Leaving Aside the Illegality…

…as in this fairly clear restriction that's a century and a half old…

• …the Orange Menace — or, more probably, some ineligible for the death penalty insiders — has determined to mobilize the National Guard, turning them from civilians to soldiers, to patrol for crime in DC without adequately determining their objective. Since I can't stop him/them from doing so, in the best traditions of military strategy all I can do is suggest an appropriate target for those patrols — a part of DC with rampant crime that the local authorities have shown neither capability nor interest in controlling. The initial target for an appropriately surgical strike against rampant crime is actually quite close to the White House, thereby presenting a cognizable threat and further justifying use of national-security assets in protecting against it: The stretch of US Highway 29 between 9th Street and 21st Street.

  K Street.

  Some offender-profiling efforts are probably appropriate. Channeling Jessica Williams for a moment, from a classic Daily Show piece that is mysteriously not available for free/easy streaming, profiling should extend to

  [P]eople you suspect of being white-collar criminals. You know, walking around in tailored suits, slicked-back hair, always needing sunscreen if you know what I'm saying.… Look, I know this isn't comfortable, but if you don't want to be associated with white-collar crime, maybe you shouldn't dress that way.… [I]t is a hard fact that white-collar crime is disproportionately committed by people who fit a certain profile. So if you are, say, [a] white, Upper East Side billionaire with ties to the financial community like Michael Bloomberg, you've just got to accept being roughed up by the police every once in a while.

  Further, such targeting would arguably evade the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act, as it's hard to envision a greater threat to public order than influence-peddling and bribery (however mischaracterized as "lobbying," "public relations," and/or "petitioning the legislature or executive") a few hundred meters from the seat of government. It would certainly be more excusable than use of military assets to prosecute the entirely-civilian-law-enforcement War on Drugs, and probably more effective too (even when being undermined by other military "mission priorities" with all too similar policy rationales).

• Unfortunately, the US is far from the only source of such problems, chafing at process restrictions on doing what… a certain element… is utterly convinced is not just advisable, but a policy imperative. Sadly, this unsigned editorial at The Guardian is far too genteel in responding to attacks on the European convention on human rights — a convention that goes not nearly far enough, set against the backdrop of not just occasional but default governmental conduct across the continent not so very long ago. Orwell was right: The object of power is power. Attacks on the ECHR Over There, and parallel attacks on "civil rights" Over Here, are not about the merits of policies that are being "impaired," but about restrictions on might equalling right.
• Maybe we'd all be better off if we just relied only on science to set policy. Or maybe not, given that the same sort of people are also trying to influence "science" — or, at least, publishing about it. The courts certainly haven't done anything about it (citations to parallel US difficulties too numerous for a blawg entry, very much starting at the top).
• At that, neither Europe nor the US is as enthusiastic about things as the PRC.

  At least, not quite yet.

Imperfections

Things are slowly returning to normal in the Sharknest, which reflects a rather disturbing linguistic slippage of "normal."

• Professor Sarat muses on the propriety of jail terms, using as examples two… apparent sociopaths. Professor Sarat is well known for his opposition to the death penalty — an opposition that I share because, having been inside the machinery short of and including death, I will not tinker with the machinery of death — which is all well and good. This short piece, however, fails to acknowledge two brontosaurii in the room, both of which are busy trampling the greenery (and leaving herbivore droppings everywhere).

  First, and perhaps most obvious, the purple and orange-striped beast: If not prison, what? Does that alternative do a better job with "punishment" than does prison, is it equally (or more) administrable, and is it equally (or more) ethically acceptable in a context of imperfect human imposition of punishment? (That the death penalty fails all three of these inquiries is not coincidental.) This is the argumentation problem underlying most attacks on public institutions: There's seldom equally-rigorous consideration of potential substitutes — not even when the substitute is "we don't need it at all!" Life and policy and society are not binary Oxford-style debates…

  Second, a bit better camouflaged, the mottled green-and-grey-and-brown beast: What is the objective of imposing adverse consequences upon those convicted of criminal offenses (leaving aside, for the moment, those guilty but not convicted or pardoned for no good reason)? If that objective is not uniform, how do we tailor what we do without undermining "adverse consequences for getting convicted of criminal offenses," especially when we've got imperfect humans involved in the "convictions"? (Don't even think about proposing hallucinating "artifical intelligence" as an alternative…) Whether under the classic "four distinct purposes" model underlying "modern" criminal jurisprudence or another rubric, the individual psychology of the offender inevitably would destroy uniformity, even coherence — and that's no way to win a struggle.

