Barbarians (Three Different Ones)

At least they're human. Biologically human, anyway.

1.   Civilization ends at the Hudson River — everything to the east of it is a howling barbarian wilderness. It's dotted with quaint barbarian villages, especially in the self-appointed "greatest city in the world" — like the 1700 block of Broadway, most of the Avenue of the Americas, and virtually the entirety of Madison Avenue. That last is what's irritating me today.

Dear "geniuses" in the advertising industry: Is relentlessly depicting your prospective customers as clueless cretins in your commercials very civilized? Admittedly, you can share some of the blame with the barbarian village in Hartford, who really do treat their customers like clueless cretins. A sense of humor in commercials concerning products that are ultimately noncomparable until something goes badly wrong (and even then remain noncomparable because the circumstances of "going badly wrong" tend to be close to unique) is probably not a bad thing, either. At least not until commercials either use stereotypes as a basis for their humor… or try to create some of their own, like "young homeowners becoming their parents" (which, to someone who knows just how mechanically inept his own generation is, is scary for other reasons). And that last is particularly so because having homeowner's insurance is a condition of having a mortgage, so it's just as mandatory as automobile insurance. Humor need not rest on ridicule that relies on stereotypes, particularly not just short of bigotry (passssssssing… demographicsssssssssss… What does that say about who is worthy of being a young homeowner in the eyes of the insurance executives who blithely approved this campaign? Ridiculously obvious class issues are for another time.).

I only wish it was just insurance commercials. I'll refrain from analyzing either scripted or unscripted network television today (for one thing, it'd take too long)…

2.   Unfortunately, the barbarians just refuse to stay in the howling wilderness where they belong. We've even got them out here, trying to grant themselves tax breaks that were passed along with a state income tax whose lowest bracket begins at $1 million in annual income while getting rid of that tax.

Just about a century ago, Justice Holmes reminded us that "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society…" (Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 275 U.S. 87, 100 (1927) (Holmes, J., dissenting). It is simultaneously frustrating and enlightening that the cohorts that are most rabidly anti-tax disproportionately benefit from "civilized society," and especially "civilized society" as a lifelong upper/upper-middle-class Boston/Harvard man like Holmes would have contemplated it. They, and their own children, attend private schools; their workforces, all the way up to the accountants advising them on minimizing their tax burdens, not so much. They, and their own children, have platinum private health insurance plans; their workforces — especially their servants — not so much. Perhaps most to the point, they (and their children) don't volunteer for dangerous, low-paid public-service jobs like "military," "Peace Corps," "fireman," and "peace officer" that have as a primary mission focus protection of property interests. <SARCASM> Maybe — just maybe — minimizing their taxes is just "being smart" (as a well-known convicted felon who refuses to accept the fact of those convictions has remarked about his own record of tax compliance). So maybe this set of barbarians is just pruning their herd by ensuring that their peers who aren't "smart" will no longer qualify as members after paying "too much" in taxes. </SARCASM>

It's very much a chicken-and-egg problem: Is it uncivilized because it rejects partial mitigation of this state's regressive tax structure, and therefore is supported by the usual suspects? Or is it uncivilized because it's supported by the usual suspects, leading to the usual suspicion that it doesn't just reject mitigating regressive taxes, but celebrates and even enhances them? It doesn't really matter much: No on 645.

I want more civilization, not less. For those who follow me (however unwillingly!), too.

3.   And then there are the vote-suppression barbarians. You know, the ones who are so convinced of the permanent, irrefutable rightness of their policy preferences (just ignore the bigotry and corruption intertwined with them) that instead of working to persuade, they work to prevent those who might disagree with them from voting at all. Now that is barbarism!

These barbarians failed, at least up here in tree-hugger country. I got my ballot in the mail Friday; the attempts to prevent the Post Office from delivering any ballots unless states violated voter privacy by "cooperating" with the Geheinstaatssicherheitsbüro's no-factual-foundation demands failed. I'll put it in an official ballot drop box this afternoon, beyond the reach of any other Post Office shenanigans. I'll just sip my tea and wait for results.

One other advantage of vote-by-mail-with-extended-time systems: I don't have to respond to nosy pollsters and ill-informed "reporters," not even "What part of 'secret ballot' do you not understand?" — followed up, if necessary, by asking how many years they spent doing additional duty as a Voting Assistance Officer (which is, I should add, almost entirely voting by mail). Which rather, again, exposes who the real barbarians are.

