The Anthropic (Lack of) Principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footlong Follies

Been busy doing statistical analysis of something cautioned against via cliché, so this sausage platter has not received an awful lot of care. As if anyone could tell from contemporary news cycles…

• Legal lore has it that a moderately competent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. A chain-store sub sandwich, however, requires more. It's possible that:
  • …smoked turkey and roast beef have qualified immunity, because there's no established statutory or judicial provision subjecting them to indictment for their discretionary condiments
  • …the US Attorney in question does not qualify as "moderately competent," so the legal lore doesn't apply
  • …this grand jury had exactly as much confidence in the rule of law as the US Attorney in question has expressed for the past few years on Faux News
  • …changes in culture have made the legal lore incorrect — ham sandwiches are generally beyond a contemporary grand jury's experience, due to the increasing prevalence of wraps and fancy variants like panini
  • …this grand jury did not find probable cause that the accused was doing anything other than providing free food to law-enforcement professionals
  • …the accused's intent was to return nonconforming merchandise to the sandwich store (that is just out of the picture in the photo in the linked article), and even this grand jury couldn't find probable cause otherwise
  • …someone on this grand jury was him/herself an immigrant, or perhaps the child of one, and persuasively whispered "Jim Crow" (or "Bull Connor"?) in the jury room
  • …the accused is or is related to a veteran and this grand jury had had enough
  • …this was a hammer in search of a nail, unable to find K Street on a map (further impaired by general reliance on dubious "GPS turn-by-turn directions")
• At least Denmark understands that books need to be just a little bit cheaper without further reducing authors' compensation while enriching noncreative distributors — like streaming has done for composers/songwriters/performers — without the corollary.
• Every so often, it's worthwhile reminding enthusiastic bookbanners that they need to, at minimum, carefully and closely read what they wish banned for themselves. Even when it's a notorious "forgery" (better description would be "propaganda sponsored by the Security Detachment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs"). Of course, actually reading goes very much against the mindset of the enthusiastic bookbanner, so perhaps I'm asking too much. I'd definitely be asking too much of the educational hierarchy in Oklahoma.
• We could just worry about government lies from the perspective of a government official. We'll just carefully forget to consider that (a) those lessons came at the hands of the party that individual is now representing, (b) that the lies were in the service of much the same policy imperatives that individual has supported (and continues to do so), (c) that individual didn't live through Vietnam and Watergate, so he has no concept of gambling occurring in Rick's casino, (d) that those clamoring to get into government (whether officeholders or challengers) don't have a better track record — including that individual, (e) that contemporaneous models for multiple-choice exams disfavor more than four choices.

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.

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".

Just Eat It

I think I've finally gotten the sausage grinder under (at least temporary) control. The last four months have been almost non-stop output, even without any real inputs.

• So, the Orange Menace thinks that WalMart should just "eat" price increases caused by his tariffs. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose: If costs increase over time at his "luxury condominium and apartment complexes," perhaps Trump Tower (Chicago) rents should snap back to their 2007 levels (from what I've been able to determine, about half the current rate). Oh, that's not what he meant? He meant that just the price rises due to tariffs he personally and imperially imposed should be eaten? (We'll just ignore how much the steel to build that luxury complex came from, or had price influenced by, import tariffs on steel.) Oh, wait, he's a special snowflake; this is about appropriate behavior for the little people, not for Very Important Real Estate Speculators (With Substantial Histories of Bankruptcy and Tax-Loss Carry-Forwards, resulting in at least a decade of not paying any federal income tax despite Being Yuuuuuuuugely Rich)…

  No kids in Japan were starved in the production of this link sausage. I cannot say the same, however, for the kids of those holding "good manufacturing jobs" in Japan once the tariffs hit — that would be trickle-down economics, wouldn't it?

• Speaking of "the little people," consider early-career (and popularity-passed-them-by-with-no-other-skills-developed) artists. Or, as is all too apparent, don't; the objective of "ensuring" that there are more "good manufacturing jobs" for Real Americans has much more to do with ensuring that those Real Americans have not the resources, time, energy, or education to object… or retrain for new "good manufacturing jobs" fifteen years or so in the future, when the products and processes of their current jobs will no longer result in above-market returns for passive investors.
• The NEA, however, is just a tiny piece of artists' property interests. Like in their good government jobs… oh, wait, she's not an artist, never mind; I therefore shouldn't be considering the interests of a black woman doing an impossible job, well out of public awareness… It's almost like there's a hidden agenda involved, such as replacing the de facto Zeroth Restatement of Copyright Law (immensely flawed as it is, both in detail and in its underlying assumptions that favor transferees over natural-person creators and reject "creative process" as at all relevant) with one more favorable to techbros.
• But perhaps it's time for a sweeter, apple-flavored sausage (although nobody really wants to see how that one was made). Perhaps Mr Cook should just eat it… like he didn't do almost exactly a decade ago (just in case you're wondering, cert. denied).