• In an entirely expected result of the initial hearing, the Army demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with aviation anywhere near civilian aircraft. Even moreso when Army aviation standards and culture are such that they can't tell when they are near civilian aircraft.

  This is, in part, a problem with training methods. "Local area familiarization" should largely be handled through intense simulator sessions, especially when that interfaces with "daily life that isn't about the Army." That will not eliminate the need for at least some actual flights, but it should vastly reduce them — to the point at which they can be scheduled and routed to avoid "daily life" or, as in this instance, "needless death." The incentives for doing so, however, are minimized by both historical and cultural pressures, especially within the Army aviation community. (BTW, don't think the Marines, the Air Force, and the Navy are off the hook here — just ask any resident of the southern end of Whidbey Island, including the orcas, about that! Their pressures are different in detail and extent, albeit not in kind.)

• On this blawg, my few persistent readers have probably noticed over time that I try to apply scientific standards where they fit. (They don't fit in evaluating individual works in the arts…) But what are they? Is a free spirit of inquiry enough, or does it require something more? Do standards require adjustment, or is the problem not with the standards imposed on science but the standards imposed on scientists and their careers? Can I write a bunch of obvious rhetorical questions?
• It's not limited to "the sciences," either. History professors have similar problems, reinforced by watching government officials fall off the edge of the world (which is nonetheless round — eppur si muove, figli di puttana) based on fundamentally inaccurate and dishonest data collection (that doesn't even meet any need of the organization collecting the data).

Eminences Grís

These fat bangers are well past the expiration dates on their labels.

• It's always amusing (and almost always disheartening) to watch thinly-disguised partisan-but-self-interested cheerleading, especially regarding elections more than a year out, from the perspective of the "opposition" party. Right now, that amusement is primarily concerning the Jackasses (although locally it concerns the Heffalumps) — especially the refusal to engage with fundamental factors, instead focusing on minutiae. It's fascinating to see "analysis" of Mamdani's primary victory and successful candidates' obsession with "image" that won't engage with the primary problem both parties have: The widespread near-senility of party gatekeepers and candidates. Unless and until the party mechanisms agree that "retirement age means from elective office, too," we're going to have these problems — and that's not happening any time soon, as internal advancement to "gatekeeper" status, not to mention "party consensus candidate" status, is almost entirely by seniority. (And I'm saying this as well within that "retirement age" demographic.)

  Militaries are frequently, and rightly, criticized for being prepared to fight the last war, and for selecting leadership from those successful in the war before that. Even out here in a state so blue it looks like a continuation of the ocean on a map, our "senior senator" is in her sixth term, is about a decade older than I am, and shows no sign whatsoever of stepping aside (which would require generation-skipping!). But nobody is making Castro-going-on-forever jokes about incumbents. Yet.

• This is also reflected within the arts community, especially regarding public access to the arts. Whether based on distribution of copies (even of "newer" acceptable forms of works) or nineteenth-century perspectives on "copying" applied to actually faithful (probable) copies, it's almost entirely being shaped by people too old to be innovative creators who can support themselves (let alone families). Even worse, most of those who control the arts aren't qualified to engage in them — often not even as amateurs and dilletantes.

  Lurking in the background remains the usual problem: cui bono? Certainly not anyone working in areas not already considered "mainstream" — and the demographics of that particular list of "nontraditional" means of trying to profit in the arts are cringeworthy at best. Nor, at the margins, are parallel problems that ignore "age".

No Generalissimos

I'm afraid the "song of the day" is not… approving of the day's scheduled events. I've been in military parades before; you, sirrah, are not fit to shine the shoes of a real generalissimo, like Pinochet, Videla, Franco, or even Ioannidis. Even all of those jerks actually served, for some value of that, instead of misappropriating a military in which they had evaded service for their own highly theatrical gratification (not to mention damage to the capital's roads and other infrastructure).

I would go farther than merely "No Kings" (or "No Generalissimos"): Hereditary rule — whether by formally holding office like a Bush, or a Daley, or a Kennedy, or a Saltonstall, or a Roosevelt (a relative of whom laid essential groundwork that made Thursday's nightmare almost inevitable in kind, if not in detail) — is fundamentally inconsistent with, and usually directly opposed to, supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But this is not your father's totalitarianism… is it?