Happy 239th Birthday

On September 17, 1787, the United States of America was born with the signing of the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence is the date of conception; the Articles of Confederation mark the first detected heartbeat; and ratification in 1789 is when the first breath was drawn (or maybe shortly thereafter when Congress was elected and first met).^†

OK, so it's an overextended metaphor, but illustrates well that we have a living Constitution. That you are reading this via the internet (even if someone else printed it for you and you never saw it on the actual blawg) demonstrates that pretty well; there are lots of failures of imagination in the document, particularly the narrow, literally-limited (or original-public-meaning limited) list of what is protected from government intrusion that didn't even contemplate electronic communication. These words, for example, have never become a "paper" while in my possession — not as you receive them, not in draft here. That's just a particularly easy example.

tl;dr Context matters, including our choices of what to call a "birthday." That we often celebrate when we yelled abuse at the sovereign instead of when we actually gave birth to something new bears some consideration, too.

---

†  We'll just slide right by the later gender-fluidity-like incidents like the Reconstruction Amendments and Nineteenth Amendment. Bringing in the gender-reveal parties apparent in Shay's Rebellion would be going more than a bit too far. Let's just celebrate the real birthday, ok? Perhaps by using the fingers we have left after the uncontrolled fireworks at the FAKE birthday in July to vote?

Dubious Competitions

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

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

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

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

Zombies

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

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

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

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

Zero-Dimensional Chess

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

In Search of an Alternate Soundtrack

Not just to the news, either.

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

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

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

Brought to You by the Letter V

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

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

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

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

You Can't Fight in Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Way It Isn't

[Dr] Martin Luther King [Jr] Day was formally established as a federal holiday in the 80s, falling on the third Monday in January. This year, it happens to fall on 20 January — the first time it has been on Inauguration Day {ETC: of a new Administration}. So Dr King's commemoration coincides with… this. And this. And this. I think I'll have to shift to a new cliché-like aphorism, perhaps "the paper calling the snowflake white"; I can't very well use the old one, about cookware, as the hue is rather ironic (and they don't get irony — not even, perhaps especially, cast-iron[y] cookware).

• One area that is just not going to get an awful lot of public attention from the incoming Administration (not that past Administrations have done much more) is the region surrounding Mu5k's childhood home — before his adventures with a US immigration "system" that would have astounded Kafka with its arbitrariness and culture of secrecy. At least now, though, Leopold's ghosts are clanking loud enough to be heard; even slightly further afield.

  You can scream "America First!" all you like, guys. All you'll be doing is trying to deflect attention from nearly a century of America screaming exactly the opposite to the rest of the world — which, when it didn't believe it, at least heard it.

• Sometimes, by sticking to their "areas of competence," academic organizations can (often inadvertently) provide a window onto incompetence. In particular, the American Historical Association has condemned destruction not even of historical monuments, but of education and particularly teaching of history in Gaza. One should carefully note two things here: This statement is confining itself to present efforts by the theocratic government of Israel, and making no claims that can support even a conspiracy-theory-tinged claim of "antisemitism" — particularly since Palestinians are a semitic people, too; and the OP is unduly generous in saying "Historically (ha), the AHA has functioned as a moderate-to-conservative organization, often loath to weigh in on political matters." My past professional interactions indicate that "moderate-to-" has little support in the AHA's ahistorical — ha yourself! — silence on a broad range of adventures and the narratives arising therefrom, precisely because in a very McLuhanesque fashion, the historical narrative is the educational/scholarly/political positions because the historical narrative shapes and controls their scale and form.
• The AHA is far from the only "learned organization" with an undeserved reputation for true and neutral rigor; I'm a refugee from four others! Sometimes, those clubs for "experts" don't even try to be neutral (or rigorous); even more often, the hidden agendas are dangerous precisely because they're hidden, and all too often undermine or contradict that carefully-shaped reputation (for example, anyone who claims that the American Bar Association is "leftist" or "liberal" has never actually read the ethics rules it sponsors, let alone pondered the structures and silences).
• The less said about the "evolution" of gaming, the better. It's rather distressing that a pasttime based on a literature of the imagination, of difference, of above all turning failure to conform to expectations into a virtue, has been appropriated via the somewhat misnamed Lamarckian inheritance of political affiliation, of religion, of vice — and of virtue. Ironically, many of those who object to the place of outliers in character-based adventure gaming choose to ignore the vast variations built into character generation, themselves typically rolling a five for wisdom (yes, I still have my original-edition three-volume set and the heavily annotated copy of Chainmail needed in large spaces and outdoors; get over it). Snide remarks about how "wisdom" was/is all too often a proxy for "socialization aligned between sociopathy and extreme conformity" will have to wait for another time, especially when applied to the "original gamers" in and around Lake Geneva… and their corporate successors…
• Unfortunately, there's a common spicing on this platter: The power of (self-aggrandizing) narrative to overwhelm inconvenient, unfavorable-to-self-image/interest facts. The real problem with Mr Walther's piece is that he stops before closing the methodological loop. I'm sure there are some differences, somewhere, somehow, among Goebbels, Alex Jones, and organizations acting the same way — but those differences are not in methodology, and only marginally in viewpoint. Which is not to say that, historically, that sort of thing has been confined to the mislabelled "right wing"; it is only to say that the "right wing" is at present more obvious/oblivious about it.

