The Anthropic (Lack of) Principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How [Not] to Share

So, one obvious conceptual flaw in SharePoint has been exploited? Color me surprised (a particularly repulsive variant of chartreuse)…

I have uninstalled and blocked SharePoint on every machine I've had since it was first distributed. At a fundamental level, the SharePoint concept is inconsistent with the concept of "confidential data," and its very existence — very much like the use of the body of e-mails for privileged information — makes a mockery by trusting others whom the person responsible for securing information doesn't know. Effective information security is not an automated afterthought to the convenience of providing "me, too!" comments on badly-conceived marketing documents passed across an organization and to outside "consultants." Even that, however, is better conceived than SharePoint and similar "collaborative editing" systems that also, simultaneously, undermine both declarations concerning the marketing emperor's new clothes and taking responsibility for changes — that is, they foster not collaboration but groupthink. (Lest you think this is an anti-M$ rant, I do the same with all other "collaborative commenting" and "silent document-sharing" systems, such as with PDFs.)

Any resemblance of the preceding to any of the following is somewhat less than coincidental:

• The traditional process of providing law-firm partners commenting ability (even with pen on paper!) on every associate's "preliminary" and "early-draft" work, without regard to either "actual knowledge of context" or "need to know"
• Blanket access to anything by administrative assistants
• The success rate of individuals in recognizing what elements of documents that they are asked to comment upon but are not directly concerned with their daily duties are confidential, even to the minimal extent of "proprietary business information"
• AI Chelsea Manning

Worse, all of that concerns "confidential information." It does not reach the concept of EEFIs (essential elements of friendly information), such as a sudden increase in communications between a corporation and a law firm (or even department thereof) specializing in mergers and acquisitions… or white-collar-crime defense… These are just the easy-to-see examples, too; and the less said about healthcare information, or enablement of ICE raids, the better. The irony that this particular system failure is (more) exploitable when an organization uses its own SharePoint server rather than a "cloud-based system" should cause everyone to question the very concept, but that isn't part of the conversation at all.

"Security, privacy, and respect for others' security and privacy" are inherently not efficient. Get over it — reject the purportedly neutral "efficiency is always good" meme — and pay the f*ck attention, instead of relying upon some programmer who knows nothing of your actual business (or personal concerns) to do it for you.

•  •  •

Meanwhile, Life continues to get in the way of everything. I'm afraid that Life doesn't make for "efficient sharing," either. So, no further comments about how having a "controlling shareholder individual or small group" for a company with First Amendment issues makes Mr Colbert's impending deplatforming inevitable, beyond my expression of just as much surprise as I did above concerning SharePoint. At least not today.

Not on Safari

I can neither confirm nor deny that there's an elephant in the room, nor whether I've noticed (or fed?) any crocodiles near the waterhole.

• I long wondered if Motel 6 left the light on for you to keep cockroaches out of sight, but it looks like the new ownership forgot to leave the light on in its own boardroom. Don't get me started on Kars for Kids (carefully choosing an unmistakeable homonymative after the hyperformalist trademark frenzy that was possible only due to the 19th-century economic concepts underlying trademark law) — or the utterly-misnamed "legitimate theater." Rather distressingly, the entertainment industry is structured on a by-design bait-and-switch, exacerbated when it's hired out for side gigs by the advertising industry — so all of this is entirely predictable.
• Speaking of cockroaches running from the lights, it's not a new problem in NoVa.
• Don't ignore this important message from our sponsors: Leaving aside that QR codes are themselves built on a bait-and-switch system designed to make users not pay attention to what they're doing, the actual use of "you don't really need to know who the sponsor actually is" just feeds the egos of exactly the wrong segment of undesireables (I say that as a not-recovering hacker from the solder-it-yourself era). Just ignore the secondaries…
• Speaking of undesireables, it's all about whose desire is being suppressed, and how, and why. We'll just ignore how actual undesireables speak out; pondering the irony of reducing a complex argument to a t-shirt slogan worn by a less-well-known part of a less-regarded sport is too much for Monday morning, though — even in the abstract or through disfavored language.
• No elephants are being shot here or otherwise harmed in the production of this blawg entry. Not even rabid bull elephants rampaging around the waterhole damaging the entire ecosystem and not incidentally making their own future prospects even more bleak. Just legislators not fully and enthusiastically participating in theocracy. But they matter no more than lawyers defrauding everyone for decades to popular acclaim. Neither does that kind of lawyer's real clientbase, not even Over There.

