany is usually rendered as "Nuremberg," which manages to mangle both vowel and consonant sounds for no good reason. It also marks the last time that a sitting US Supreme Court justice actually practiced law — the chief US prosecutor was Robert Jackson, on leave from the Supreme Court.

   The various dramatizations of the proceedings and results — the only parts that most, and indeed too many, people know of — focus on the highest-level politicomilitary leaders and "associates" of the Third Reich. That's certainly defensible in terms of "narrative coherence," but it neglects all of the lower-level personnel who were prosecuted (and mostly convicted) in the various proceedings. That neglect takes attention away from Calley's failure: The Dienst ist dienst "defense" of blindly following orders.

4. Here, a perhaps hypertechnical objection — one that is reinforced by the Navy's continued misuse of "commander" as part of two officer grade names, and misuse of the word in job-title descriptions like "tank commander" and "aircraft commander." At the platoon/tank/aircraft level, the leader (even a commissioned officer) is not a commander, but a leader. Actual command, however, involves more than just giving orders and/or being the most-senior individual on site; that many of these distinctions are specifically legal, such as the authority to actually confine a servicemember for misconduct, is a seldom-considered irony when JAGs blithely discuss officer responsibilities.
5. Source chosen primarily because it's both readily available and lacks obvious conflicts of interest.
6. This gets extremely messy when that officer has direct personal knowledge that the asserted factual basis is false, or the use of military force has not been propertly designated and directed — let alone when there's a disjuncture between high-level policy and individual-munition-level explosions.

The 2025 Turkey Awards

An annual tradition for nearly three decades! This is my list of ridiculous people from 2025 (so far). Pass me one of those rolls, please:

• The Greasy Gravy Award for oily publicity that makes the main dish inedible goes to lazy, "cost-efficient" sponsored content — both the providers and the venues.
• The Red-Tide Oyster Stuffing Award for carelessly poisoning an otherwise tasty dish goes to everyone in the chain of command who can't spell "undue command influence" — a fairly important concept (PDF) that helps avoid past US armed forces failures, too. Implied intent to prosecute a retired field-grade officer, after a recall to active duty that would itself probably be unlawful (as one cannot serve multiple branches of the government simultaneously, and Kelly is an elected member of Congress), who warned against mindlessly obeying unlawful orders? Really? That orders are "presumed to be lawful" does not, in any sense, mean that "presumed" means "necessarily are" — that's the entire point of rejecting the legal (as distinct from evidentiary) basis of Calley's defense.
• The Broken Wishbone Award for shattering dreams goes to everyone involved in the government shutdown. Both parties. Both houses of Congress, and the Administration (and even substantial parts of the judiciary).
• The Golden Gristle Award for assertions far too difficult to digest (and usually stuck in one's teeth) goes to the Illinois Supreme Court, which managed to — simultaneously, no less — evade its responsibility to "regulate the profession" in a way that makes the inadequacy of state regulation of the profession irrefutable; demonstrate that electing judges leads directly to conflicts of interest; fail to explain itself to educate either the profession or the public; and leave a "lawyer" able to continue precisely the corrupt practices that formed the background for his prosecution and conviction. Bravo!
• The Conspicuous Consumption Cranberry Relish Award for the most-outrageous example thereof goes to the current Administration, which not only started gold-plating everything at 1600 Pennsylvania that doesn't move — it did so during a government shutdown while recipients of food aid were looking forward to impending starvation.
• The Crabapple Pie Award for marketing something sour as something sweet goes to the Inner Party leadership of both major political parties for ensuring, up and down the ballot, that we're almost always choosing the lesser evil. The Inner Party leaders are supposed to be guardians of the processes of a democratic republic (especially, but not only, against populist demagogues), not all-too-comfortable, all-too-well-paid-through-dubious-means unaccountable power brokers. They've utterly failed.
• The Wilted Salad Award for the one part of the meal that's supposed to be "good for you," but is instead rather past its sell-by date, goes to the DOGE of Venice Beach for trying to apply purported "market efficiencies" to an organization that by its nature operates where markets can't and don't: Governments. Especially those parts of governments that have to deal with the unexpected, right now. P.S. "Efficiency" is not an objective, neutral good thing — just ponder Maxwell's Demon (PDF) and the benefits to the demon of moving those particles around…
• The Brussels Sprout Award for stinky, slimy, overcooked, gentrified little cabbages goes to the organizers of the practice parade. From top to bottom. And the stench is still pervading the kitchen, even after thirty-odd years avoiding them at year-end holidays (they were all too popular Over There).
• The Dried-Out Breastmeat Award for overcooking the books goes to Anthropic and its "colleagues." And the idiots who — rather ironically, given its canonical status in computer science — ignore the aphorism that the perfect is the enemy of the good, while definitely ignoring that perfection is subjective, uncertain, costly, and further delayed. In the best of all possible worlds, that wouldn't be true; neither would ripping off the original expression of authors (not whatever facts are being presented) be so easily excused.
• The Rancid Drumstick Award for something that should be edible, but isn't, goes to all of the participants in Signalgate, who managed to simultaneously demonstrate their contempt for classified information, those who handle classified information, journalists and journalism, and everyone placed in jeopardy with their carelessness/egos. I'm afraid this year we've got a turducken's worth of rancid drumsticks.
• The GMO Tofurkey Roast Award for a main-dish item that's supposed to be more wholesome, nutritious, and/or ethical, but merely hides something that's perhaps worse under that veneer of virtue, goes to Secretary Brainworm and his fellow Know-Nothing allies. I'm starting to think that MAHA stands for Make America Horrible Again.
• The Unwanted Obligatory Guest Award for the guest at the banquet that you had to invite (but wish you didn't have to because you knew would spoil everything) goes to the other bigoted uncle that you're trying to pretend isn't actually related to you, Major Major Major Mr Hegseth. His actions over the past year demonstrate pretty well that he doesn't, in fact, respect the chain of command — and that he's forgotten one of the critical principles of leadership: Respect runs both directions or you end up with both mission failure and mutiny.
• The Leftovers Anticipation Award for something that has returned from the past to haunt the gathering, and cause indigestion, goes to ICE, leftover from eight years ago and gathering ice crystals in the made-in-China-but-imported-before-the-current-round-of-tariffs freezer in the garage.

  The Broken Wishbone Award for shattering dreams goes to [ICE], which thought it was a good idea to effectively repudiate and repeal DACA without even acknowledging a certain poem in New York harbor. (As the rest of the administration has demonstrated, acknowledging either simple humanity or the interest of the public not composed of one's existing campaign contributors would be just too much effort.) Next: All persons who are not protestant northwest Europeans, with long-form birth certificates so proving, will be invited to wear an appropriate yellow armband… probably manufactured at low cost in South/Southeast Asia (with numerous misspellings on the tag and a false "Made in USA" declaration)…

  This isn't any tastier, or more appropriate for an AI-generated-in-the-style-of-Norman-Rockwell picture, than it was in 2017. One wonders what items from this year's spread are going to reappear in the future; quite possibly all of them.

Sorry, there's no room left on the table for the Salmonella Carrot Medley (Artifical Color Added) Award, as it's been retired (and can't stand up to being in the freezer for eight years).

Charade You Are

Shut up, piggy.