  tl;dr "Good" and "evil" are seldom pure, no matter how they're presented for marketing purposes. Means used limit and shape the ends actually achieved; when those means rely upon deception…

Raising the DebtCaffeine Ceiling

I'll begin with the morning ritual: Coffee. Definitely not any brand or type advertised on American television — let alone the UK (foreshadowing seven years of fighting against demons while seriously undercaffeinated).

• Stealth branding efforts continue to be problematic, whether unopposed but later challenged or distinctive only to monolingual boors. But that's nowhere near as confusing as figuring out what conduct, or who, is actually regulated by copyright principles from afar.
• If there's an underlying theme to the preceding link, it's that being a special snowflake isn't good enough to evade generally-applicable, well-settled restrictions on overreaching bullying. Claiming that it's all the users' fault doesn't seem to be much more successful. Means used need to be consistent with ends desired, or one ends up subverting both — especially when the special snowflakes are the ones already in power, unable to tolerate any criticism whatsoever. It's neither "pro-democracy" nor "the rule of law" if what really matters is whether anyone who might object knows about it. (Yes, that's a hint for the incoming administration.)
• Throwing the bastards out is only the first step, of course. The Romanovs were bastards, but what followed was worse. Violent revolution followed by vengeance against those perceived/labelled as the former oppressors seldom makes it a decade without descending even farther — and especially so when religion is involved (just look two nations to the east… or at any of the neighbors to the southwest). (Yet another hint for the incoming administration.)
• That danger is perhaps more obvious with governments than with dominant business entities, whether in large or niche "markets." Indeed, "business as usual" can be even more repulsive in the niches, because blacklists are a lot more effective — and pervasive.

Interrupted Afternoon

Listen, you idiots: I got my ballot a week and a half ago; I took it, properly filled out, to a drop box almost immediately; I posted an "I Voted" sticker on the door. Don't waste your time sending FKAs (Future Karens of America) around to ring my doorbell to convince me to vote for a "tax cut" referendum sponsored by a hedge-fund trader who moved to this no-state-income-tax state from a high-state-income-tax state after his fortune became self-sustaining. Neither cool nor productive. And definitely annoying.

• There's a contamination outbreak at McDonald's in progress. I'm not going to bother trying to keep up with current status — it's not being hidden — but I will speculate on the cause: Untrained workers who know nothing of food hygeine.
• Recently, some assertions have been raised by people with better direct access to certain facts than I concerning a certain candidate's mental fitness for office. <SARCASM> I question whether there's been sufficient examination of the subject individual to distinguish between DSM-5 301.81 (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) overlaid with sociopathic behavior and DSM-5 301.7 (Sociopathic Personality Disorder) overlaid with narcissistic behavior. </SARCASM> Meanwhile, he's also been accused of being a fascist, which is not entirely consistent with that nonclinical diagnosis; "fascism" is both methodological and ideological, and a true narcissist (or sociopath) doesn't look far enough beyond personal self-interest/self-aggrandizement to have a coherent ideology, let alone be consistent with it.

  On the other hand, this is all too similar to disputing which serial killer is the most despicable with choices limited to Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Gary Ridgway. Once "serial killer" fits, degree of despicability is largely irrelevant. Once "unfit for office" fits, the exact reason among competing explanations is largely irrelevant. Although since I already voted, maybe nobody cares what I think.