The City Is for Burning

Once every generation:

1933 — Griffith Park
1965 — Watts
1992 — Rodney King
2025 — January wildfires… and now this

What that says about the arsonist in chief and fomenting insurrection — again — is not supposed to be a necessary part of the conversation in a true democracy. Is it? Maybe a well-known former resident of an internment camp already understands the current situation all too well.

• How about something cheerier, like music? (That look on your face says "You've got to be kidding me.") How about some real patriotism from pop stars, who did not dodge the draft? Sometimes I do have upbeat stories on the music segment of the entertainment industry! But you don't actually come here for the cheeriness, so I'll return to normal grouchiness pondering Corruption at the Top: The Next Generation, all the while speculating about how bad things must really be if that source is criticizing management. Nor is it really any better across the Pond.
• Well, how about the rising gaming industry? Surely there's some extravagent claim to be made that will entertain us! Just consider that he probably never would have been able to work on games like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, or The Winter's Tale (that last with its definitely-made-for-gaming "Exit — pursued by a bear"), because he was 40 or older and — notwithstanding the Age Discrimination in Employment Act — old fogeys of 40 and up have real trouble getting interviews (let alone actual jobs) in gaming. Any grey hairs had better be from a bottle…
• At least the House of Lords is showing some understanding of the natural-person-creator's needs and perspective on "exceptions" for AI use of copyrighted material. Not at all by coincidence, the charge is being led in the House of Lords by an actual, active, natural-person creator — something we haven't had in Congress for quite some time. Now if we'll just get everyone, or even anyone who actually has a voice in the matter, to understand and accept that "machine learning" on a Von Neumann-architecture computer doesn't resemble "human learning" except by coincidence, we could have a real conversation. Which, in the current environment, would turn into a war on social media rather rapidly.

Don't Have to Live Like a Refugee

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

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

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

Their Lips Were Moving

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

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

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

After-Bedtime Sausage Platter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ministry of Silly Talks

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

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

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

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

  (1) Military plans, weapon systems, or operations

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

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

 
 

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

The 'net Has Ears

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandatory Response

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

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

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

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

In Praise of [In]Efficiency

I offer no apologies to Erasmus¹ for an ironic twist on his ironic twists. Ambiguous, infinite reflexiveness is kewl!

The unsanctioned "Department of Government Efficiency" has been on a rampage of late², because "efficiency" is a necessary universal objective that only a business orientation can achieve — and that "government" (and, in particular, the Deep State) can never achieve. There's a tiny, tiny problem with this pathway, though: Almost by definition, planning for crises is not efficient precisely because there is neither certainty nor sufficiently precise (and accurate!) predictability of the time, place, and context of a crisis.

Consider, for the moment, an objectively-clear crisis: Hurricane Katrina.³ If one actually looks even cursorily at the four years leading up to the devastation in New Orleans and the bungled response thereto, one sees increasing emphasis on efficiency… primarily so that any "savings" could be plowed into responding to another (manufactured? not-objectively-clear? resulting-from-the-response-as-much-as-the-putative-cause?) crisis.⁴ No plan survives contact with the enemy — or reality — because neither one actively cooperates with the plan.