• Staying with that first kind for a moment, history's rhymes of late have sounded a lot more like hard-core counter-gangsta rap — explicit calls for violence by the police, not against them, delivered as an exaggerated distraction from real grievances actually having little, or at most indirect, relationship to the advocated violence.
• Or, as the case may be, pure pigheaded ignorance. Interestingly enough, there hasn't been a comparable report Over Here as of yet; if there were, the period from mid-February 2020 for about a year would almost certainly, based solely upon what has been released in public to date, get much the same evaluation (which is not to limit the criticism to that period or the national government, either).
• OK, that's the first kind. Here's the second. The underlying headline is rather asking whether Adolf Schickelgrüber, Ioseb Jughashvilli, or Leopold II was responsible for the most/longest-lasting human suffering — there really isn't a "winner," and certainly not among the victims. It's not always necessary to draw the line for where narcissistic sociopathy ends/begins — especially not hiding amongst the techbros…

  Perhaps irrelevant aside: It's not the "tech" but the "bros" that's the real parallel; just look at the fairly uniform character flaws among "rising magnates of new industry" of the past, whether the US (Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Ford…) or elsewhere. It's almost like the ambition to be the biggest pig(s) in the sty encourages gluttony and reliance on the work of others.

• The third kind of pig is a bit more subtle. Rather than oinking, snarling, and flopping about in overt displays of fatness, they focus more on suppressing notice of their fatness. Sometimes they justify it through worship of "market forces" and "loyalty to shareholders" (usually failing to acknowledge that the largest shareholders are to be found among that third kind of pigs).

There's really only one proper conclusion: Mmmmmm, bacon — but that would require curing it first ("uncured bacon" is an oxymoron — without curing, it's just "pork belly," however tasty), and I've not found a lasting cure for any of the pigs that contributed to this platter…

Again? Really?

So, the Office of Legal Counsel appears to believe that military personnel engaged in strikes on "drug-trafficking" boats cannot/will not be prosecuted. Really? Again, you ignorant sluts?

Let's neglect, for the moment, that overruling the National Security Act of 1947 as amended requires an actual bloody amendment. This matters — yet again — because the purportedly binding nature of the Office of Legal Counsel's "opinion" is interfering in a chain of command established by statute. I've been unable to find anything in any proper amendment to the 1947 Act (and there have been several) that inserts the OLC into the chain of command. The OLC can, at most, provide outside advice to the Joint Staff and the respective service chiefs. Further, we've had multiple historical demonstrations that the OLC's expertise simply does not extend to military law; the Yoo memorandum is only the best-known.¹

We'll also neglect, for the moment, that the "opinion" was classified. Recall the proper grounds for classification: "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," with the particular levels of appropriate classification defined (see § 1.2) with wording little changed in the last half-century. One can only conjecture the "identifiable or describable damage to the national security" — as distinct from damage to any individual (including but far from limited to the President), organizational imperative, policy initiative, or pipedream — from disclosure of a memorandum of law that (ineptly) discusses and dismisses prosecution of military personnel in a hypothetical future operation of uncertain factual context and unspecified content of relevant directives and orders.²

The fundamental problem is that the memorandum is indefensibly wrong. If the orders are in fact lawful, and in furtherance only of lawful actions, there's no risk of prosecution in the first instance. There might be for exceeding them, or I suppose for hazarding a vessel in the course of following them, but that's a different — and highly fact-bound — issue beyond the scope of any pre-event legal memorandum. If the orders are unlawful and the memorandum is purporting to excuse following them anyway, the memorandum is legally wrong.³ We've been here before.

[E]ven if Calley had received the orders as claimed, he would not necessarily have been exonerated. The military judge properly instructed that an order to kill unresisting Vietnamese would be an illegal order, and that if Calley knew the order was illegal or should have known it was illegal, obedience to an order was not a valid defense.

(emphasis added) And no matter the ego or righteous conviction of one or more civilian lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, they can't overrule the Fifth Circuit. At most, they can supply some authority that a particular class of orders, without consideration of specific context, might be legal — but that just goes to the "should have known" issue, because the individual who issues unlawful orders should have known, too.

Perhaps these are seditious words. If so, I own them; and I assert that a Presidential suggestion — however disguised as a social-media reference — that anyone "be arrested" for reminding military members that following an unlawful order is itself unlawful seems to constitute a "high crime or misdemeanor," and especially so in opposition to the Speech and Debate Clause and/or First Amendment.

