Bad Parenting

One of the fundamental tensions in American (and, arguably, Western) culture and law is the five-way tug-of-war amongst privacy, freedom of speech, intellectual property, distrust of monopolies, and access to information. Every nation balances these differently; indeed, every decade balances them differently, and every information user¹ balances them differently. All too often, a display of balance for one user, during one decade, in one particular American (Western) culture, appears to other users as not plates spinning on a finger, but off it.

Thus, the parenting problem with one current set of problem children: Large-language-model generative-response systems, which I'll call "SuperEliza" for now.² Consider what parents do: Teach their children, and model behavior for their children (not always positively; an abusive alcholic parent is a model of what not to do). In no particular order, consider:

• The "parents"' disregard for the rights of others in information that is generally available, especially through mass "ingestion" of digitized textual material (both overtly, and admittedly, piratical³ and otherwise), rationalized by ignoring the second part of the Feist test: Even for those texts that are "factual," it is still necessary to consider whether the way those facts are expressed is "original" that necessarily informs any fair-use analysis. That's the difference between a recitative timeline of the last month before the beginning of the European conflict in 1914 and The Guns of August: One of the two is clearly copyrightable original expression, however much it is expressing "facts."
• The "parents" set their "children" loose with nothing resembling adult supervision. One would expect a "parent" — or a reasonably socialized parent, anyway — to at least yell at their "children" about vandalizing the neighbors' houses after three police visits…
• Those two instances are just at the input end, which is bad enough. Harmful output is worse. These "children" are either stupid or mean — perhaps both — and that's leaving aside the way they encourage misuse even when not formally "wrong" (and even if it turns out this accusation is false — which is certainly possible, even with all of these emdashes that I've used in my writing since the 80s — its very plausibility is itself problematic).
• Then there's the ownership of the product problem: Not of SuperEliza's responses to queries, but of SuperEliza him/her/their/itself. The irony that the reductio ad absurdem of "Information Wants to Be Free" is "there can be no legitimate ownership interest in information-based systems, any more than of the input" gets less attention than "when recess is over, you have to give the ball back to the playground monitor — it hasn't become 'yours' because you used it."

Perhaps, though, with these parents and their endemic disregard for the rights, property, and self-respect/identification of others (and Others), we shouldn't be surprised. As a group, "techbros" aren't… well… the best-socialized voluntary-membership group on the planet.⁴ And their companies are, if anything, worse; they're unruly children, too.

It's not just the parents' personalities, but their substitution of "volume" for "credibility with those who've actually studied the subject matter", the "more input" is better than "higher quality, even paid-for, input" choice that led to, well, every lawsuit over training materials. This is particularly apparent in output for anything related to biology. It's not quite so apparent, though — and dangerously so — when there's a lot of incorrect popular mythology about a subject that's not quite within regular, everyday experience. It's not that Joe the Plumber is stupid; it's that he doesn't actually know a lot about industrial-scale petroleum refineries, no matter how many pictures fo them appear on his social-media feed. The mythologies get turned into blithe, uncontrovertible, unreserved statements of "fact" based on the accessibility of the source materials.⁵

If one is going to ascribe a human characteristic like "intelligence expressed through language, music, or drawing" to the machines, some examination, some acknowledgement of how human "intelligence" develops — and is flawed, in substance or process — seems appropriate. The next stage will necessarily involve incorporating not just a direct response, but exercise of judgment (also a hallmark of human intelligence, let alone "superintelligence").

So we shouldn't be surprised that with this kind of parenting — and this kind of parents — we're seeing more Lord of the Flies than To Kill a Mockingbird. Both of which remain in copyright, so they shouldn't be part of any SuperEliza "training" dataset… but they're in the Bartz dataset…

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1. There's really no satisfactory shorthand for "the people who are in and around information, who consume information, who produce information, and who are affected by information and others' consumption and production of information." For the nonce, I'm adopting "user" because that's the first-in-time for individuals in the modern world, at least as to conscious interface. This carefully neglects the chicken/egg problem regarding where the initial dataset comes from.
2. It is possible that these systems will evolve toward true intelligence, which would require both the ability to pass the Turing Test with an expert in the field being discussed, and the ability to apply not just information and inferences from previously-known information to new disparate contexts, but determine and adapt methods of reasoning from the previously known to new, disparate contexts. We're not there yet. Notwithstanding an ignoramus's attempt to rebrand rename current-generation technology as "Superintelligence", the current branding of "artificial intelligence" isn't just puffery — because it's ultimately descriptive, it's fundamentally (and, arguably, intentionally) misleading. Current-generation systems, and those in the forseeable near future, far more resemble Eliza with a larger dataset and automated incrementing of that dataset than anything else. They can't develop new methods of reasoning, or spontaneously do anything. Fortunately, they can't send astronauts outside to fix a (nondefective) AE-35 unit, either. Plus, they're "SuperEliza" largely because the hardware is so much more capable.
3. One might argue that the settlement reserves that question; however, the settlement documents reserve not the question of whether knowingly pirated material was ingested, but whether the ingestion created liability because there was a potential fair-use defense that had been preliminarily ruled sufficient to avoid summary judgment in the infringed authors' favor. Compare Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 788 F.Supp.3d 1026 (N.D. Cal. 2025) with Thomson Reuters Enter. Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc., No. [20]25–2153 (3d Cir. 30 Sep 2026).
4. Back in the day, I was one of them. (Some would contest that my socialization is any better now.) I contend it just gives me insight into the only comparable voluntary-membership group: Authors.
5. That this bears a sad relationship to the "statements of facts" found in judicial opinions wrestling with nontraditional contexts is for another time. And it's not just when "science" is involved, either.