More disturbingly, consider the particular rampage noted a couple paragraphs above. There might be a microefficiency possible through a fresh-eyes oversight of payment systems. Assume, hypothetically, that the deterrent effect of knowing that the DOGE⁵ Is Watching will automatically cut all fraud to zero. (Yeah, right.) Has anyone considered the costs of any of:

• Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from internal misuse, like some staffer at DOGE using the payment data to track down his ex… or estranged daughter?
• Securing the data retrieved from the payment system from external attack, like hackers choosing to attack off-the-shelf software now being stored on dubiously-secured computers in Alexandria? Or, more to the point, hostile foreign governments doing so?
• Distinguishing between the fact of a payment and the reason(s) for that particular payment — an effort (if actually undertaken) that inherently requires correlation of individual payments with specific, private, oft-protected-by-other-law personal information?
• Actual enforcement efforts against any discrepancies actually discerned (whether or not factually/ethically verified)?

I didn't think so; and even that comparison assumes (with no warrant, let alone relationship to reality) complete success.

Beginning down the path of internalizing negative externalities⁶ — necessary to determine the efficiency of a system even more than the efficiency of a particular incidence — further exposes the real problem. DOGE is attempting to count the number of angels (or, in this instance, devils⁷) on the head of a pin not by assuming just the existence of the angels and devils, but by assuming that they are necessarily — and accurately — countable through the magic of modern accounting. It further flies in the face of a critical lesson of both the events of military history and the theory of conflict resolution. "All teeth and no tail" is a losing strategy precisely because it presumes that the world is a chessboard, that no pawn ever repels the actual assault of a knight, that the terrain is known and fixed and unchallenging, that the simplest case is always an accurate model of the real world — and that no one ever responds to a demand to surrender with "Nuts!," but instead accedes to the "inevitable." But it's only "inevitable" to those making the same set of a priori assumptions, and slavishly following the same path of reasoning, as those making the demand.

Mu5k's Schlieffen Plan to remake the government as smaller and more efficient is little more than an attempt to convert the slogan "greater efficiency is always good!" into reality. Instead of considering the facts, or the law/other methods of reasoning, railing against "government inefficiency" is merely pounding on the table⁸ — or, perhaps, the on-screen keyboard in 140-character soundbites that couldn't even complete this sentence, or include the footnote. And the footnote(s) is/are part of the point: The "inefficiency meme" is at best a postulate that has not been proven.

---

1. Desidarius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (1509, this trans. 1876); see also Anthony Grafton's helpful context-setting foreword to the Princeton University Press edition (PDF) which, nonetheless, glosses over a critical aspect of the work: That it also functions as a pre-Enlightenment criticism of the argument from authority, and in particular transferrence of authority between fields of expertise. Directly confronting this problem would need to wait a couple centuries more…
2. Keep in mind that it's still during the government/business day in DC as I'm writing this. There is a nonzero chance that something even more outrageous, or at least even more remarkable, will have occurred between its writing and whenever you read this.
3. This concerns the fact and context of the response, not its competence. It wasn't a heck of a job, by any means. It's also important to remember that the management-level response failures came from those appointed to "supervise" the Deep State by the political masters, not the Deep State itself — and included a substantial proportion of "successful" businessmen (dubious genderization entirely intentional) brought in to make things more efficient.
4. It would be rather churlish for me to point out that the sum total of all such "savings" didn't make much of a dent in the cost of that earlier crisis (PDF) … and even that is just the immediate cost, as the human and consequential costs have yet to be acknowledged (let alone quantified). Consider where you're reading this: "Churlish" is probably the most-civil thing you should expect.
5. I propose giving the publicly-known leader a floppy hat and status as a spokesbacterium, carefully neglecting conflicts of interest, monomaniacal focus on twigs and not trees, not-well-hidden agendas, and attempts to deflect attention from nonmonetary (indeed, inherently inefficient) intentional side effects. Just like a disturbing nominative ancestor. Wait, you don't really think I'd suggest ridicule of a government official in a blawg piece that explicitly invokes satire, do you? Or that such ridicule just might be merited?
6. See, e.g. Prof David Zilberman, chapter 4 of course texts for Spring 2006 (PDF), and it's worth noting that this is from an introductory-level course.
7. "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911) (quoted at Britannica.com).
8. Cf., e.g., Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (1936) (convenient direct quotation).