This Administration appears to be engaged in an epistomological attempt to determine the number of wrongs n that makes a right. I remain… unconvinced. (And they can't have the pony, either.)

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1. I make no representations regarding the content or existence of any other Office of Legal Counsel memorandum, present or historical, concerning either military law or legality of classes of prospective conduct by military personnel, that has not been declassified and made available to the public. I similarly make no representations regarding the mining of manganese nodules from the floor of the East China Sea.
2. Probably only the same sorts of considerations that led to burglarizing a psychiatrist's office. With, one might contemplate, ultimately similar results.
3. In any such/similar memorandum that has been made public of which I'm aware (whether or not formally declassified), there's a simultaneously startling but ultimately unsurprising omission: Any consideration of Article 133, Conduct Unbecoming an Officer (codified at 10 U.S.C. § 933) as a source of prosecutorial grounds independent of the specific actions. And this as we approach the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg proceedings, let alone considering whether military law might treat failure to make independent, circumstance-specific inquiry as a dereliction of duty. Dienst ist dienst indeed.

A Candle in the Window

Gotta crank out these sausages so there's room in the kitchen for Turkey Day preparations. Maybe if the shutdown ends soon, SNAP recipients won't have to be satisfied with a Cornish game hen split six ways. (There will still be plenty of other shenanigans.)

• I suppose I should start by noting The Further Adventures of Eliza — the true ancestor of so-called "generative AI" systems. (By now, she's probably just another old lady.) Some proponents of these systems really, honestly believe that "information wants to be free (and everything is just information)," so they disrespect "opt-outs" (leaving aside that under the basic premises of copyright — indeed, all intellectual property law, whether US-centric or otherwise — opting out is for waiving protection, not waiving rights).¹
• The obvious consequence is underinclusive class actions. Now I say that in the abstract; in the best of all possible worlds, all of the defendants engaging in similar schemes would be in a defendant class, all owners of copyright interests would be in the plaintiff class, and the judge would be authorized — indeed, enthusiastic about — using a chainsaw on prevaricating briefs. And lawyers. And outside commentators (especially those with conflicts of interest). This, however, is not that world, so we have to deal with… well, the realities of litigation. Such as the underinclusive list of eligible works — a list that, as usual for anything with which the Authors' Guild is involved, neglects "abnormal" publications by their concept of "normal," such as requiring an ISBN or ASIN, and dismissing self-help books that outsell all but a few of their actual members — in the context of the realities of the primarily-cost-effectiveness narrowing of the case.

  The perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and definitely the enemy of the achievable. Don't be fooled by carrion-eating "advocates" searching for scraps in pursuit not of an achievable better deal for the actual rightsholders, but for their own award of attorney's fees. If you, as an author, choose to opt out, do so only after having experienced IP litigation counsel review the details of your specific circumstances — not based on spam². (This is explicitly not an offer of representation or solicitation of business for me.)

• Which beats worrying about how unearned inherited wealth is warping social values. It's even worse Over There… until you look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in which each Heffalump resident in the last third-of-a-century-plus has been a scion of inherited wealth.
• In somewhat better news, wingnuts took Election Day results in very delicate portions of their anatomies indeed. Not just Over Here, either; even the "governing party" in the Netherlands (which doesn't mean quite the same thing as Americans think it does). The wingnuts really don't like hearing any of this from a mixed-race… individual (sarcasm tag superfluous, doncha think?).
• Wingnuts also need to rethink exactly how they approach institutions that seem not to welcome them as much as they think they deserve. Oh, wait, that would undermine their sense of entitlement, so maybe it's as unrealistic as the suggestions running around to opt out of the Anthropic settlement without a competent evaluation of particular circumstances…

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1. Also leaving aside the deceptive naming habit of damned near everyone in this conversation — "Copyright Alliance" without conflicts of interest my avulsed toenails.
2. From what I've seen — and I suspect I haven't seen all of it — spam that arguably violates applicable legal ethics rules, neglects Fed. R. Civ. Proc. 23 and the parts of the Manual for Complex Litigation (sorry, the web reference isn't working during shutdown) relating to management of class-member options, misrepresents the most-relevant facts, and completely fails to acknowledge the uncertainties and costs of proceeding with individual suits, or even alternate class actions. The preceding has been edited for the benefit of your screen; my real opinion of the opt-out spam that I have seen drips acid. I've got more respect for your computer than that; the people who came up with these campaigns… didn't. At least they're not porno trolls — at least, not yet.