Mismatched Capabilities

How does one actually build something when the tool available is a hammer and there are no nails — not even any screws — in the inventory?

• RIP Tom Ulen (nothing "official" yet). Yes, I actually maintain(ed) friendships inside the L&E movement, primarily among those like Tom who viewed economic analysis of law — and legal analysis of economics! — as a powerful tool and not an answer per se (or should that be per quod?). He (and his science-fiction fandom) will be missed.
• And as to the latter, just over sixty years ago American TV boldly went where no one had gone before, in particular because it relied upon truly independent freelancers (not mere outside contractors mislabelled as freelancers) telling unpredictable stories premised on surprise and not a single overarching premise (preapproved by the studio). Maybe Disney could learn something, whether for Marvel stuff (of which there are other "ownership" issues that are not well-known, even aside from Stan Lee), or a certain other franchise devoted to ill-conceived fan service since the mid-1980s, or… Oh, wait, that would be the definition of "Not Invented Here," wouldn't it? And the less said about the respect accorded the outside inventors/inventions by transferees and other exploiters, the better… especially when misidentified and poorly-conceived legal workarounds are involved. Since it's a new academic year, here's your homework… which you should be prepared to both criticize and embrace for very much the same reasons (and for many others not visible within its underlying weltanschauung).
• Or we could note that the biggest problem with many cultural debates (and institutions) is a distressing tendency toward binarism, epitomized by CP Snow's regrettable inability to count above two (not that Leavis was any better). "A clash between diametrically opposed alternative views" is almost always oversimplified nonsense, especially when the actual stakes are not those of the argument's subject (semipaywall) — things like "reputation" (and "casualties"). Sometimes everybody involved in these false-dichotomy debates is wrong; the Snow/Leavis controversy was fuelled in part by refusal to even contemplate "boundary conditions," as inherent in the very forum of the debate — both between Snow and Leavis, and in Snow's own conception.

  At present, the purported "debates" over the more-than-two-millennia-long snarl of the Levant in particular and Southwest Asia (the "Middle East") in general epitomize this, and especially so because many of the most vocal participants in those "debates" themselves have no stake in them. Let alone any knowledge of the region, or personal experience with the spillover elsewhere, or the concepts of "hidden agendas" and "undisclosed/overdiscounted conflicts of interest." For it to be meaningful, "Never Again" has to include everyone, else we're just seeing at a social level that those who were themselves abused (literally or by transferred identity) tend to become abusers; very much like, well, Northern Ireland. Meanwhile others exploit the distraction (and you should carefully ponder the meaning of "regime change" in all its multiplicity — and undisclosed conflicts of interest). That allied/proxy leader may — for now — be our bastard, but at his/her/their core still a bastard.

Briefing for a Descent Into the News

Unfortunately, there's no Virgil handy to guide us out afterward, either. Contemporary satirists just aren't enough.

• If you need any further demonstration that Disbarred Rudy has gone bonkers, consider his screed urging the present mayor of New York City to not attend Friday's 25th anniversary eulogies for an atrocity. That screed underlines precisely why Mamdani should participate. It's not just because "he's a nonwhite Muslim," or anything else pointing at Mamdani himself as somehow an "inappropriate" mourner; it's because the attitude of taking action and spewing hate against those Not Just Like Me is precisely the attitude that informed the terrorists. They didn't go after a directly-related target, but a massively multiemployer office building… that employed more than a few members of their own religion, but were somehow lumped in as "Americans." So, too, for the first responders.^† This ironic turn on "We have met the Enemy, and he is us" is no doubt beyond Rudy's narrow-minded consideration.
• As a further demonstration of endemic inability to look outside the box, to judge canonical literature texts by their covers… or to look at context, in the same way that the curriculum itself has been forced to look at context. (Initial aside: Even in 1980, there were paperback editions available… I had to buy one each semester. They fit much better in backpacks than did the casebound editions.) The fundamental problem is that Bauerlein believes that the canon represented by sole focus in even a survey course represents either "literature" or "the study of literature." That's not to say that one cannot impose some structure on the field — only that one cannot do so by preliminarily restricting the data set to material likely to reaffirm entrenched doctrine.

  Somewhat more snarkily, a significant part of any movement away from canon by students (and younger instructors) came from increasing recognition that none of them could, or did, share a first name with Byron: Lord (really, state his "Christian name" without looking it up…). The context in which literature lived mattered more and more as more students from "less-privileged" backgrounds made their way into the better schools, convinced that they needed to be employable immediately after graduation so they could begin paying back student loans. Too, just off campus (even at elite schools) the unwashed kept getting closer, kept becoming more a part of students' lives. And meanwhile, some darned fine writing was coming up from civilization — the parts of the US west of the Hudson (and here, it's also important to remember that nineteenth-century-and-earlier Europe is east of the Hudson…), particularly in comparison to what was being newly published from the mid-1960s onward in the barbarian wilderness to the east.