• As yet another demonstration that state bars cannot effectively regulate the profession, the Washington bar has refused to discipline disgrace-to-the-profession Matt Shea. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his views, it's fundamental to the profession to neither violate an oath of office nor advocate violence in support of those views (especially when the two occur together) — and the presence or absence of criminal charges is irrelevant except as it goes to the reliability of the evidence at issue and perhaps — albeit not in this instance, as the bar relied upon in refusing to implement a disciplinary action — interference with pending process. There are times that violence may be the only means available — but that's never true for lawyers. Except, perhaps, the violence the profession does to language (which does not require military-grade automatic weapons or advocating atrocities).
• Sadly, that appears more effective than regulation of insurers (especially when the insurers collude with each other). Profiting from others' pain is just so admirable.
• On the lighter side — not literally, indeed rather the opposite literally — the American invasion of Europe is progressing. The spearhead units are oversized pickup trucks (and suburban assault vehicles).

The Nicest Garbage I've Ever Seen

So, if you actually need proof that Teh Orange One doesn't listen to what he's saying, even as he's saying it, consider the US as "a garbage can for the rest of the world" and further consider

• …what the rest of the world must be like if the US is a "garbage can" and the disadvantaged in the rest of the world still want to come here
• …what that implies about Trump's father, who Teh Orange One has claimed was born in Germany…
• …but wasn't; instead, it was Grandpa who was born in Germany and came to the US as an undocumented, unaccompanied minor (and draft dodger)

That all being true, as Darryl Rostow once noted, the US must have "the nicest garbage I've ever seen".

Or, I suppose he could just read the inscription on that statue in the harbor where he grew up.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
 
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

(emphasis added) Oh, wait, I see the problem: That's more than 140 characters, so he didn't read it (and wouldn't want to). It rather asks for the garbage — including Grandpa (and, for that matter, his opponent's parents, who came here on merit to study in prestigious graduate programs, which is what really irritates him).

And that you've gotten this far into this rather short entry — but much more than 140 characters — is rather the point.

The Devil We Don't Know

This election season is a funhouse¹–mirror image of another election, in another land. One that I had a somewhat-sideyed professional interest in observing: Chile, 1988. That election wasn't competitive between candidates — it was a yes/no referundum on continuing Augusto Pinochet in office.² Pinochet had little support in urban areas, but considerable (often terrorized) support in rural areas, meaning that the referendum was largely considered a toss-up before the actual election. We'll leave aside, with our 20/200 hindsight, the very real threat that Pinochet intended prior to the vote to ignore an unfavorable result — and would have been successful in doing so.

Even in the poorer areas, where most people live in modest wooden homes and battle to get by on salaries as low as $2.50 a day, voters indicated a preference, as one put it, for “the devil we know.” Few here have been touched by the civil rights issues that arouse emotions in Santiago, the capital. Young people seem as likely as older adults to vote “yes” in the “yes” or “no” poll to decide whether the 72-year-old Pinochet should remain another eight years in power.³

So we have a choice this fall: The devil we reallyreallyreally know, and the devil we don't know very well at all. And in some states, the second-generation devil derided by the other devils as stupid (but he at least admits that worms ate his brain), not to mention a passel of devils less powerful or tempting than Wormwood. Partisan politics — between party apparatus and fundraising imperatives — gives us only devils to choose from.⁴ It's critical to remember that when one chooses the lesser evil, one is still choosing evil.

Anyanka You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?

Giles Because it has to be.⁵

Acton was fundamentally wrong: It's not power that corrupts, nor absolute power that corrupts absolutely, but the striving for power that corrupts (and the striving for absolute power that corrupts absolutely). This would have been obvious considering his first name: "Lord." So, I suppose, we should be thankful that we're choosing among devils who didn't get on the ballot due to inheriting their initial power bases.⁶

But we're still choosing among devils. <SARCASM> Just make the wisest choice you can among the lesser of "who cares?" </SARCASM> But do choose; do register and ensure that the devils who want to take that choice away from you — the real evildoers — don't win.⁷