We're a nation of immigrants. That the influx of immigrants of today doesn't look or speak like the immigrants of your parents' time, or their parents' time, or some grandcestor's time, only means that the world has evolved in its predilictions to seek opportunities Over Here. Curiously, nobody seems to be asking Dr Nygren about the flood — the invasion — of immigrants on these shores. Oh, wait, we're not supposed to acknowledge the hypocrisy of largely white, largely Northwest European, almost entirely christian "forefathers" in public; if we did, we'd end up with a soul of/on ICE. The only US Army unit that really, truly belongs in this military parade is the 442d Regimental Combat Team, perhaps with a flyover by the 332d Fighter Group. Oh, wait, that's probably far too old school…

So tell me, Comrade: Who do you suspect will be missing from the reviewing stand next year?

The Moon in June

…being what I'd like to show current-Administration buffoons. They wouldn't look, though — that sounds too much like science. Oh, you thought I meant the other "moon"?

• About a month back, the Chicago Tribune demonstrated its conscious ignorance of history. It probably wasn't the reporter, who actually works for AP. There's actually only one word — ok, one acronym — that you really need to know to understand air-traffic control problems in the US: PATCO. The same complaints and problems from the 1970s have resurfaced now — overstressed controllers (and not nearly enough of them), unreliable and out-of-date equipment and communications, purported military training exercises planned without regard to, well, reality that impair traffic control (perhaps inevitable when groundpounders fly, especially off-base; a little interservice rivalry never hurt anyone, right?), a management attitude that the lowly employees don' know nuthin'…
• How 'bout a little more of that interservice rivalry? Perhaps pointed at this Administration's pretty-much-universal mishandling of military personnel, or maybe at just SecDef? I'd refer those undereducated blithering idiots to historical studies of which I'm aware bearing directly on "the meaning of 'warfighting' in conflicts without rigidly-defined front lines," but (a) that would mean they'd have to actually read them and (b) letting them handle that material would just create more opportunities for mishandling of classified information (notwithstanding that some of that material is at minimum overclassified). That last parenthetical reflects reinforcement of "civilian" ignorance and, thus, the classification itself causes grave damage to national security that can be specifically identified, but that's for another time… and might well itself be classified.

  Perhaps part of the problem is that those "warfighters" — like SecDef wants to portray himself — don't have a clue about what it takes to fight a war above company/single-vessel/single-flight level. Or to train for it, get to the battlefield, sustain operations for longer than a couple of gaming sessions, plan for all of the above, train for all of the above… The American Way of War is now, and has been since the late 19th century, to pin the opponent in place, degrade the opponent's logistics while building up friendly in-theater forces, and then overcome our own generally below-average top leadership with well-trained and well-motivated working-class cannon fodder deployed forces. It hasn't ever been about being a superior first-person-shooter player… especially considering that in the real world, you don't get a new life by restarting the game.

• Let's ponder something a little easier than "effective civilian control of the military by means other than Stalinist purges leading to Russian Roulette." Perhaps we could just ponder what constitutes antisemitism, or if we can't agree on that appropriate responses thereto. That latter failyuah to communicate reflects a more-fundamental failure: Not understanding that "Never Again!" means everyone; it means always. Objecting to what's going on in Gaza need not be "antisemitic" — maybe it's just "antiatrocity." (We just don't need to get into the technicalities — legal, sociopolitical, linguistic, propagandistic — among "genocide," "genecidal acts," "unlawful selection of targets for military force," or any of the other buzzwords; "atrocity" will do just fine, focusing on the act more than the rationale.) That some who are objecting to what's happening in Gaza really are, or at least are really expressing in the mode of, the antisemitic, doesn't mean everyone who objects is; "one," "some," even "most" is not all… and making that error is the very foundation of European antisemitism.
• It was bad enough when McCarthy et al. went after "the arts" with their witchhunts seeking to identify any of the fifty-seven card carrying communists in the Department of Defense. Now they're going after those who would respond (within the decade) to Sputnik (an undoubted Commie achievement!). Of course, this latter is perhaps inevitable when virtually no member of this Administration has even been in a laboratory in decades (and even that was probably a freshman-level survey course). Even history professors right across the river from disreputable, uncooperative private colleges like Hahvahd understand that. That said, one must wonder if there's a history of rejections from (various parts of) Hahvahd somehow at issue…
• Next it'll be the humanities faculties. Then, probably at "less prestigious" institutions that don't study "popular" fiction on the grounds that if the great unwashed like it, it must be easy and therefore unworthy, we'll see many of the mistakes in this screed — from which I dissent, and align myself with Voltaire (and, ultimately, Tolkein — however much I disagree with some aspects) and against John Crowe Ransom. The content revealed by "close reading" of the text while ignoring its context is somewhere between merely ignorant and actively misleading.