  Put another way, one absolutely, positively must study the Michelson-Morley experiment and its context to understand modern physics — even the parts that aren't about subatomic particles or the speed of light in a vacuum as a speed limit. The real point is that the experimental results ended up proving that its experimental design was futile; that, more than anything else, is the problem with taking the editorial efforts of Professor Abrams et al. as reflecting not a, but the, foundation of literature and literary study. One might also contrast Beowulf, Chaucer, and dare I say Spenser with even the nascent novels of Sterne and Fielding — let alone Cervantes and the chansons de geste that were already evolving from verse as printing made memorization from oral presentation less essential — but that might be gilding the lily; and it's worth unpacking that metaphor to compare to Bauerlein's explanation, particularly in the midst of the field of orchids and Nepenthe in which students today find themselves. Or, perhaps, it's just some hungry sailor mistaking a priceless tulip bulb for an onion.

  All of which I say with a fondness for (many of the) classics — but, simultaneously, recognition that the classics constitute a corrupted data set, and that due to social and technological factors we simply do not have (and can probably never obtain) the rest of the data. That more lawyers (not excluding judges!) could do with the kind of "close reading skill" Bauerlein describes — one that necessarily asks about context beyond the document, such as why Ophelia should repair to a nunnery — is for another time.

• But that's a different-academic-perspective disagreement with Professor Bauerlein, not the kind of fundamental skepticism I have regarding a certain copyright-related settlement now in the throes of maladministration. The official administrator can't escape some responsibility here, but today I'm just shaking my head at the ignorance — not much of a surprise, but definitely dismaying. I have no idea which lawyers told the President of the Authors' Guild that "less than 25% of claims had any issues at all, and that in most cases the problems stem from typographical errors or other mistakes that can be easily fixed and don’t involve actual disagreements" reflected an acceptable claims administration process — particularly when there's no need to prove initial entitlement (like in a medical mass tort) or uncertainty regarding the facial identity of potential claimants after the settlement class was narrowed inconsistently with governing precedent. Those lawyers clearly had never been involved with significant class-action settlements of this nature, where there's an admission of the relevant conduct (however "excused" it was earlier claimed) regarding a purported closed universe of claims against a specified settlement fund.

  The Authors' Guild's track record in "representing authors" is — generously — abysmal. Ms Rasenberger has not helped matters here, perhaps aided and abetted by PW's own abysmal track record… But that's nothing compared to the noncredible explanation offered by a commercial publisher's CEO for the claim of 100% of payments by that publisher, and in that he's far from unique. The directions for filing claims were not a model of clarity, nor were other explanations offered clear and consistent, but I haven't run into an author yet who didn't understand that "If the publisher still had rights on the relevant date, I write '50%' for my claim because I have to assume the publisher will make its claim for 50% unless I've already been told otherwise" — even without consulting a lawyer. Another failure to engage in "close reading," I suppose.

• Which is still superior to the purported "objective test result" standard for Army cadet officers. Yes, this is tinged a little bit with interservice rivalry; that said, we should be expecting all officers to be substantially more capable than reflected in the fiftieth percentile of, well, darned near any widespread standardized exam issued below the graduate-school level. Indeed, one of the "practical lessons" of officership is that low standards lead to low achievement… and when it comes to making decisions involving the use of force, "the middle of everyone" is a low standard.
• Which is probably less frightening than AIs answer[ing] questions about the course reading for medical, nursing, and allied-health-profession students. The vendor's identity fills me with even less confidence than the probability that this will turn out well for anyone other than the vendor.

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†  It's just not worth going in to the broader bigotry that has followed 9/11. Followed, but (unfortunately) was merely amplified by — not caused by.

Questionable Freshness

Some of these sausages are based on recent items; some… are not. At least it's not the latest antisocial-media influencer fad, the Taco Bell Diet. Maybe we can get some of those TPUSA youngsters complaining about $20 burritos to try the less-expensive ones there; that would move their explosive diarrhea to the correct orifice, anyway.

• A college president with only a bachelor's degree in political science from a third-tier university fired an English instructor for continuing to teach a story with an unreliable narrator in her English class. At least it wasn't a "biographical study" of a fictional character (that in some more-fashionable literature departments slides toward psychoanalyzing the author) (yes, that's foreshadowing for a future blawg entry). In the current political environment — something allegedly close to that college president's academic knowledge — one would think it very important to understand unreliable narrators… unless the point is to prevent students from obtaining such expertise.

  It should surprise precisely no one that this took place at a state institution in Florida. Apparently, Florida Man is more sophisticated than Florida Educational Administrator.