---

1. "Fun" meaning "fouled-up nonsense"… or something sounding a lot like that.
2. We will, for the moment, leave aside the role of some… past professional counterparts… in making that referendum possible or even necessary (IMNSHO, there's an aspect of excessive even-handedness to that article, and it's still rather damning). There's a pretty obvious funhouse–mirror image here, too…
3. James F. Smith, Rural Chile Leans Toward Pinochet—'the Devil We Know', Los Angeles Times (17 Sep 1988). I heard that phrase more than once — even from (junior) officials of other Latin American nations, often referring to their own nations' dictatorships.
4. At best — and it's a really, really poor best — we end up with an on-the-surface somewhat well-meaning outsider surrounded by devilish advisers and cronies who themselves wreak havoc after not even being elected. At worst, we end up with "businessmen" and "investment advisors" — like, say, one of the current candidates for second fiddle in Nero's string quartet — whose weltanschauung of "government" has been so thoroughly warped by the combination of "modern accountancy and efficiency studies" and "the boss never needs to compromise" (not to mention self-righteous arrogance seldom seen outside the Spanish Inquisition) that those other advisers and cronies are even more in control.
5. The Wish, 3 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 9 (08 Dec 1998). That this screed cites to an entire program that was, at least on the surface, devoted to "fighting demons" should be entirely unsurprising.
6. Oops. And oops. And yet again oops. Seems we haven't actually learned all that much from our own secession from inherited power in favor of representative democracy.
7. That [representative] democracy is the worst form of all human governments that have ever been tried, except for all the others, should not be comforting. It's not supposed to be comforting: It's a prelude to work and agonizing choices, no matter what form of government there is — most especially including the bullying that inevitably results from replacing a government of flawed accountability with nongovernment strongmen (ask any refugee from the Horn of Africa in the last half century).

Two Guns of August

Well, at least we're assured an elected member of the executive branch who has done national service this time around. Maybe it's time to get up off the couch and help govern…

• About four decades too late, D&D is removing "race" from the basic character attributes. That was a topic of some griping in my gaming group back in the day (you are not supposed to ask about that heavily-annotated-in-the-margins three-volume set and copy of Chainmail over on the bookshelves, including the corrections of the measurement typos).

  However, it led, and continues to lead, to a broader question that both the gaming community and speculative fiction have generally refused to confront: Given that the subjects of both are exceptional individuals engaged in exceptional acts/quests/etc., exactly how much sense does it make to turn the rest of the milieu back to Valdosta in 1832 (unless, that is, one is gaming the rural antebellum South — into which orcs would be a tough fit, and it was decades too early for Grand Dragons)? Doesn't that sort of stereotyping actually undermine and devalue the central characters, and for games the players themselves? Do rhetorical questions with obvious answers provide any relief from the ongoing political campaigns?

• As to that last, I'm afraid not. We just had a jungle-primary election here. Results are still coming in, but it looks like at least one of the White Walkers won't be on the fall ballot. Which is a good thing; this is Seattle — rain is coming.
• Speaking of quasizombies, Utah is banning books (again). Not just demanding proof of adulthood, but actually removing them from libraries. This pisses me off. This is unAmerican, and demonstrates that those in power in Utah have no shred of common decency. Callbacks entirely intentional… but it won't be long before books that might enlighten those in Utah about it will themselves be removed from libraries…
• Quips and improvised attempts to be/seem clever have a tendency to reveal some ugly defects in the speaker's worldview (I cannot invoke even illusory absolute immunity) — and especially from politicians. When a candidate proclaims that only those with children should be listened to because only those people have a stake in the future of the nation — and then tries to revise the plain/original public meaning of what he said by retroactively claiming he had an entirely different purpose and target, despite the dearth of supporting evidence (and despite his failure at the time to so state, when he had plenty of opportunity to do so) — one must wonder. <SARCASM> Foster and adoptive parents clearly aren't worth listening to because those aren't their biological offspring. Those who learn of their own genetic issues (or chemical exposures) and won't inflict the defects on children obviously care nothing for the future. Those who lose their only child also care nothing for the future. </SARCASM>

🦉

Mixed-Species Link Sausage Platter

Lots of weirdness from the arts and banking on this platter.

• Consider The Broadsheet Hit List of 1648 (some of which remain disturbingly contemporaneous).
• But that's just amusing, not as cringingly predictable as the impending implosion of gatekeeper-subculture-centric periodicals. Now when have I heard this before? Or seen it as a rather thin roman à clef that ultimately demonstrated just how irrelevant the allegory itself and its subject were?
• Even that's less deliciously damning than a garden supply business chewing on Louis Vuitton, a business whose narcissism is a positive feedback loop. It is, unfortunately, a positive feedback loop encouraged by, and embedded in, the "must always defend against everyone" meme built into trademark law — a meme that clashes, at a fundamental level, with the concepts of "satire," "parody," and "egotism." Europe may be beyond help, but at least we have a First Amendment over here to (eventually) rein this sort of thing in. Oops. Too late (PDF).