Brought to You by the Letter V

…and the number 58,318 (presuming that site can be reached during the shutdown).

Both of which have been problematic. Vietnam is pretty obvious, but far from the only example; at present, the Orange Menace is working on Venezuala (without any reference to the past and how well that has worked out), carefully neglecting any mention of the Vatican and Wien (usually spelled "Vienna" in these parts, reinforcing the goofiness of English spelling — not to mention its cultural imperialism). What's next? Vilnius? Virginia? Almost no one is mentioning the most-menacing V word hanging over America at present, though; the Magician's Assistant Method of political change is working. At least until next season (and the exploding… anatomical structures previously measured in public).

The number isn't much better. None of them was the first casualty — that was any reliance on truth. The rest were just… falling dominoes after that first one. Any reflection on current American foreign policy memes is both entirely intentional and from a rather fractured mirror.

Meanwhile, in an equally-misguided effort, the Orange Menace is trying to save inbred, incapable-of-survival-in-the-wild turkeys by starkly reducing the ability of many Americans to buy them for Thanksgiving. Of course, this won't actually save any turkeys — they've all been raised for slaughter, and will just end up in the freezer for longer. The turkey farmers, given lower demand this year, will have less to look forward to in the future, too. So I guess celebrating "American Tradition" — however historically misguided — is reserved for trust-fund kids and techbros. But that's getting into the letter T, which is a future episode of this fine educational, public-oriented-but-entirely-privatized outlet (despite the efforts of the Secretary of Education).

A Really Cheap Costume

SATIRE

So Kim Davis is back at the Supreme Court, begging — yet again — to be allowed, as a government official, to practice a particular brand of bigotry "required" by her religious beliefs.¹ Davis and her fear of somehow "blessing" same-sex relationships actually casts a rather disturbing (perhaps kaleidoscopic) light on matters at the Department of Defense/War/ExcessiveViolence.²

The Secretary of D/W/EV has a serious problem with same-sex relationships. This is at least a partial explanation for his firing of female officers in command positions, because — especially in the Navy — those officers are/have been engaging in same-sex intimate relationships… with the vessels they captained. Any marginally-attentive commander of a vessel afloat is in an intimate relationship with that vessel, and often characterized as "married" to that vessel. Since in English a vessel afloat is rigidly assigned a feminine gender — despite the formalized absence of "gender" in English grammar, referring to a vessel afloat as "it" or "he" will not make you any friends among its crew or the maritime community at large — that means these female officers were married to other females. We can't have that, and the ships are going to remain "she" for the forseeable future. Therefore, those female officers need to be forced out, before they endanger their souls with sin.

On further thought, though, maybe not. Maybe one or more of those vessels is gender-fluid, or even male-identifying transgender. Then, the female captain would not be married to a female. But I'm not sure that's better within this religious viewpoint, and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" seems both inappropriate and futile for treating the USS Shiloh as, well, a guy — just so a female marital partner is religiously acceptable. We certainly wouldn't want guided-missile cruisers being too butch and wearing pants all the time,³ and "women in combat boots" doesn't resemble "women in comfortable shoes" all that closely. Unfortunately, DOGE and the Shutdown are together preventing me from consulting with the Directorates of Euphemisms and of Naval Research for more (in)appropriate circumlocutions.