• But at least they're reading, right? That first sausage was about only a short story, so maybe — just maybe — it was within the capability of those students to read. I'd argue instead that there are three other causes: The relentless demand for replicable metrics in the education system, which drives the measuring devices (papers and exams) toward the clearest, simplest, least-ambiguous, and as a consequence shortest material.^† Then there's the absolute load of self-congratulatory crap that makes its way past the cultural/commercial gatekeepers (gatekeepers are necessary to at least some extent — just not these gatekeepers). Lurking underneath, there's the question of whether the teachers can or do read book-length works themselves; we surely don't incentivize those in the classroom already to do so, let alone incentivize those who do so to spend time in the classroom.
• And then there's the uncontrolled spew of social media, which is harmful enough even before considering darker enabling behavior. That, in turn, becomes one of the ingredients in the first sausage on this platter, and not just because social media is a target-rich environment for finding unreliable narrators.
• The obvious linkage among the preceding sausages is that in many ways, they all involved unreliable narrators — often in multiple layers. It can become even darker when courts intentionally ignore attempts to make the narrative reliable. That, in the end, is what lower-court "factfinding" does: It first turns individual pieces of evidence — often of varying reliability, and virtually always incomplete — into "facts." Too often, though, those facts (and/or the evidence behind them) are subordinated to ideology. Eppur si muove, figlia di puttana — which is not about any particular judge (or at least not out loud!), but about theocratic mindsets: Not final due to infallibility, but treated as infallible because they're final.

  I suppose it could be worse. It could be memoirs and not court records. Tell me, how many lies are acceptable in a memoir? Perhaps a few more than in legal decisions that themselves did inadequate fact-checking (as to the long-prior proceeding described there)…

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†  This is not yet another veiled criticism of the bar exam, and especially not the multiple-choice multistate bar exam (for both substantive law and ethics). Or at least it's not veiled.

Hawley Smoot!

There's only one Canadian product that merits a punitive tariff: Wildfire smoke. But then, I'd say the same thing about coal-fired electrical generators, the Tacoma Aroma, and other negative externalities with unclear cost factors. Whether that should be applied directly to real-estate developers is… complicated.

• Speaking of negative externalities, we just had a six-weeks-long event full of them: The Men's World Cup. (And for anyone who says "men is the default, we have to separately designate women as the inherently less-athletic product," I suggest competing with Abby Wambach for a header in the penalty area.) Whether considering the perfidy of agents or of dubious fanbases — not to mention dubious individual fans with little understanding of the game (especially when their efforts are utterly meaningless) — this quadrennial event always ends up fighting mythology. In two years in/around Los Angeles, it'll be same process/different flavor…
• I've not seen Nolan's The Odyssey, if only because it's not showing in an appropriate venue: My living room. I've beaten the dead horse of miserable cinema experiences well past the glue bottle, so I'll leave that there and just point out that for those of us who wear thick glasses, 70mm widescreen and IMAX are actually less immersive than our TVs. The more-amusing side battle is Mu5k's "promise" to create a "historically-accurate proprietary-LLM-engine-generated version of his own"; one wonders whether it will include the rampant disease, festering post-battle wounds, and… well… adult content. Perhaps more to the point, one wonders if Grok can/will refrain from the Lara Crofting of the female characters, especially Helen and Athena but also Arete, Calypso, Cassandra, Circe, Eurycleia, Melantho, Nausicaa (not this one), and last alphabetically but not in importance Penelope. A "historically accurate" adaptation of Homer — one, the other, together — will have to be toned down to get a "hard R" rating, and that would put it out of reach of the adolescent boys forming so much of Mu5k's fanbase (at least until it comes out on a streaming platform with lots of ads for worthless-at-best crap).
• Meanwhile, Major Major Major has been busy "suggesting" that "older" military personnel have low testosterone (projecting much?), which rather begs the question of what qualities are normally appropriate in "older" military members — that is, more senior, whether enlisted or commissioned. And frankly, I'd much rather any military surgeon treating me after an honorable wound in battle didn't have any steroid-induced shakiness in fine motor control.

  On the Malibar Front (or at least nearer to it than headlines make it seem), journalists are beginning to recognize that among Persian rulers, it's not turtles but monsters all the way down, back to not later than the Sasanids. But then, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia…

• I've been one of the literati since I was writing my age in single digits (well, at latest single hexadecimal digits). I've never been one of the hot literati, though, and there's no chance that I'm about to start.

Comments on the final (snort!) approval of the Bartz/Anthropic lawsuit are forthcoming. Short preview: It's not nearly as "final" as the words "final approval" imply, and nobody should count on payments being made Real Soon Now.

Circadian Link Sausage Platter

(Not cicadian, no bugs approved here.) Given that this Sunday's big game is between two Spanish-speaking nations, I'm feeling somewhat copacetic about being forced to rely on Telemundo due to the incompetence of the local Fox station.

• It's become quite apparent over the last year and a half that we have endemic chemical imbalances at the top of this Administration, ranging from 'roid rage at the DoD to damned near every-non-scientifically-validated-thing down the street to reasonably probable psychotropics, intoxicants, and other "mind-altering" things at 1600. I'd suggest installing some biochemists in senior positions, but "biochemist" has at least one too many syllables to be within the contemplation of the senior officials in this Administration… although, curiously, "testosterone" seems just fine with (at least some of) them.