Their Lips Were Moving

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

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

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

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.

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.

Winter Weather

I almost got trapped in a parking lot by a sudden snowstorm — the special snowflakes drifted up to my chest! These particular special snowflakes were driving SUVs (and a couple minivans and pickups). Well, not exactly driving, but parking. Hint: When a space says "Compact," it might really mean it… and "compact SUV" is very much like "friendly fire" (neither one really is, no matter how pervasive the marketingspeak), and taking up two spots in a crowded lot doesn't help anyone. Except that it might save those special snowflakes a few steps while they're preventing other customers from getting in their way in the store.

In any event, lots of interesting IP and related news items even since the last platter.

• Consider the (difficult) issue of copyright in fictional universes. One wonders how much farther the reasoning might extend when considering a completely invented fictional universe, like the United Federation of Planets (Star Trek™), instead of the slightly fictionalized Peckham that played home to Del Boy. Or is the way I identified the Federation a hint, reaching toward the inner operation of (and communicative distinction between) copyright and trademark?
• The purple haze still lingers around the copyright estate of J. Marshall Hendrix, as Sony (the successor to Hendrix's label) has found out to its chagrin. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of plantation overseers, could it? Not all transferees actively mistreat the actual creators, but the economic model remains very much the same…
• A couple contrasting, and probably fundamentally incompatible, visions of "fair use" and "training sets for large language model generative systems" have hit the news of late. On the one hand, authors in the UK are (rightly) complaining that a "consultation" on copyright's proper treatment neglected authors' (and other creators') interests. Conversely, WestLaw got the opposite result regarding purportedly factual (and definitely lacking originality by design) case headnotes. Comparison to the last paragraph might bear some consideration of its own.
• One might instead ponder the EU Advocate General's attempt to leave weasel room around Dastar when applied to European patents. Which is just as bizarrely strange as it sounds. Dastar held that, under US law, a trademarked title (or, more broadly, a Lanham Act claim) cannot be used to protect a thin, compilation only, dubiously expired copyright. The pending CeramTec matter concerns something quite parallel: Marks being used to at least as to commerce extend an expired patent.
• One could just consider that the Doge of Venice Beach has ensured that some of his minions have extracted quite a bit of data tracing back to specific individuals from government computers. Not that any intelligence-collection methods might use this now dubiously or completely unsecured material residing on Baby Techbros' laptops (n.b. cited as a basic open-source explanation, without comment upon or endorsement of its precision or accuracy). That, after all, would be considering potential collateral damage — something that the individuals at the top in the executive branch since 20 January have clearly demonstrated is not within their weltanschauung.

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.

From Rubashov's Cell

Earlier this week, we were only a couple minutes off (Eastern Standard Time) — and the treatment of former comrades is already all too consistent. Which should shed quite a bit of light on whether this has anything to do with "ideology" or "principle"… before it Snowballs too much, on the perhaps-inevitable slide toward Shostakovich's fate.

• There's been some rather bizarre and, at least cumulatively, disturbing news in the last couple months in and around publishing.¹ Perhaps the most obvious is yet another shoe dropping in the single-most-profitable area of publishing: for-profit restricted-focus academic journals. Nobody is looking at oligopolistic practices there, of course; and certainly not for stock photography frequently relied upon for cover images (sometimes with dire consequences due to rampant incompetence and deception regarding "permission" throughout publishing, but who's counting?). At least there wasn't outright forgery… this time; no guarantees concerning "AI-generated art" slipping in without proper attribution, though.
• That's less disturbing, though, than silent defaults for writers' drafts to be assimilated by the Borg a large-language model. This is, or should be, a big hint to anyone who handles confidential information — especially, but not only, lawyers: Cloud-Based Executables Are Not Your Friends. Or at least not your clients' friends. It's not going to be long at all before a FISA warrant issues (if I'm not already late with that).
• We don't blame you — you were only doing your job, Mr Parsons. Given this sort of effort, one wonders just how accurate the information making its way to the Inner Party upper-management MAGAts is going to be. Perhaps they'll end up tilting at the wrong windmills, despite their intent to blow them up.

  One also wonders if the real "deep state" actors are the self-righteous apparatchiks who keep ensuring ballots have only the same bad choices, I probably shouldn't say that as I just received my ballot in the mail this afternoon.

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1. Remember, there is no "publishing industry" — just the (multiple) bastard offspring of a three-century-long orgy among thirteen distinct industries.

Not Braving the Mall for Boxing Day

…particularly since the malls near here are a quarter or more empty. Which doesn't diminish the parking lot madness. Or the threat of being run down by delivery vehicles.

• Misconduct in the "c-suite" in corporations is everywhere, from health insurance to water utilities. This is what happens when more than one generation reads the LLM-generated summary of The Wealth of Nations and never realizes that there's a word before "self-interest." It's bad enough to neglect "enlightened"; too often, though, executives forget what the "self" is when they're directing operations of a company with a lot of non-equity stakeholders. Big hint to MBA programs: The "self" in "self-interest" is most emphatically not related to the "take any opportunity for personal advancement and withdrawing an arbitrageur's commission";¹ insurance policy holders are in fact the company's creditors, the water utilities exist at the suffrance of the landowners served, and so on.