Caseless Link Sausages

Since I haven't finished what little holiday shopping I'll be engaging in, I'm not going to wrap these link sausages either.

• So the rich want to buy into nobility (semi$wall) despite the American prohibition on titles of nobility, do they? Well, that's certainly not the only benefit of an original position advantage. Nobel prizes appear to be directed that way, too. Not to mention the irony-free criticism of a "nepo baby" by another "nepo baby".
• That last note leads to a few musings on the meaning and strategy of President Biden's pardon of his son Hunter.

  First, let's clear something out of the way: So far as I can tell, President Biden did not criticize any action or decision of the judge(s), so the judicial faux outrage is unwarranted. What he instead was criticizing was misuse of prosecutorial discretion — and choosing to elevate these charges to criminal (instead of the ordinary assessment of civil penalties on both the tax and firearms charges) should raise eyebrows, because it certainly presents the appearance that a Drumpf appointee with a history of vindictiveness in his prior Drumpf appointment may have failed to consider the complete context. Anyone who tries to pretend that there's never any pressure on individual prosecution decisions coming from institutional loyalty concerns has never been there, or at least never had misgivings about a particular matter. Let alone any regrets.

  Second, consider the timeframe. This is both legally sophisticated and a slight error by President Biden and his advisors. What he has essentially done is cut off the ability of a new administration to continue prosecution on purportedly "new" charges that are similar to those already raised. It's not just that extending backward to 01 January 2014 includes the entire period during which Hunter Biden was on a Ukrainian board of directors; it's that it extends three years backward from 20 January 2017, slightly over three years — that is, the statute of limitations for federal offenses for all except RICO (four years), continuing conspiracies, and outright murder. In turn, that means that in order to get a subpoena, a newly-appointed special prosecutor is going to have to demonstrate probable cause that something over ten years old by the time Drumpf is in office (another, obscure evidentiary-value issue that would force a judge reviewing a warrant application to at least pause) remains not just relevant, but persuasive. It's a slight error because going back 11 years, instead of 10, would also have related to RICO charges (four years prior to the prior Drumpf Administration initiation — it's a bad argument, but one that can be made in camera with a straight face for political purposes). Of course, this analysis is coming from the outside, without any inside knowledge of what was actually being considered… but in light of some previous frustrations with statutes of limitations.

  Third, this is intimately connected to Drumpf's own past and future conduct regarding pardons. Past, in that he pardoned his brother-in-law (cousin-in-law?) and now proposes to appoint that convicted felon individual to an ambassadorship (for which he's manifestly unqualified, but that's a half-century tradition that crosses party boundaries, I'm afraid; at least it's only to France); how this differs from Biden pardoning his son will be a tale told by a fool, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Future, in that criticism of Biden for pardoning his son as a white-collar criminal and for technical regulatory violations that (so far as is known) are unconnected to any substantive offense will underly any conversation about prospective pardons for insurrection. One might suggest that the holier-than-thou of all politico-personality loyalties ponder hoisting by one's own petard, but that sort of goes off the rails once one says "ponder," doesn't it?

  And, frankly, this is a lot more verbiage and consideration than the topic deserves. Don't kid yourselves: Pardons have always been politically dubious, if only because they necessarily involve second-guessing specific decisions by the judicial branch, the legislative branch, or both — not to mention depend upon finding third-party advocates (especially visible/prominent/powerful ones) more than the underlying facts, however those facts have been determined.

• Unfortunately, this just leads into other contexts and considerations of prejudice in action. (n.b. These examples have been carefully selected to offend as many unthinking doctrinaire assumptions as I can conveniently stuff into a single sausage. OK, maybe that's an eyebrow-raising assertion after the preceding one, but a foolish consistency is for small minds — and this is surely about foolishness.)
• Or, I suppose, we could just ponder yet more inaccurate, inadequately considered assumptions about large-language generative Eliza. It's not "intelligence" if it doesn't enable actual, defensible (even if incorrect) reasoning by analogy — and the "teachers' assumptions" built in deserve a lot more consideration than they've gotten. It's not even particularly insightful, however convenient.