  And as to military personnel and testosterone: Leaving aside that "'roid rage" is rather the opposite of what one needs in leadership positions, muscle mass isn't going to help maintain weapons systems; or analyze observational data ranging from intercepts to downrange clearance; or evade hostile fire; or prevent unfitness for duty due to cardiovascular disease, or gastrointestinal irregularities, or gynocomastia preventing proper fit of body armor (designed by and for Manly Men); or a host of other side effects of not just supplements used, but lifestyle and exercise changes — consider the obvious problem of joint and other flexion deficits. Much of the time, rather the opposite. And despite Major Major Major's hostility to half of the population participating in the military, testosterone isn't everything; but then, if he'd actually taken advantage of an elite education to bloody learn something or just acknowledge how much he doesn't know…¹

• Meanwhile, this Administration has demonstrated yet again that its main method of persuasion is turning assertions of the inherent perfidy of those not personally loyal to them up to 11 without any factual basis (sometimes in less than an hour). I can't — quite — call it "lying" or "perjury" because that requires self-awareness of falsity; that's a deficit that should have been apparent to everyone who actually read even part of the Orange One's self-congratulatory/aggrandizing publicity tome of the 1980s. (In case that isn't a clear-enough reference, I mean the ghostwritten one that the ghostwriter regrets, the one that's a work of fiction as much as a memoir.) That I can't quite call it "lying" or "perjury" does not invalidate an inference of inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office of the Presidency — a distinction in degree from other Administrations so great as to be a distinction in nature.
• I suppose we could just argue about daylight savings time. Again. I'd prefer permanent standard time, but absolutely disdain the twice-a-year changeovers. And to those who whinge about the dangers of sending children to school in the dark, you're asking the wrong question entirely: Why send them to school that early at all, especially since the agricultural sector is going to work when there's daylight no matter what the clocks say… and there's much less reliance on child-of-farmer labor now than even half a century ago?
• At least Peppa Pig isn't an instrument of propaganda and bigotry.² Well, not much bigotry, anyway; even though it depicts anthropomorphized pigs, it's not about antisemitism. Meanwhile, the stampeding herd of elephants in the room is not only being ignored, but proclaimed as nonexistent by techbros/allies who can't conceive of a distinction between "fact" and "expression" — unable to distinguish between "87" and "four score and seven"…

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1. One of the surest ways to earn the disdain of mid-grade NCOs — the backbone of the military, and this also applies to their civilian equivalents even far from the military — is the pretense of deciveness and certainty coming from ignorance, and specifically when those mid-grade NCOs do have knowledge inconsistent with that pretended certainty. Of course, Major Major Major in his last active-duty assignment was in a role in which everybody (all the way up and down) is ignorant, and often intentionally so.
2. Aside: It wasn't just that the CIA's propaganda alterations of Animal Farm for that wretched cartoon distorted the political subtext of the original; it was that they were objectively inept, both as "fiction" and by ironically weakening the original's anticommunism, quite probably because the idiots involved hadn't read the book, or done any research on its context, or worse yet hadn't read Homage to Catalonia or Why I Write. Either of those last two items would, or at least should, have resulted in a "wait a minute, did we misunderstand the original?" moment or three. That they didn't is rather consistent with the US tradition of marginal-at-best competence at human intelligence.

Casualties in the Ostrich Brigade

Fortunately, not all of these casualties have been fatalities. The VA will no doubt resist treating those that are just maimings as "service-related" — rather unusually, with substantial justification.

• The fatality involves the bafflingly (even though wilfully) ignorant Sen Graham. His ignorance extended far, far beyond the usual-for-politicians "I'll viciously attack members of a different faction and excuse the same conduct in those of my own" posturing that has become normal since… well, not later than 1954, albeit without parallel consequences.

  Instead, Graham's ignorance extended to things he learned — or at least was exposed to and required to teach — in his pre-politics days: The laws of armed conflict. Not just because he was an officer, but because he was a military lawyer in an operational-immediacy zone, whose office participated in providing required annual training. The contrast between that requirement and Graham's quarter of a century of advocating cultural and military imperialism — both of which implicate Geneva and Hague Conventions restrictions — is at minimum cautionary. Magnanimously, I'll leave his selective ethics and knowledge acquisition/assimilation regarding various domestic and other foreign-policy issues for another time, if only because he's far from alone in them.

• In the "no fatalities — yet" set of casualties (no Purple Hearts, the wounds aren't visible enough) we can ponder distractions from education, specifically athletics. Budgets and institutional priorities are bad enough; this attitude, extending back half a century, is one of the main reasons that I chose to avoid this institution, despite its 500kg-gorilla status in my hometown. (That it was all too often just about as sophisticated in the arts as a gorilla mattered, too.) This is definitely the tail wagging the Dawgs.

  Much worse, though, has been the continued misuse of athletics to advance evangelical agendas inconsistent with a broad education — most especially by those who proclaim/think that they're concerned only with the "integrity of athletic competition," and ignoring that they're allowing "principles" applicable to athletics to overwhelm everything else. This is epitomized by the poorly-reasoned Supreme Court decision in BPJ not quite two weeks ago; admittedly, this poor reasoning was invited — but not compelled — by poor writing of the underlying statute and regulations and vague writing of the Constitutional provision. More to the point, it was completely ignorant of the Establishment Clause issues presented by ignoring the religious aspect of defining "biological sex" without noting that the purported "original meaning" was already — at the time the statutes and regulations were written — divergent not just from any technical meaning within "biology," but from even the undergraduate level understanding of "biology."^† This ostrich-like devotion to only "understood and recognized by lawyers" material as the source of meaning dives into the rather vicious positive-feedback loop of theology in general and evangelism/evangelicalism in particular.