Where Stolen Roses Grow

Fortunately, this Memorial Day I'm not annoyed by the vegetarian crawling out of the marinade; fish don't crawl, because they'd just flop around on the kitchen floor. Unfortunately, that's given me some extra time, as a veteran of a time of increasing internal divisions and dishonesty about their sources, to fear somewhat for the Union.

It's worth remembering that in the aftermath of the nearly-ultimate Othering¹ that's most prominent in US history — and, perhaps inevitably, descended into partisanship and excuses and greed, and has been thoroughly twisted since to the point that almosts no conversation can take place without self-contradiction — Memorial Day originated to celebrate deaths among Union soldiers, whether POWs or in the field (without yet acknowledging Andersonville for, well, Reasons). The difficulty at this time is a slight — ever so slight, given yet more inconvenient precedents — target shift both backward to religion and sideways to place of birth (notwithstanding that statue in the harbor and the nearby island). No, that doesn't make it "better."

And for all that, the US is still at least somewhat better than just about everywhere else (even Canada; just consider the word "Francophone" for a moment); that we even have an argument about "sanctuary cities" demonstrates that we're not all nutcases. Which, frankly, should embarrass and shame everyone. I don't think the US is to the point of truly working toward a "more perfect Union" quite yet, but at least in our critical document (and lawful object of allegiance) we admitted that we had work to do. Still to do.

Conscious acceptance of that would be the real memorial, whether to those Union soldiers, or all American military casualties, or more generally those who fought for it despite — not because of — "assimilation" and cramped visions of "America First".

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1. The Ultimate being actual extermination, or at least attempted actual extermination, with obvious historical exemplars (and that's just Europe, just rationalized-in-the-moment by religion). Whether you believe the trailer or the prologue to the first episode, Murderbot is right: Humans are assholes/idiots.

The Ministry of Silly Talks

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

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

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

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

  (1) Military plans, weapon systems, or operations

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

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

 
 

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

The 'net Has Ears

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring Is Here

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

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

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

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

Dress Right… Dress!

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

Sometimes, however…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recess Appointment

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

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

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

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

An Unreasonable Use of Resources

This sausage platter is not a reasonable use of my time and resources —

• Lots of obscure copyright and intellectual property stuff that I've neglected to mention of late, ranging from global applicability of US copyright terminations (n.b. beware broken/inaccurate links in the article) to still more nonsense about dog chew toys and trademark infringment of whiskey bottles. IMNSHO, these judicial opinions got tripped up by the process versus product problem in and around the arts and intellectual property — but that's for another time, another forum, another stultifying set of citations to authority that reflexively fail to engage with the process versus product problem by their very nature.

  But the winners, as usual, aren't the actual creators. Sometimes the winners are publishers (and some classes of reusers); sometimes the winners are TV production companies; sometimes the winners are an entirely different set of reusers. The only guaranteed winners are the lawyers. Well, the general class of transferees, too, but that's also for another time, another forum, another few hundred footnotes…

• …some transferees being less basically honest than others. (Translation: Companies House, in the UK, performs the functions — and more — of US state-level Secretaries of State and their divisions responsible for business organizations.) Of course, it helps the con artists Over There that the UK doesn't overtly prohibit unfair competition, for some value of "unfair" that depends largely on "how much did you pay your lawyers?"
• I'll just shove the politics in one big lumpy sausage for the day, so if you'd rather not barf you may want to skip to the next one. The current administration is trying its very best to be more corrupt than Ulysses S. Grant's, which was so corrupt that Congress established a civil service system to prevent personal loyalty "oaths" from being a criterion for getting or keeping a federal job. Civil service isn't dead yet, but not for want of effort. You want an example of the alternative? Try city hall… in Chicago. That's all too consistent with the only effective way to reduce the felon count among Illinois governors. Part of the problem (and not just the executive branch) arises from how we choose the winners, but even that piece goes not nearly far enough because it doesn't excoriate the corrupt, coopted gatekeepers (who usually epitomize "patronage").