  Go ahead, Vuitton. Sue me for the pinpoint URL of this link sausage. But make sure that your attorneys read Rule 11 first.

• The family of the only true guitar god (the rest just want to be that good) is already experienced with litigation, and now his bandmates can join the fun. This exposes one of the critical problems with collective efforts in the arts: Who is the author? Cinema's so-called "auteur theory" was, at its core, an attention-getting device that actually evaded any real consideration — especially for films and even TV episodes adapted from preexisting material that wasn't a "script." Wait, is that the ghost of Raymond Carver trying to blend into the mantelpiece over there, snuggling up to that Hummel-like figurine of a walrus and the shockingly overpriced glass sculpture?

  My point here is that determining "the" author of a collective work requires intense examination, not acceptance of commercially-convenient labelling — and may, and indeed should, often result in "well, all of them" as an answer. Yes, that's commercially (and library-catalogingly) inconvenient; so is statistical mechanics.

• The preceding sausages on this platter verge on navel-gazing. Sometimes, however, the arts look outward, and are then promptly forgotten or reappropriated for other purposes — purposes that seldom acknowledge their own virtual self-parody.
• Turning from the healthier chicken sausages (no "natural hog casings" either) to pure pork, consider inflation targets. But not too broadly, or you might start considering the psychological fallout of inflation on trust-fund kids whose trusts were invested in long-term fixed-return securities and real property, and remain illiquid for Reasons… and then, rather sarcastically, ponder who disproportionately ends up in control of both banking policy and the messaging about it. Or that the monetary velocity of the consumer-facing portions of the economy is now an order of magnitude greater than when that "2% target" meme was developed, and since velocity inherently expands the apparent money supply, just maybe even a Friedman-worshipper would reconsider. Nothing to see here, no conflicts of interest here. Move along, citizens, back to your lives.
• …which explains, all too well, why banks are not paying attention to customer safety. On the one hand, the banks are overenthusiastic about purported "two-factor authentication" (and it's only purported, because if the authentication comes through the same device or decisional funnel it's only a multistep authentication, not a two-factor authentication — not a self-defeating mirage that convenient-use-of-smartphones-for-everything advocates want anyone to think about) that uses inherently insecure methods plus a "time-out." They don't want it good, they want it Tuesday (at 1406 to pay for that three-martini lunch, and delaying to 1408 would be inconvenient and unacceptable).

  On the other hand, the banks do not implement a duress-word system that would sandbox transactions as prospectively subject to further, later reexamination. It would be incredibly simple to implement — but it could not be fully automated. And that's why the banking system doesn't want anything like it: It would require injecting humans and human judgment into "banking," and there would be "personal responsibility" involved that they can't foist off on others. Plus it would blow up some of the nineteenth-century conceits of UCC article 3, and we can't have that!

Poisoned Blood Sausages

I have two questions for those Over Here complaining — no, not just complaining, shrieking — about how immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation:

1. What federally-recognized tribe are you a member of?
2. Care to share your hints for getting stains out of those white sheets you're wearing?

I'd also ask if they were aware that they're echoing a wannabe Austrian artist, or pseudonymous fan of icepicks and purges (and I don't mean some diet fad), but (a) we already know and (b) they'd lie… or claim they got the rhetoric from other, equally repulsive figures. Not to mention ignore that that… individual's grandfather was an undocumented immigrant.

Not just Over Here, either. Maybe we should ask the Prime Minister about it… preferably at Question Time when he'll be forced to answer.

• Right in the middle of the platter, I'll lead off with creators' (non)rights. Whether we're talking about the misleading rhetoric of "public domain day" coming up in a week or so (the works are available — one just has to pay the writer), or the consequences of exceeding the scope of a copyright agreement's terms, or the future of audiobooks in a demonstration that Marx was absolutely wrong (it's not the means of production, but the means of distribution, that matter), or even the analogous circumstances in music, the result leaves us with one overriding refrain:

  Soylent Pulp is authors!

  which will probably lead to more indigestion than any slice of Autorenblutwurst. Or, for that matter, complete ignorance.