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1. Cf., e.g., Jennifer Nelson, The Role the Dutch Reformed Church Played in the Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 2 J. Hate Stud. 63 (2003) (PDF). n.b. The author grew up under apartheid. She would now be entitled to preferential treatment in immigration matters.
2. The official, Congressionally-approved name, as is required for all executive departments (and certainly for those exercising an enumerated power); the name the current Administration would like it to have, for Reasons; and, based on what has been happening of late, its current conduct. Of course, the military members who actually pulled those triggers will assert the traditional defense: Dienst ist [sic] Dienst. Cf., e.g., Maj M. Keoni Medici & Maj Joshua P. Scheel, Training the Defense of Superior Orders: Honoring the Legacy of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg After 75 Years, 2020 Army Lawyer #6 (unpag.).
3. If all of this seems ridiculous — including, and perhaps especially, the footnotes — that's how satire works. Oh, darn, I've revealed my hidden agenda. In the last footnote.

You Can't Fight in Here

This is the War Room! (even if it does look more like a press conference).

• This previously-unreleased video of Congressional hearings on the budget/shutdown negotiations is probably unduly generous, as the participants depicted here seem to be actually communicating, with an objective directly relating to their conduct. In their own way.

  That's certainly more than I can say for knee-jerk "government is best that governs least" bullshit. These morons were elected to govern (for some value of "elected" that doesn't bear too close, and possibly even cursory, scrutiny). If it were all privatized and they were at-will employees, they would have been fired by mid-March — with maybe as many as two dozen exceptions out of 538. Or maybe they just don't understand what a "mandate" is: Later achievement of a bare majority — however achieved — does not create an entitlement to a later-election quasilegislative veto over prior Congressional action. If you want to reverse something, follow the legislative process and reverse it. (If you actually have the "mandate" that you claim you do, this should be easy — or at least achievable.) Which means more committee meetings like this one in the current environment.

  Meanwhile, these morons are forgetting that the shutdown of SNAP will, if it goes on for more than a couple of days or so, impact the all-American celebration of Thanksgiving at the end of the month. (Admittedly, only for the Great Unwashed.) Of course, that assumes that any of these morons have any clue about "advance preparation time" for a major family dinner, since they've generally "delegated" that to either unpaid spouses or barely-minimum-wage staff/restaurant employees. <SARCASM> Never mind, it's just the underclass who don't matter to "Real Americans" (specifically including Joe the Plumber). We'll just find some foreign war of ill-defined objective to send them off to as cannon fodder, and then we won't have to worry about paying for it either. Maybe in Central and South America this time, since we can effectively send them by ship and won't need to have air traffic control facilities fully staffed. </SARCASM>

  Any implied relationship of this sausage to "failures of so-called AI systems when confronted with the truly unexpected" is probably intentional.

• We can, however, be pretty certain that none of the Congressional negotiators (those depicted — and not) were "gifted children" — whether identified that way or not. That entire debate presumes that an educational establishment that itself includes no (or almost no) "gifted children" can identify the "gifted" without sneering, Othering, bullying, directed at those so identified; that the implied locksteppish meme in the alternative actually makes sense for the individuals involved (that is, that "natural and ordinary variation" is less than or equal to "variation in educational methodology allowed"); and that the implied production-line educational method works in the first place, especially once one recognizes that not all post-public-education jobs are just good factory jobs (like the participants in those hearings in the previous sausage).
• One wonders, too, how effective unpaid FBI employees will be at further searches for Jimmy Hoffa in the records from decades back. Hey, maybe that points to the problem: It's not Jimmy Hoffa buried in (now-torn-down) Giants Stadium, but the relevant records that would have revealed where he "really is." Not to mention "who put him there" and "who, in turn, had a vested interest in the whole mess."
• At least at some time those FBI employees were paid a living wage — unlike the average/far too commonly artists (and authors, musicians…). Oh, wait, so many of those artists were "gifted" that there just might be some implications elsewhere on the platter about "productional-line-like educational systems not encouraging consideration of potential long-term consequences, especially to Someone Else"…
• My prescription for the headaches caused by the foregoing: Take two Tylenol and call your doctor in the morning. That's two "regular-strength," not "extra-strength," which would probably accelerate any liver damage. In turn, that reveals some disturbing (arguably misplaced) priorities about "pain relief" in the pharmaceutical and medical establishment for the last century and a half. Presuming, that is, that we can overcome the lasting effects of fluoridation, Mandrake. Unfortunately, during the shutdown, "the information on this [government] website may not be up to date".