  In the end, I'm not sure which is more disturbing: That cancellation upon accusation remains A Thing in the arts (especially when, no matter how well supported, the accusation is levelled at a creator or performer previously acclaimed as a role model for and around their work, particularly when there are clearly multiple sides of the story — perhaps all icky — which remain untested), but that opprobrium doesn't extend to politicians not just accused, but found liable for the ickiness after a full trial, or refuses to pay legal bills (that's just one example). If character matters for the one…

  What's next? Jackbooted thugs in the military? Unfortunately, that's not that implausible. The public has little idea how close we came to that; the end of the Cold War disrupted a decade of perceived-loyalty buggery, but not nearly enough.

  Obviously, the current administration is trying its very best to deflect attention from Secretary-Designate Brainworm's policy preferences utter ignorance by undermining medical research all by itself. Oh, wait, basic science isn't efficient because the outcome is largely unpredictable.

  "Dr. Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, when asked whether she could describe the scientific advances we may expect to achieve from the voyage of the Starfarer, replied with a single word: 'No.' [* * * *] 'Science,' she insisted, 'is not meant to create useful applications of scientific knowledge. [… A] scientist does not do an experiment to prove a hypothesis. A scientist does an experiment to test a hypothesis. You may guess about the answer that nature might give back to you. You may even hope for nature to give you a particular answer. But you can’t know what answer you'll get until you’ve performed the experiment. If you did, or if you thought you did, you'd be back two thousand years when experimentation was looked upon as unnecessary and vulgar, or, worse, back a thousand years when belief was more important than knowledge, and people who challenged beliefs with knowledge were burned at the stake.'"

  Vonda N. McIntyre, Starfarers (1989). It may be a work of fiction, but it's accurate, looking backward and forward… and as previous ingredients in this sausage and the news demonstrate all too well, the stake-burning was less than a thousand minutes ago.

• A little bit less politically — but not entirely removed from it — consider the healthcare problems caused by the division between "mental" and "physical" health. There is an underlying political issue: Convincing those who pay to do so when "the records" don't include clear and replicable "evidence" regarding the "condition" to be "treated"… not to mention that there's so little quantifiable treatment applying to all patients. Determining whether a patient needs, say, a particular dose of atorvastatin (brand name: Lipitor) to control lipid and cholesterol levels can be quantified; even the regimen and results of body-building can be quantified. Getting a trauma victim readjusted to normal function? Not so much.

— but I did it anyway.

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.

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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).

No, Sir — That Is Incorrect

Saying that too often definitely impairs one's career prospects. Saying it at all far enough up the chain of command/supervision makes that consequence rather more… immediate. As I have precisely no career prospects in the present or incoming administrations, I'll do it, remembering that speaking truth (or advocating alternative viewpoints when "truth" is indeterminate) is not a declaration of sartorial impropriety.

Secretary (Gen) Austin, you have recently attempted to impose what appears to be unlawful command influence (PDF) upon decades-long criminal proceedings involving specific defendants and alleged offenses — proceedings that began outside of your personal purview — by rejecting plea agreements. This decision cannot be justified either in principle or on these facts. In short, sir, you are in the wrong here, and your attempt undermines both the justice system and the chain of command. Not just the military justice system, but the entire apparatus; not just the chain of command to GITMO, but every chain of command involved with post-activity consequences to be imposed on non-US persons (which, ultimately, is all of them). That imperils your oath of office, and everything you've stood for in the past half century — since you took that oath upon entering the United States Military Academy to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I respectfully suggest that you trust your learned subordinates, rescind your statements, disqualify yourself from further "supervision" of the process, and allow proceedings still in pretrial mode to continue.

Your post-plea decision to reject the plea deals in this matter appears — so far as is in any currently-available public record — to be unaccompanied by specific implied threats of retribution against the officers (and others) involved in making a decision on the facts before them.¹ That, at least, is somewhat less egregious than it could be (and has been). The standard, however, is not "somewhat less egregious." It is to not only do justice, but be seen to do justice — and as Gilmet and similar matters imply but seldom state explicitly, that includes nonjudicial decisionmakers. That is the point of having a military (and related) justice system, of the general concept of the rule of law, of both the entirety of and specific provisions in the Constitution.

The particular sequence of events at issue here rests upon two decades of (entirely understandable) public outrage.² This points at the fundamental tension between "democratic will" and "professional judgment." You are not a lawyer, so you are not charged with that particular version of "professional" (although those who negotiated and accepted the plea agreements at issue are, a fact that should inform your own decision process). You are, however, by training a professional military officer — and you have retaken that oath you took in 1971 to place loyalty to the Constitution above all else. It is bad strategy to undermine one's own principles of command and control in pursuit of small immediate advantages, and especially so when that pursuit seeks an irreversible escalation on the spectrum of conflict.³ These plea agreements seek to impose the only sanction short of the individual-instance equivalent of total nuclear war: One cannot deescalate from the death penalty once imposed and executed.