  But the combined effects of these considerations are what really matter: Subordination of education to outside agendas. That's what's above the sand here. Given other methods of subordination in the news of late, the ostrich should be paying a lot more attention to sounds making their way into the hole that sound like hyenas. Even if the metaphor does not actually relate to actual ostrich behavior, but only to popular mythology — which rather makes my point.

• The third set of casualties is a little harder to identify. Ultimately, it's most probably the voters of Maine, not either the Maine Democratic Party or any particular candidate.

  Initially, one must note a critical premise gone awry. Maine has used ranked-choice voting for quite some time… which removes the actual need for "primaries" and "single endorsed party candidates" in the first place. And it's not only possible but routine in fully-tabulated RCV elections for an initially lower-ranked candidate to overcome a more-monolithically-supported candidate; that is, a party putting forth a Unity Candidate has little practical advantage over a party putting forth several others (see, e.g.,, 2025 Hugo Voting Statistics at 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25 (first-place candidate on initial ballot was not the ultimate winner; and do not kid yourselves, there are definite "party politics" involved… all of which should use a jackass as an anthromporphized logo)). So, in reality, it did not serve the voters to reify Platner as "the" Democratic Party candidate — particularly in light of the incumbent's vulnerability and problems — but only (at most) the gatekeepers.

  More subtly, though, Platner demonstrated his unsuitability for office long before the current allegations (upon which I'm withholding judgment because I've seen no evidence, not because I'm "believing" or "disbelieving" anyone; I don't make liability/liability-like decisions on the basis of initial public posturing, and you shouldn't either, not even when that public posturing is ultimately vindicated). In a representative democracy, we don't vote for specific policies; we instead vote for intermediate decisionmakers, who may or may not express an initial policy preference. When they make those decisions, however, those decisionmakers will have access to substantial nonpublic information to inform their choices, ranging from expert testimony to often-odious-but-sometimes-appropriate lobbying by specific interests to intelligence data leading to other unexpected decisions, for good or for ill. I can't trust someone who puts a permanent mark on his/her body without understanding its associations… presuming that one accepts the excuse that he really didn't, which I find implausible even for a Marine on liberty. At least a somewhat sober Marine, which may be expecting too much on a foreign-port liberty call — but sure as hell isn't expecting too much from a candidate for an office that votes on declaring war (or not).

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†  By the early 1980s, undergraduate textbooks and lectures — especially for upper-level courses in vertebrate embryology and development — treated gonad expression as fluid, and did so as established doctrine. But now we're into the questions of the meaning of "ordinary" and "public" related to meaning, and more particularly as to "what is evidence of meaning?" that we can see getting screwed up by lawyers who should bloody well know better (after having been warned about it). When lawyers outsource their datasets and analysis to small and overtly nontechnical language models, they're committing the same error. Demonstrating that, however, might take a few hundred footnotes… shooting at a very-much-moving target with high deflection in the first place.

Viking Row Link Sausage Platter

Well, FIFA has once again moved ahead in the battle to be recognized as the most-corrupt sporting organization. The irony here is that FIFA set itself up to fail, both with its "rules" regarding appeals (note: for all practical purposes, there are none… in particular, there are none regarding non-sporting-origin pressure tactics by oligarchical assholes) and the "rules" regarding the VAR review that led to the problem in the first place ("zero tolerance" and "death-penalty-equivalent only" systems just don't work to actually control behavior — ask any third-grade teacher). I'm sure the IOC will make this competitive in the next two years, but I'm afraid that just trying harder isn't going to help the NCAA.

• Somewhat more mundanely and more importantly, the illusion of privacy on the 'net appears to be getting more attention, if not more actual effective control. (Which still beats intimidation by DHS consistent with its internal culture.) Meanwhile, even the "technologically challenged" Supreme Court seems to be waking up a little.

  The thread connecting all of these incidents is simple to state in the abstract and horrendously complicated to confront in any practical sense: Lawyers' (and politicians') ignorance of both the actual methodology used and its means of (and potential for) abuse by nonofficial actors. It's all well and good to establish a prohibition on "the gummint" establishing policies and procedures to invade privacy. When "the gummint" — indirectly, via third-party privacy invasions epitomized by the location-data items in the preceding paragraph, or directly, via wink-wink-nudge-nudge "unauthorized exceeding of authority" by officials as in the last one — that's not sufficient when everything about how privacy is at issue is masked. At the moment, the most-obvious example of this is the underlying rationale for Google's "analytics": The purported benefit to advertisers (not incidentally enabling them to charge excessive rents). Leaving aside whether that benefit is to society as a whole for another time, it's a castle largely built on sand that is most emphatically not linearly scaleable: The relationship between overall, fully-extended costs per transaction achieved, commercial or otherwise, and the failure/success rate of communications seeking those transactions. Worse, the sand is being undermined to make more memory chips for enhanced-Eliza systems calling themselves "AI" without displaying the fundamental characteristic of true intelligence: Judgment.