Grinch-Approved Link Sausages

These are just the basic sausages. There's plenty of garlic in their souls, but you'll have to bring your own sauerkraut and toadstools.

• If we had an effective national health assurance system, we wouldn't be talking about the CEO of the insurer with the highest rate of claim denial among major insurers (except maybe for the VA, but that's a different issue entirely) getting shot in an apparent targeted assassination — and then seeing teh internets explode with schadenfreude over an act of vigilante violence.

  The legitimate use of violence in pursuit of policy objectives is the exclusive province of the State. It can't be tolerated from private citizens, whether we're talking about a single targeted assassination or a much larger atrocity. Sure, States (and quasistate actors) make mistakes about it — like, say, the assholes on both all sides of the disputes in the Levant — but they're not unaccountable bullyionaires (well, not supposed to be). <SARCASM> Like the proposed cabinet for the incoming administration, some of whom clearly have no clue about how government officials are supposed to act.¹ Oh, wait, maybe that explains why so many bullyionaires want to be in the new cabinet where they can direct violence, or at least the power of the State, against their personal enemies. </SARCASM>

• I did mention unaccountable private citizens as a problem. Their power is especially problematic when it arises from accounting dodges in the first place, whether individuals or entire businesses.
• It's the holiday season so there's lots of dubious intellectual property news. The newly formalized reach of EU designs is highly technical and mostly concerns what we (over here) call "industrial design." But that doesn't — indeed, can't — make "Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй" on t-shirts protectable (for trademark purposes) on behalf of the Ukraine border guards; it's just not distinctive. Katy Perry had only a little bit more success in Australia.
• But that was better luck than the Kahlebros² have had: They decided not to petition the Supreme Court to overturn their abject loss in the Second Circuit. The IA's attitude is extremely common among techbros (and too common among other activists) — "the law already must be what we want it to be to advance our interests, regardless of what that does to anyone else." Admittedly, the law is often ossified, stuck in assumptions (not to mention precedents, and poorly-worded legislation and constitutional provisions) that are overtly out of date, and frequently ignore problems never imagined. The public statements by the IA, however, reflect an almost theological arrogance, an unwillingness to conceive of personal error, an utter disrespect for those whose interests are not completely aligned with those of the techbros — even when the techbros proclaim that they know what those interests are better than do those who have them. This is especially so when what the techbros demand is theirs as of right is totally unencumbered use of what the law treats as someone else's property (literal copies here, creation of derivative works for the egregiously misnamed "generative AI" that has almost zero chance of passing the Turing Test in the next decade, let alone now). The law can certainly do better than it does with science — but one must also remember that the applications and self-interest of techbros are not a congruent set with "science." Or "invariable right."

---

1. Or, for that matter, what "treason" is in the first place; one thing that it's definitely not is "providing testimony on personal knowledge in support of a complaint properly filed in the right place," or "filing a complaint regarding conduct that appears to violate clearly-established law." But then, that individual has a track-record with his own whistleblowers, so we shouldn't be surprised.
2. What to call the advocates of conversion of printed books to electronic books without authority from either the publishers or the authors/successors, while the works are still in copyright, is itself an interesting question of deceptive labelling. Making it an even more interesting conundrum, none of the "groups" actually have unified interests in themselves. For example, the authors of mainstream novels have different interests and perspectives on how this conversion might matter to them than do, say, journalists employed by a periodical who knowingly signed an employment agreement containing a clear work-made-for-hire clause; and even within distinct segments, there is legitimate disagreement among members. And that's just the authors; the assumption that publishers' interests coincide with authors leaves me ROFLMAOing (because, well, I know too many of both). This is a problem, similar in nature to whether one wants to be called a "liberal" in today's political environment. So, because this group largely insists on insulting the interests of everyone else, the intelligence of those actually involved in creating original expression, and me rather personally, I'm going to be snide. Get over it.