Delegating leadership and execution is a necessary element of strategy, of government, of state policy. The irony that the real reason delegation is both necessary and appropriate when dealing with individual, tactical matters is that the lower levels of leaders making those decisions have specific competencies and information not available to their superiors, as often as the converse presumed in "civilian control of the military," appears to have escaped almost everyone. This tension is implicit in the precommissioning programs throughout the US military (and that of most democratic nation-states), and throughout further professional military education and command-selection criteria thereafter.

Please reconsider your decision to overrule the underequipped leaders in actual tactical control who — very much like Operation Eagle Claw — have detailed appreciations of tactical specifics that you do not. Unless, that is, your decision is based upon what must be at minimum breaches of attorney-client privilege, which would very much resemble destroying the village to save it.⁴

Mr Secretary — General — please reconsider. Conceive that just as you believe those who negotiated and accepted these plea agreements might be wrong (from at minimum a certain perspective), so might you. Trust the years of training, the years of investigation, that have gone into those decisions made by those in a position that you might well have been in yourself. Trust the remainder of the Constitutional process. Remember that under these plea agreements, those individuals are pleading guilty and are being incapacitated from repeating their conduct, without achieving a martyrdom whose attraction is literally foreign to you and especially to those to whom you answer.

In short: Do not demand complete victory in a context in which victory is inherently incomplete.

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1. I have precisely no confidence that those around you, in both the present and incoming administrations, have similarly refrained. Unlawful command influence occurs by proxy, too; that is precisely what was at issue in Gilmet. And, for that matter, at Nuremberg, in post-Yugoslavia proceedings, in… Delegation does not remove command responsibility.
2. I do not believe that I am saying anything you have not considered, particularly since you held multiple command positions concerning the conflict zone. Neither am I saying anything not already said behind closed doors: That the very nature of these proceedings arises from information-gathering sources and methods — indeed, from specific information — that nobody who actually knows anything wants revealed in public. Not even, if it thought about it (which almost by definition it cannot and will not), the Mob.

   The disturbing corollary here is that rejection of these plea agreements — agreements which would keep the defendants in custody for the remainder of their lives, just short of the maximum possible penalty — appears based upon not just policy imperatives, but relevant information that has been withheld from those charged with making individual-case decisions. That is not good military strategy.

3. See, e.g., Frank Hoffman, Examining Complex Forms of Conflict: Grey Zones and Hybrid Challenges, 7(4) Prism 30, 32 (2018) (PDF). This is not at all a controversial or unfamiliar concept; in broad strokes, it has been a fundamental part of officer training throughout the nuclear age, and is implicit in centuries-old doctrine. Cf. e.g., Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege ("On War") (1832, this trans. 1874)("War is only a continuation of State policy by other means").
4. The controversy over both the origin and later uses of this statement is not just relevant, but is indeed the point.

Survival

Four years ago, there was a serious possibility that this nation would succumb to something that hasn't ever happened on this part of this continent before: A successful violent revolution by the loser at the polls. The First War of American Secession came about precisely because there weren't any polls, so the colonials could hardly be accused of sore-loserdom. The Second War of American Secession beat back the attempt (after four years), although we're still recovering from it in many ways. This time around, the loser was more graceful, more respectful of a quarter of a millennium of men and women who fought, and bled, and died — and of those they never came home to — in defense of "voting matters."

What damage that former loser will cause is for the future. It may be mostly "just" policy failures (as I remarked here just short of a couple of decades ago, stupid ≠ unconstitutional); it may be the executive this time instead of Congress; it almost certainly will result in needless suffering, casualties, and probably deaths. But we're not quite at the death of the American Experiment

We interrupt this rant to return to the irregularly-scheduled platter of link sausages.

• All too often, "old and wise" really means "decrepit and inflexible." It's been a dozen years since there's been an occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who wasn't drawing Social Security, and the average age of Senators just sworn in last week is at least Social Security-eligible. I've been griping about this for quite a while, and I'm glad to see I've finally got company. Well, a little company, in that most Senators might as well be off just keeping their "bad habits" (and short workweeks).
• I'm firmly against the draft, but it's like both Dracula and a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 it (or at least advocacy of it) keeps coming back. Peace Corps veteran Jonathan Zimmerman is here rather overdoing it, though.