• And now, ignorance on display. A purportedly esteemed commentator Over There inadvertently exposes his utter ignorance of preparing for contingencies. Perhaps this statement epitomizes the ignorance of someone who proudly proclaims that he was a member of Blair's strategic-review commission:

  When I served as a lay member of Tony Blair’s strategy defence review in 1998, we were bombarded with unquantified abstractions. We were told not to query or quantify concepts such as menace, aggression, force or “nuclear threat”. As for the last, it was said to be “like the Virgin birth”, axiomatic to the concept of deterrence. Today’s case for spending £63bn on renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent must be close to slight. Yet it receives no peep of debate.

  What part of "You have no f*cking clue how long it takes to establish, or reestablish, a discrete contingency-response program, do you?" did you not understand? Leaving aside the amount of time it takes to actually acquire the tools, there's a serious issue with training personnel — and, more to the point, their supervisors, up to three or four levels above the workers. Elsewhere in that ignorant screed, there's an implicit claim that the UK will have three years' accurate, clear notice of immediately-impending military action by Russia against the UK… which, even if true, begs the question of how long it would take the UK to build a full system to respond. Not just buy the guns off the street — recruit, train, promote, support, and deploy counterforce.

  There's quite a bit to be said for keeping things less wasteful in military, and all other contingency-based, programs. (That's not at all the same thing as "improving efficiency" — by definition, "contingency preparation" is not and cannot be "efficient.") It's always easy to pick on obvious, easily-defined-and-denigrated programs like "independent nuclear deterrent" and extend that reasoning to all else. The same for "hurricane preparedness" and "vaccine/antibiotic stockpile" and… well, I won't go on. The real point is that "the hardware" is the easy part of any contingency-response system — and even the hardware is almost always specialized and not fit for any other purpose. Conservatively (and historically), it takes ten to twelve years to establish a self-sustaining discrete contingency-response system where there is none, whether it's a new creation or complete reactivation after dismantling a prior program. That's due primarily to human factors, not hardware issues easily waved away with a finance-industry-provided magic wand… presuming that the hardware being specified and purchased (and usually not maintained because that's even more expensive!) is actually fit for purpose. Particular to this issue, do I hear any echoes of "How long did it take the UK to bring the obsolete-even-then Typhoon Eurofighter into operational readiness?" anywhere? Buehler? Buehler?

  Absolutely there must be a guns-versus-butter debate, and no partisan for any aspect is going to get everything desired. "Lack of immediate threat means ignore long-term threat because we can deal with it later if it's ever necessary," though, is not a valid part of that debate… as demonstrated by global warming, etc. And that's before considering the difficulty of changing resource allocation later, both politically and practicably.

• CNN demonstrates that arguing against someone's high statements of principle justifying a rebellion — specifically, the preamble of the Declaration of Independence — is seldom very persuasive and merely distracts from actually confronting the grievances — the rationale — behind those high principles. But I probably shouldn't be surprised: Civilians seldom learn how to run a checklist…
• Odious art, and "labor relations" in the arts, and educational directives, and even wealth all have their places. Preferably well away from me, as I can make few assurances about minimizing the collateral damage if they get too close.

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."

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…)

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…

Link Sausages Past the Blockade(s)

I'm afraid the ingredients have been piling up, but they've finally made it past the Strait of Hormuz for your reading pleasure. And their undoubted (and unpredictable) effects on the world economy.

• I'm not entirely sure which is less credible — Drumpf as Jesus or as a doctor.
  • Depending upon which version of the propaganda one credits, Jesus was one or more of a rabbi (certainly in its sense as "teacher"), a man of peace, an advocate of tolerance for others both different and (in particular) less financially fortunate, the son of Yhwh and/or a tripartite aspect of Yhwh and/or a deity in his own capacity, an ardently Semitic Jew, a nonviolent opponent of the Roman Empire (and, more generally, Western classicalism as projected by privileged-class scholars a millennium-and-a-half later), and an ethicist who did his best to conform to those ethics. Not all that credible in any respect.
  • Conversely, a doctor is learned in the sciences, constantly seeks to understand more about the sciences and circumstances of patients, cares for patients individually (and at least aspirationally whichever patient is at hand, regardless of circumstances or ability to pay or politicoreligious opposition), and pledges first of all to do no harm. A doctor definitely doesn't prescribe drinking bleach… and understands that labelling such advice as satire (or considering satire in the health advice one is giving) is inappropriate at best. Not all that credible in any respect.

  This comparison seems more apt. So does this one. So does remembering that (paraphrasing a quotation often attributed to Twain, inaccurately) the man who doesn't read (or write) more than 140 characters at a time has no advantage over the one who can't.