Offshore Assets

Taking a break for a moment from US partisan politics (at least while gathering the ingredients for this platter), the last few weeks have seen some significant IP decisions, mostly overseas. But it's not 1930 any more: Especially with intellectual property, both "legal precedent" and "legal reasoning" for IP (which is essentially borderless anyway) squeeze their way past all borders — all too often without adequate (or honest) inspection at the border.

I am not suggesting — yet! — that Perry Rhodan is an undocumented immigrant. Neither, however, am I ruling out such consideration at a later date… especially if the West Germany of 1961 might well be called a "shithole country." (I did say "for a moment.")

• Since this is a platter of link sausages, let's start with whether the shape of a sausage is an enforceable-to-exclude element of a registered mark (in Europe, anyway). This just seems like one of those amusing bits of overreaching, but…
• …that seems almost like a standard business strategy these days, whether in Europe (and the UK) or in the US. Memories of discussions on this blawg of limp cockiness about an IP-related mark are more than "AI" hallucinations.
• That's about exploitation of IP, though. Before one gets to exploitation, one must produce the IP in the first place. This can be rather squicky in concept, and the result of a team effort that often involves dubious claims of "ownership" of the output. This last item has interesting implications for the enforceability of the US copyright law work-made-for-hire enforced statutory transfer in Europe (a doctrine that was always a bad idea anyway, and rested on the necessary condition that Congress has the right and authority to redefine a word in its relevant grant of power to mean nearly the opposite of its ordinary public meaning, either in the eighteenth century or now).
• Determining the kind of IP that's at issue in a particular dispute (especially once the lawyers get involved (third paragraph)!) is at least equally frustrating — and can be outcome-determinative. Consider, for a moment, whether this dispute would have reached this result under either trademark or more-generic "unfair competition" law. The key point to remember is that the natural-person creator is seldom, or at least seldom accurately, thinking about "the kind of law that will apply when I'm done" during the throes of creation… and that's before considering any "statutorily-enforced transfers of ownership"!
• After production, IP must be packaged for the consumer — especially when it's only words, words, and more words. I have always found CMS helpful, but not definitive, especially when it reaches outside its core competency in the humanities and nonnumeric social sciences. For example, for all of the foolishness of "signal priority" and "canonical abbreviations" found in The Bluebook (for American legal writing) — foolishness that never made sense, let alone a century later when about a third of the canonical abbreviations are entirely new and substantively overrule earlier but unchanged ones, not to mention show utter disdain for conflict-of-laws analysis of the actual weight of some abbreviations — CMS-compliant citations have always discounted essential information for legal materials (like full-and-adequate identification of which court issued many opinions). Bluntly, there cannot be an effective "uniform system of citation" that reaches all kinds of citations and all kinds of writing… and that's before getting into the distinction between "grammar in the real world" and "grammar in Mrs Grundy's sixth-grade classroom" underlying much of CMS's proscriptiveness. (Can you spot the seven items in this sausage that CMS would characterize as "improper" that actual real people and writers would characterize as "style for teh Internets" that actually has a substantive basis?)

Phew! That's exhausting if not necessarily exhaustive, to intentionally and ambiguously overload two terms of art that are themselves less than artful: Those initial rights are not truly "exhausted" if the parties can legitimately argue for years (with considerable attorneys' fees to be paid by someone) about them without regard to any disputed facts.

— 30 —

Thirty days until election day. Or, rather, the first election day for the presidency, thanks to an electoral college that today withstands just as much scrutiny as the original text of Article I § 2 cl. 3 — especially in light of their common flaw: Restricting full voice to "the right kind of people" beyond the mere facts of "citizenship" and "adulthood."