  We don't need the entire nation to engage in national service. For one thing, that's a rather fast path toward devaluing an awful lot of jobs that are far more complex to do well than one can train draftees to do. It's one thing to say "build roads" (or even just "fill potholes") with some vision of creating the Transcontinental Railroad with slightly updated materials in mind; it's another entirely to do so safely, effectively, and with few side effects. Rather than reinstating the draft, I propose something a bit more… targeted: Appearance on a ballot for a state or federal legislative or executive (or, hackcoughshouldn'tbeelected judicial) office should require prior satisfactory completion of national service (and, of course, the Peace Corps counts, among many other "nontraditional" roles). That might, at minimum, provide some appropriate — arguably essential in a democratic republic — insight into some of those who don't have much in common with candidates for high office.

• Being a (nonuniformed) lawyer, however, isn't one of them. For example, just consider how much "service" to the nation as a whole was actually being provided by the lawyers in this fiasco. Or this one. Leaving aside that these two matters demonstrate yet again that states are incapable of effectively regulating the legal profession, I find myself unable to distinguish the conduct of counsel in these matters from that of counsel related to the attempted coup on 06 Jan 2021. Oh, wait, many them — including one of the most egregious — weren't disciplined either…

[fade out and static]

…yet.

A Few Words on Behalf of the Leadership

Words that they can't say, due to fear of being seen as disloyal, and Article 88 (for at least some of them), and frequently lack of prior opportunity to reflect on the full scope of their duties as members of the leadership. Sometimes they've been so coopted that they don't know, or in extreme instances have lost the ability, to think about them. But none of those limitations apply to me any longer (not all ever did), so:

Those "duties as members of the leadership" point to another part of the owner's manual, a part that reminds the leadership — all of whom have taken that oath and continue to be bound by it; an oath almost unique in world governments, proclaiming as it does ultimate loyalty to a linguistically-bound abstraction rather than an anthropomorphized one — that they are all social justice warriors by definition. They have sworn to

…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter… (5 U.S.C. § 3331)

when that Constitution includes these:

…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. (U.S. Const. Art. VI cl. 3)¹

No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (U.S. Const. Amd. XIV § 1)

It doesn't get much more directive to be a social justice warrior than demanding that all holding "positions of trust" support and defend the equal protection of the laws for everyone. Even people they don't particularly like.

It's not 1948 any more.² Even if a substantial proportion of the incoming government would rather it were 1785, the true high point of "states' rights." Neither is it the Republic of Korea, a nation that has been under a military dictatorship in my lifetime (hell, during my adult lifetime) and really would rather not go back. It's not just the military, either: The oath applies to every federal, every state officer.³

So go out and do your jobs, to the best of your ability, supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The hard part is determining who is the enemy at any one moment; blaming someone's parents for having the wrong skin color, wrong religion, wrong nation of origin, wrong social class, wrong whatever, is always suspicious, however. After all, on September 16, 1789, there was not one natural-born citizen of the United States; the once-and-future President is only a second-generation natural-born citizen of the United States; a not-so-long-ago Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was an immigrant — from Warsaw by way of Peoria.

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1. Those of you who persist in religious nationalism, or in perpetuating the mythic propaganda that the US was formed as a christian nation, should consider this carefully. And if still not convinced, I suggest a careful reading of Matthew 5, Numbers 30, and Ecclesiastes 8 — among others. The only reason the Devil can cite scripture for his own purposes is that someone wrote down scripture intending it to be cited…
2. Cf. Executive Order 9981 (26 Jul 1948) (Truman's order desegregating the military, applying only to "race, color, religion, or national origin"; all else came later, or remains yet to come).
3. "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution…" U.S. Const. Art. VI § 3 (emphasis added).