Tiptoe Through the Tulip Bulbs

I'm shocked — shocked, I say — to hear that cryptobros lost a lot of money on a major downturn. Now all we need is some hungry sailor to eat some cryptobro's SIM card…

• Saturday afternoon was mildly nostalgic; very few people on the monorail understood why I mentioned "burning draft cards." (My hat — my last active-duty BDU hat, with an exceptionally obscure unit designator and subdued grade insignia — might not have helped.) Not surprisingly, the current Speaker alleged that the demonstrations were Marxist. I'm very much afraid that he knows no history regarding demonstrations, either in his lifetime or not quite a century past — or just how (in)correct the central authorities' kneejerk accusations of "Marxist control" proved then, either. Perhaps, though, he's been impaired of late by poor choice of beverages (and additives), on advice of Secretary Brainworm.
• At least the No Kings protesters were noticed, even if they end up getting precisely as much substantive attention.
• I'm certainly not booking any Caribbean cruises from 12 December onward. OK, I'm not booking one at any time (just not my style), but you shouldn't then, either.
• It normally takes about a decade or so to remove the "carpetbagger" label from politicians when they significantly change their residences. That's perhaps the best explanation for the "at least a decade" prospective delay in seeking elective office proposed by this guy; if he moves to where he's most qualified to hold office right now — Illinois, as Governor (since despite the commutation he's still a convicted felon) — he'll have a couple years to practice on the Cook County Council before the 2038 election cycle. He'd be breaking a campaign promise to run in 2034… oh, who am I kidding?
• With all due respect to the Chancellor of my undergraduate institution, I think he is making a mistake "engaging in dialogue" on some subjects; in this particular instance, it is all-but-formal negotiation with terrorists. That is not a winning strategy — especially when that terrorist organization has previously, and repeatedly, demonstrated that it will not in fact "engage in dialogue" but will instead seek further opportunities to propagandize based on at best out-of-context statements by those with whom it purports to communicate. Dialogue does note mean "provide further opportunities to make demands without actually listening to responses," nor "meaningless opportunity to try to explain reality to those whose minds are already made up on ideological (fact-free) grounds."

  In this, Chancellor Martin is at least being explicit that he's not agreeing to anything. Which is not at all to say that this terrorist organization won't mischaracterize "agreeing to sit at the table" as "agreement," whether tacit or explicit — because it will (which is one of the major reasons not to negotiate with terrorists). Anyone who doesn't perceive that organization, and particularly the militant wing of the IRA Department of Education, as a terrorist organization for these purposes is respectfully referred to Zillow to peruse valuations and financing options for purchase of several acres of waterfront property approximately 45km east of Mar-a-Lago.

• Meanwhile, PW continues to demonstrate its utter obliviousness with its annual list of "the world's largest publishers" that ignores at least three publishers with greater revenues than their #1. Oh, but those publishers don't sell to "the trade," so they don't count. That's sort of like ranking the biggest bookstores in the world and excluding the 'zon because they couldn't find it on a street map.

  The real point here is that this is far from an isolated instance when talking about "publishing": Virtually everyone — and absolutely all "publishing news outlets" — silently restrict their datasets to exclude things they just don't want to talk about. Or, more frequently, can't get paid to talk about… or have any present/recent conflict of interest talking about. That doesn't meet even the minimal standards of Faux News and the WSJ…

• All of the above really make me want to exercise my linguistic skills as acquired from the real experts: Senior NCOs.