• OpenAI is possibly poised to become a profit-making corporation — that is, provide a measureable financial return to investors, in addition to any purported social benefits. The more-subtle change would be allowing outsiders direct influence on what benefits "the board" can establish as objectives (not to mention their operational priority)… because as a for-profit corporation, outsiders can buy enough voting control to "own" one or more seats on that board. (They can arguably do so for a benefit corporation, too, but it's harder.) Given the historical track record of too-early shifts from "basic science" to "economic exploitation of technology arising from basic science," like data brokers, that should scare you.
• In a remarkably-but-not-surprisingly myopic article, James Hibbert asks whether Disney is bad at Star Wars without engaging with the more-fundamental precondition: Is Star Wars badly conceived? I'm shocked — shocked, I say — to find a purported analysis of missteps in exploitation of an artistic property that does not consider missteps in creation of that artistic property. As a slight riff on the recently-deceased central character: I find your lack of questions… disturbing.
• Speaking of forgetting fundamental questions, a German court recently ruled that a specific large-model-inference dataset could rely on a German copyright-law defense to a claim of infringement. The fundamental question that was not asked concerns a confusion generally sidestepped in German copyright law but implicit in American copyright law: What kind of transformative process gives rise to a defense of transformative [fair] use, let alone when the concept of fair dealing (and not fair use) is at issue? That this failed of consideration in its US origin, too, doesn't help… especially given rejection of other defenses in the LAION decision at the lower-level court.
• One might also ask cui bono Big Music, but that's likely to be just as disturbing as the shadowing figures behind the previous two items. Not to mention just as difficult to discern — and just as subject to deception.
• Cui bono indeed when bankruptcy proceedings intervene! A Florida district court recently reached the (clearly) correct conclusion that termination rights are not extinguished by the creator's bankruptcy discharge (PDF at 18–27) without reaching the really, really hard question. It's pathetically easy on these facts to focus on the bankruptcy process, precisely due to the structures of the recorded-music industry. This enabled the court to evade the much harder question — whether, absent availability of the first clause of the § 101 definition of "work made for hire" (employee within the scope of duties), the claim in a contract that it concerns a "work made for hire" that is not eligible under the second clause in § 101 (the nine eligible categories for freelance works made for hire) makes it a work made for hire. That would have been a different question here because due to cui bono-flavored shenanigans followed by a technical correction, there's a clear textual-history determination that "a phonorecording" is not one of the eligible categories. (tl;dr The recorded-music industrial interests got phonorecordings included as a tenth category in an amendment to the 1976 Act, but that was rapidly reversed in another amendment.)
• As noted previously on this blawg, Braxton Bragg was a multidimensional loser (who was so inept that he "resigned" as army commander — under not-well-publicized pressure — after one of his many defeats) unworthy of having a military base named after him, regardless of (misplaced) "sons of the Confederacy" pride in the local community where the base is located. Why doesn't it surprise me that The Orange Menace proposes elevating that pride even further over reality by reinstating that traitor's name on a military base? Might "surprise" require inferring some knowledge of American history, even some knowledge of military principles, on the part of that individual, contrary to all other indications?

Weird Duck Sausages

You know things have gotten — well, weird — when the Prince of Darkness announces he'll be voting for a Democrat because the guy nominated by his own party is too evil. Ms Harris, I recommend politely RSVPing "no" to any invitations to go duck hunting; any implications that target selection (and downrange clearance) may be equally off now are entirely intentional.

Meanwhile, early next week things will get even weirder with yet another non-debate debate.

• Across the Pond they're proposing to eliminate more feudal lords with inherited titles from the House of Lords. Although I think Charles III's head is safe (or at least safer than his namesake's), the future William V just might want to look into opportunities for making a living (like his little brother has) — but he'll have a hard time getting legacy/donor preference to attend Stanford (or USC) business school. Schade.
• Meanwhile, the (ex-)commies over in Ukraine are demonstrating that they've learned the right lessons from prior atrocities in their region. Yes, war is a contact sport — but at least throw a penalty flag on late hits out of bounds, ok? (And definitely no running into the stands to demonstrate one's martial arts "prowess," guys.)
• The world of internet piracy has taken a couple of hits. First, a major anime/manga node (source for a number of sites) went dark. Then Brewster Kahle's arrogant selfrighteousness, his reductionism of all "original expression" to "mere information," got far more credibility than it deserved at the Second Circuit and still got trashed (large PDF). And his little dog, too!