• Many people today rely on their phones for everything, from banking to inability to type URLs. They shouldn't — the consequences are pretty obvious.
• Relying on security systems you don't understand and can't see is probably less of a problem, though, than relying on tech billionaires' visions for the future — especially since those tech billionaires weren't even reading the good stuff, the stuff that considered consequences… let alone understanding much of it. Why yes, I am saying that these Wile E. Coyote-like tech supra-geniuses have educational deficits that impair their perspectives and performance, even before getting into their uniform experiential deficits (go ahead — name a tech billionaire who actually participated in national service, military or otherwise; it's not that they all needed to, it's that none of them did).
• Oh, that's too hard. Let's see what's on television. And how. But no athlete-nonstudents, even though it's "bowl season," please.

Black Friday

It's Black Friday! Let's see, what's on the shopping list?

• Kangaroo treats, $3.77 at MallWort (hoping they'll get through TSA's gentle ministrations)
• High-end trading hardware, $3300; software, $800; communications (fiber optic), $99/month (but I'll only need two months' worth and even Veriz0n can't get me Down Undah)
• Inside information to support an "optimal trading strategy," no charge from a college buddy/neighbor/whatever (because if I paid for it that would be illegal)
• "Untraceable" cryptocurrency account for the profits… oops

Not so much oops for the corporate profits, though, eh? What I really want to know is this: If corporations are people too, why aren't the corporations paying the same tax rates as people… and paying in to the purportedly about-to-be-insolvent Social Security trust fund?

Eighteen Minutes

Once upon a time, a President of the United States turned over mysteriously erased tapes that did not deal with national security, or anything really all that important in the grand scheme of things — just his knowledge and direction of criminal activity related to elections. Instead of learning from Nixon's mistake (relying on never-definitively-determined "erasure" that could have been accidental or undirected), the Orange One demanded erasure of material already known to be of value in a criminal investigation. Regardless of the duration of the surveillance video to be erased, this is a bit more serious than an audio recording about campaign dirty tricks…

The Orange One has shown that however sly and cunning he is — however much he bears considerable watching — he is not intelligent. Oops, I can't say that about him: That's the 1912 Army Officer's Manual (and earlier editions) referring to "enlisted men," and the Orange One was never an enlisted man. Just a draft-dodger. Come to think of it, though, the way he dodged the draft just reinforces that he bears considerable watching. Or maybe not: That would make him the center of attention, and he'd like that.

• Speaking of "our betters," it doesn't look to me like either of the leading English-speaking democracies deserves to be called "leading English-speaking democracies" any more. Not Over There; certainly not Over Here. "Betters" my avulsed left big toenail.
• Of course, unelected powerbrokers aren't "betters," either. Ms Francke asks if a fired-for-good-cause female bank president was "held to a higher standard than male bank bosses", which entirely misses the point. That she was held to any standard at all is the real news — not her gender, because she's a "banker." Not a "better" any more than is billionaire hedge-fund owner Leon Black — regardless of various accusations floating around about associations with the less-than-esteemed Jeffrey Epstein, Black is reprehensible due to his past in the banking/finance industry.
• Apparently, though, if professionals don't get caught stealing from their clients, their other problems are not to be mentioned, so long as they file mandatory self-reports on measures that will do absolutely nothing to stop a determined embezzler. I'm picking on California here just because it came up in the news; the organized bar's refusal to effectively self-regulate the things its members screw up that are not subject to prosecution as some form of "theft" or "assault" have been a target of my ire for not quite four decades. (Because I'm old.)
• Sometimes it takes a Nobel Prize winner (ok, ok, "Bank of Sweden Memorial Prize" winner), though, to contemplate whether schmucks can still do good (despite their worst intentions). The relationship of this particular problem to Picasso's treatment of women; to Pound's treason; to Johnny Paycheck's, well, everything — and that's just a few whose credited surnames begin with "P" — should be pretty obvious.
• How one actually obtains access to art, though, is at least equally problematic. Mr Black's term as a leader at MoMA epitomizes the problem: The real art is dead presidents (and living monarchs), which simply are not to be shared with those who otherwise provide access to the art. And definitely not with the artists.

If you finish this platter with either indigestion or the impression that its theme largely concerns "hypocritical failure/refusal/inability to learn," you're probably right. Especially if simultaneous.