The 2024 Turkey Awards

An annual tradition for a quarter of a century! This is my list of ridiculous people from 2024 (so far). Pass me one of those rolls, please:

• The Greasy Gravy Award for oily publicity that makes the main dish inedible goes to advocates of "open AI" who are carefully ignoring that they're running Eliza on processors, memory, storage systems, an peripherals from displays to input devices all considerably more advanced than real AI conceived at roughly the same time — with the same sort of hallucinations and bullshitting, like in the clip.
• The Red-Tide Oyster Stuffing Award for carelessly poisoning an otherwise tasty dish goes to the major-party candidates for President — not excluding the last-second replacement. My generation needs to get off the ballot (and doubly so for its predecessors), and especially out of the smoke-filled back rooms that act as gatekeepers on who can get a party endorsement in the first place. During an era of accelerating change, "old and wise" is usually PR bullshit for "decrepit, ignorant, and slow to adapt."
• The Broken Wishbone Award for shattering dreams goes to everyone excoriated here on 23 May. Unfortunately, it's probably too many miscreants to actually get a grip on that wishbone.
• The Golden Gristle Award for assertions far too difficult to digest (and usually stuck in one's teeth) goes to McZorgle's for its latest trademark overreach (with an unexpectedly delicious result).
• The Conspicuous Consumption Cranberry Relish Award for the most-outrageous example thereof goes to the 0.001% with their purchase of politicians everywhere. This isn't exactly new — politicians have always been for sale, or at least long-term lease — but, surprisingly, it's even more outrageous than overpriced artwork "originals" this year.
• The Crabapple Pie Award for marketing something sour as something sweet goes to Moms for Theocracy Liberty and their demand to be treated like and have the powers of the government while ignoring core limitations on government (like accountability).
• The Wilted Salad Award for the one part of the meal that's supposed to be "good for you," but is instead rather past its sell-by date, goes to Robert F. Kennedy… Junior. His only apparent qualification for office is his surname (and even that family of loyalists has repudiated him). Not to mention fluoridation, Mandrake — and he's just as well-balanced and fact-oriented as BG Ripper (and equally likely to attack the wrong target for the wrong reasons).
• The Brussels Sprout Award for stinky, slimy, overcooked, gentrified little cabbages goes to everyone involved in the struggle to control Paramount, none of whom actually have had a damned thing to do with building that monstrosity (let alone with any creative decisions).
• The Dried-Out Breastmeat Award for overcooking the books goes to my friends across the lake who are convinced they can speed up publishing by naming their new imprint and process after a microprocessor suitable primarily for primitive games. At least they didn't name it after the processor that was foundation of their company's operating-system success — a processor that was intentionally crippled. Meanwhile, it wasn't the processor at all that ultimately mattered (the Motorola 68xx and 68xxx series were both considerably superior to their Intel counterparts), but the software, peripherals, price points, and above all the documentation and training. Why, no, of course I'm not suggesting any parallels there.
• The Rancid Drumstick Award for something that should be edible, but isn't, goes to state-level bar regulators whose (inept) efforts destroy public confidence in the courts and legal system. Do you need a few more examples? Damn, there are more legs stuck out than on a terducken made of a cuttlefish stuffed inside an octupus stuffed inside a squid — hiding behind a cloud of ink…
• The GMO Tofurkey Roast Award for a main-dish item that's supposed to be more wholesome, nutritious, and/or ethical, but merely hides something that's perhaps worse under that veneer of virtue, goes to the Heritage Foundation, which begins the deceptions with its very name (if nothing else, by denying the role of slavery and plutocracy in America's "states' rights" heritage).
• The Unwanted Obligatory Guest Award for the guest at the banquet that you had to invite (but wish you didn't have to because you knew would spoil everything) goes to El0n Mu5k for more reasons than I can list here. His immigration to the US as an opportunistic draft-dodger from a shithole country (without respecting admittedly ridiculous visa restrictions that by their nature select for anyone but the tired, the poor, the wretched refuse of teeming shores) is just the start.
• Special Limited Time Offer! The Uninspected-Produce E. Coli Baby Carrot Medley Award for discrediting an office goes to Matt Gaetz, whose only qualification to fulfille the duties of the office he was nominated for (and, for that matter, the office that he had) was undue familiarity with the concept of "barely legal" (see 18 U.S.C. § 2421 et seq.; see also Fla. Stat. § 794.05). Notwithstanding his denials, there's enough other evidence to infer squickiness, regardless of whether that evidence meets the criminal standard of proof (that is, beyond a reasonable doubt). It's pretty obvious that the individual who nominated him prepared this dish didn't wash the produce or his hands, and I'm afraid this contaminated dish is making me sick to my stomach.

Looks like there wasn't enough room on the buffet table this year for pets from Springfield, which is probably just as well — we're going to be stuck with that guy for a loooooooooong time, maybe even long enough to move up from the kids' table. Maybe next year he can be the Unwanted Obligatory Guest… almost certainly by 2028.