If this platter — despite the current-events flavor profile of the individual sausages — somehow makes you nostalgic for the late 1960s, you need to brush up a bit on the full context of 1968. Perhaps you can ponder one of the gaping loopholes in the XXVth Amendment, too: There's no similar mechanism regarding cabinet members, only at most the President's own ability to fire them, and if we're thinking about XXV that's already in play otherwise…

I Blame the "Parents"

In a repulsive, inappropriate-for-purported-future-leaders, and nonetheless entirely unsurprising revelation (the fact of, not the timing of — the only potentially surprising part), the Heffalump "kids", who are primed to be future [Inner] Party leaders, have demonstrated appalling allegiance to bigotry in both reasoning and discourse. Worse yet, it's using the same insecure discussion method as their elders did just a few months ago. This leads to two rather distressing conclusions.

First, that it's really the "parents'" fault. Where, after all, did these kids learn all that potty-mouthed diatribe? Admittedly, they probably first heard it at recess in the schoolyard, and particularly while ganging up on the nerds and geeks and nonconformists and just generally Others. But it became acceptable language in conversation — and concepts for conversation — around the dinner table, where they heard grandma saying the same thing (in slightly elevated language) with agreement — tacit or otherwise — from all of the other "adults." Or, at minimum, the other adults who were participating in the conversation, even passively, at the [Inner] Party's "adult" table. You know, the one that the kids feeling a sense of impending power and adulthood gravitate toward at holiday dinners, instead of hanging around with their siblings and cousins at the less-cool-and-less-entitled table.

Naturally, this calls the fitness of the "parents" into question. Or, rather, it would if their unfitness (and sheer stupidity) had not been definitively demonstrated. One can only wonder what other wonderful bon mots are being exchanged away from Signal among those kids. Or between those kids and their parents. Or among those parents.

Second, and perhaps more distressingly for the future of the nation (and for any future of conversation about it), there's the demonstrated inability of these kids to learn from their parents' undoubted errors. <SARCASM> After all, future electability is a helluva lot more important than mere national security and needless potential deaths, so they should have learned that a group chat invites someone to later release a partial/edited/whatever transcript. It doesn't matter whether it's a relatively secure system like Signal or the dubious protection of "private" social-media groups: It's gonna happen. </SARCASM> But even more than the too-much-later revelation of unelectable venomous spewing:^† Why was no one stopping to think about the potential consequences of what they were saying, however firmly believed it was? Isn't their (the kids or the parents) constant diatribe against "wokeness" pretty solid evidence that consequences exist for "inappropriate" Othering? Even when that "inappropriateness" is the funhouse-mirror post hoc rationalization that it's "inappropriate" to call out perceived racism and its perceived related consequences (which, after all, hurts the feelings of those who benefit — however subtly, however indirectly, however unconsciously — from those consequences)?

The reason for (potentially, maybe) excusing, or at least minimizing, "mistakes" made by the kids is that they're supposed to learn from those mistakes. And grow up. On all evidence, at least in this "family" they do neither. Apparently, the "sticks and stones" theory of electoral politics continues to hold considerable weight. Except, that is, when wielded against one's opponents in a startlingly self-unaware demonstration of what can best be called "group sociopathy." Or, perhaps, we're just supposed to expect our government to look like a stereotypical frat house, now and in the future.

---

†  Of course, this would have required these ignoramuses to actually want to, and do, some real research. To actually use education beyond that necessary to live in a company town, dig coal, and die of black-lung disease, or hold a good factory job (perhaps running a high-output loom), or fulfill the (conscripted) "warrior ethos" now so desireable. Or, for that matter, even follow down to this footnote, let alone consider any of the sources cited herein — or, that at least in this footnote, those sources that don't require them to read anything (not coincidentally, all of them). Not even just in English.

Unavoidably Delayed

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

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

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

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

Another Eye

…for another eye

'til everyone is blind

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

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

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

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