  I'll have far more to say about this at another time. Of course, my position shouldn't surprise anyone at all… why yes, the choice of repository source was entirely intentional, with malice aforethought, and really does concern "fact" and not "original expression"; did you really need to ask?

• It appears that artificially-stupid large-language-model "AI" programs aren't hallucinating. Neither are they lying. They're just… bullshitting. I suspect that The Blues Brothers (1980) was an essential source work for all of the major large language models — that's why they can spew forth about that Picasso.

"It's Only Treason If You Lose…

"…and I didn't lose, it was stolen from me."

— Teh Orange Menace

• When one builds and maintains organized crime's favorite no-questions-asked low-commission-per-transaction fencing operation pawn shop, one'll eventually have to answer to Dah Man. This miscreant is either lying through his teeth, or so morally/ethically defective, that some "corrective action" is necessary; the key question is what corrective action, and that's a hard question thoroughly deflected by everyone's public posturing. Distillation of a certain compound from castor beans is a kewl kitchen science experiment… and potential terrorist act and war crime; the former is no justification for the latter, only a post hoc rationalization.
• This guy might be next. OK, probably not next; given the timeline of the previous sausage link, we should look for hints of investigations (into something criminal or quasicriminal) and such some time in early 2031 — mark your calendars now! In this instance, the main deflection is a single word: "Learn." They keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it does (for electronic processors, especially Von Neumann-pipelined processors however massively parallel-linked). Or, more likely, it does, but they're either intentionally or unconsciously in denial (PDF); that just leaves bargaining, depression, and acceptance to go before the grieving can begin.
• I might well grieve for opportunities lost, but I won't grieve for the gatekeepers thrown out of work as literary festivals and nineteenth-century-commercial-model periodicals of all kinds disappear. Nobody is asking the obvious question: cui bono (hint: probably not the kneejerk reaction)?
• The pretense of nonnormative evaluation of facts, of the apolitical/nonpartisan nature of searching for answers {freewall}, actually does nobody any good. "Searching for answers" is inherently normative in that it implies that what is already known (and, more to the point, assimilated) is not a complete description of reality. IMNSHO, that's a good normative baseline; in the eyes of theocrats and those whose power (and often personal identity) are directly tied to avoiding change, not so much. But in this sense, the laws of thermodynamics are "normative" — and it really helps to understand, or even just acknowledge, the fuzzy boundary between "technology" and "science"…
• The problems with illusory neutrality in the search for knowledge pale next to illusory knowledge in the search for power. The key assumption behind this remarkably ignorant editorial is simple: That there are clear, unmistakeable, and most importantly policy-directing answers to be had in the first place — and that these editorial writers have them (even if they're not revealing them yet). As (fictional character) Lord Marbury said, "It is about religion, and I can assure you that they do not share our fear of [thermonuclear] bombs." Or of bigotry.

  Unless and until the West — and, most especially, the descendants of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, and France, and the Ottoman Empire, and to a lesser but still significant extent Czechia and Ha'am — acknowledges that the map is not the territory, that Jerusalem is the City (and the City), the illusion that some single, superior solution exists will remain disturbingly persuasive. The argument will remain which one, when the real problem is the underlying religious bigotry overlaid with ethnic disdain — and the inherent failed-state destiny of every theocracy ever (including all religion-restricted governments not headed by formal members of religious hierarchies). It's important to remember that ethnographically, all descendants from the Levant are "Semitic," despite the self-defeating reflexiveness of how that term is used in the West; thus, my advocacy not of a two-state solution, or a one-state solution, but a zero-state solution. Merely establishing a recognized polity does nothing regarding the underlying problems, especially when the previous/inherited "solution" involved intentionally creating more problems for someone else while deflecting attention from one's own… antisemitism. An eighteenth-century imperial midset led to failures of imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Echoes of calls to prioritize the interests of "Real Americans" (largely based upon whose Protestant Caucasian ancestors were allowed to immigrate and when) are entirely intentional. So is the calling out of the descendants of Col McCormick for the same.

Losers!