• Speaking of self-appointed stable geniuses, albeit in London this time, the compensation structure at Tottenham Hotspur explains a lot. I'm no Arsenal fan, but I do have antipathy to Spurs stretching back more than half a century, so I'm somewhat pleased that on current form they'll be swapping leagues with the Tractor Boys for next season. But this is just the current economic consensus in action, right? The righteous exploitation of an an advantaged-without-merit initial position, right?
• At that, the Spurs women's programs are (not surprisingly) better off than writers, than publishers, than the arts in general. Both the self-manufactured crises at Spurs and the general problems throughout the arts have a common nexus — not necessarily "the" cause, but a common point of failure — in inept, overcompensated gatekeepers who seldom have actual experience with the process, but only with the product (if that).
• Conversely, thieves would deny the property rights of authors and other creators however original. In part, this is a jurisprudential problem, because the last few centuries have steadily eroded "personal rights" to the point at which "an impaired property interest" is the only practicable entre to any dispute-resolution system. In even greater part, this results from too many people — not just techbros! — actually believing that information wants to be free (and it's all just information) while simultaneously ignoring that "originality" is itself informational. That a mutation of an existing gene is not an expected result does not change its nature as new information.
• And, from the distressingly-old part of the meat drawer that I just didn't manage to work into any prior sausages, consider conceptual problems with fuel efficiency of hybrid vehicles. What this really points out, however, is that the measures of "efficiency" are inappropriate; the figures stated correlate to real-world fuel economy. More distressingly, the article doesn't provide context, like comparison to "more-conventional" vehicles' fuel consumption — which demonstrates that even if not perfect, hybrids are better. Context matters.

Decline and Fall

Once upon a time, Croesus — the yuuuuuugely rich king of Lydia — asked ChatGPT the Oracle of Delphi whether he should attack Persia. The Oracle replied that should he do so, a great empire would fall. Upon hearing this, Croesus decided that he would attack Persia and inevitably cause the fall of the Persian empire. But the empire that fell was Lydia, not Persia. So long as it's not his personal empire that falls, though, today's avatar of Croesus won't care.

Perhaps more than one empire will fall. We can only hope that Mordor is among them; the real problem is that the fall of empires inevitably has an excessive body count, long after the first casualty has been buried.

Meanwhile, just across the river, nothing newsworthy is happening. But at least the architecture is neoclassical and, thus, suitable for American grandeur instead of being excessively modern — not to mention dedicated to ensuring that the names of real people do not remain unknown.

Swinging Gates (and Other Things)

Hopefully, it does mean a thing (at least one thing, anyway):

• The highly esteemed Mr Hendrix would have been entirely unsurprised by monopolistic ticketing practices regarding live performances (in all probability, both directly corrupt and "influenced" by the same forces — if not the same individuals or "organizations" — that gave us payola). In the usual we-didn't-do-nothin'-wrong-and-won't-do-it-again partial resolution of current ticketing issues, the DoJ has announced a settlement of antitrust charges with LiveNation. Not everyone agrees, though; over half of the state Attorneys General have not signed on to this settlement, and continue to push for divestiture as the most-appropriate resolution.¹
• The LiveNation controversy is just one particular window into the gatekeeping problem in the arts. LiveNation and its other-segment counterparts are involved after the snootier gatekeepers have finished (ineptly) imposing their narrow cultural preconceptions on everyone by trying not to "advance the useful Arts," but by repeating what has come before (presumably with better marketing support). The gatekeepers' error is one of projection: I am, therefore everyone should be… when, from inside their bubble, they have an economically ignorant view of the creator's life. Usually not just economically, either, but arguing about the self-proclaimed primacy of a single city in an entire nation's — hell, the entire world's — useful Arts is for another time, being a reflexive issue leading right back into economic irreality. (And more than one city's gatekeepers' attitudes are at issue here…)
• I respectfully suggest that the considered-out-of-touch-by-wingnuts Ninth Circuit needs to confront its current problem with "swinging dicks" by consulting a mohel (there are still a few days, the eighth day after the opinion (PDF) issued is this Saturday, so it can still be… snipped). That the plaintiffs in the underlying litigation should have consulted — and thought about, using available methods of literary and historical analysis — a relevant part of their owner's manual is an issue not amenable to judicial remedy, if only because US courts refuse to engage with pretext so long as a religious basis is proclaimed. It's far too late for this jurist to confront either without some significant guidance from real adults.²
• Sometimes proponents of generative-response systems — it's hard to avoid using the marketing-friendly, and misleadingly inaccurate, "AI" — realize, under pressure, that they've gone too far. (Much, much too far.) Any output will do; competence is optional. One wonders when they'll impose similar restrictions on legal advice, which in many instances is at least equally dangerous and founded on hallucinations. Our doom (or our Doom) at the hands of the machines isn't far off.

  Pardon me, I need to take a call from Cyberdyne Systems…

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1. This sort of nonsense makes me wish that the American zeitgeist was as enthusiastic about imposing death penalties on bad-actor corporations, which have generally proven incapable of learning to behave better, as it is on disproportionately minority individuals, who often have never been given an opportunity to learn to behave better. The old "but what about the widows and orphans whose investments depend on those corporations?" argument means an awful lot less in the day and age of low-transaction-cost index funds (and specialized mutual funds, and even hedge funds!). Those who choose to reach for higher returns need also to accept higher risk — especially as passive investors whose only job is to choose board members to supervise corporate management.

   I certainly haven't seen all (or even most) of the evidence in the LiveNation matter, although both analogy to other parts of (and pasts of) the entertainment industry and the knowledge I do have indicate it would need to be extraordinary evidence indeed to refute the inference that There's Something Incurably Wrong Here.

2. Compare, e.g., prior issues with that jurist's scholarly deficits with Kitzmiller v. Dover Area Sch. Dist., 400 F.Supp.2d 707 (E.D.Pa. 2005) (in which a court actually did confront pretext… thanks to a web of arrogant and inexplicably stupid errors by the wannabe-theocrats exposing the pretext for what it was).