  Insert a comment — with footnotes and photographs and a paragraph on the back of each one — about "the reason for the season" being inconsistent with the prosperity gospel (which is, itself, inconsistent with actions by the protagonist, but since we're already in cognitive-dissonance territory what's a little more?) right about here.

• Or maybe right about here. Sadly, the publishing industries (frequently including the "indie" segment) epitomize the problem. Those in charge — whether in editorial, S&M, or "general management" — are almost invariably not qualified to practice in the field.² This should remind the excessively scholarly of Holmes's Lament:

  It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted, for instance, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge. Yet if they command the interest of any public, they have a commercial value — it would be bold to say that they have not an aesthetic and educational value — and the taste of any public is not to be treated with contempt. It is an ultimate fact for the moment, whatever may be our hopes for a change. That these pictures had their worth and their success is sufficiently shown by the desire to reproduce them without regard to the plaintiffs' rights.³

• Which leads directly into musing about blind spots in the law that itself displays an immense blind spot: The inept equation of "extremism" with "ideology," without adequate consideration of deception, of claiming the mantle of victimhood to evade real examination, of rage (however justified/unjustified) relating to self-identity. Bluntly, "hurt feelings" do not equate to, and seldom result in, coherent, or indeed any, disinterested inquiry into details of an ideological position. Justified? Distrust of Manifest Destiny by Native Americans. Unjustified? The disturbingly-corresponding Great Replacement Theory, which is not in fact an "ideology" at all. Hint: Just because the FBI and Geheimstaatssicherheitbüro declare that something has an "ideological origin," coming from agencies that gave us self-interest-masquerading-as-principle ranging from Cointelpro to [redacted, much more recently] doesn't make it so. I do not think that word means what they think it does — let alone what they say it does. This is just excessive fandom — disturbingly similar to belief that if the opponent wins he/she/they must have cheated.
• Issues with bullying, lashing out, and self-interest shading into the cognitive dissonance of limited-scope megalomania (with elements of "simple" narcissism and sociopathy blended in) often arise in retrospective legal proceedings regarding "war crimes." This is by no means saying that, for example, on available evidence a certain recently-fled dictator guy doesn't merit such scrutiny. The irony that, in the medium and longer term, formalized reconciliation really hasn't worked, just points at how hard the problem is — especially when applied to businesspeople, not government officials. When all of the other tools for dealing with misbehavior by the powerful are taken away, "the law" becomes a hammer… and all misbehavior starts to look like nails.
• At least they're not nails viewed in a mirror. Yet. What kind of holiday season would it be without an existential threat? (Not one I've ever experienced.) No more sugar chirality for you, guys. (Or proteins, or nucleic acids, or…)
• Those who lost the last American election are the most likely (not certain) to propose dragging us out of the eighteenth century and landowners' franchise. It does bother me that my vote for President this past election was worth about 82% of that of a resident of Montpelier, just in terms of population disparity between districts… and it gets worse when one factors in that I was "only" voting for one tenth of my state's "undivided whole" of electoral votes. (And the less said about Iowa and the "representativeness" of the caucuses, the better.) The real problem is that every electoral system has distortions built into it; comparison is a highwire balancing act, with very hungry litialligators below…

  That this is a natural consequence of "gatekeepers" is for another time; the US certainly isn't alone in having severe difficulties. The real problem is that our betters don't trust us not to elect demogogues. How's that worked out in the last century, guys? (There's a reason that "divide and conquer" leads almost inexorably to "plurality claiming a mandate"… and the math just isn't that hard. Well, it's hard to put into HTML.)

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1. Analogies to Maxwell's Demon, Szilard's seldom-challenged-never-refuted demonstration (three quarters of a century ago) that the Second Law problems with Maxwell's Demon apply not just to heat but to information and indeed all ordering, and of executives to demons are entirely intentional.
2. Hell, they're often not qualified to even consume in the field! So as to avoid a defamation action (if the individual is still alive), I am carefully not naming the c-suite executive of a major NYC commercial publisher — one that included a "literary fiction" imprint — who boasted in the bar at a convention a while back of never having read any literary fiction.
3. Bleistein v. Donaldson Litho. Co., 188 U.S. 239, 251–52 (1903) (citation omitted). I'd call this a safe and seasoned precedent, but of late the Court has been ignoring the imprecation to limit lawyerly egos to the law. Take your pick: basic biology, lab technique, nonscholarly 18th century linguistics applied to people whose progenitors had no preserved voice in that era…

Grinch-Approved Link Sausages

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Follow the Money

Reminder: If you took the US income-tax extension in April this year, your returns are due today. Which is both a sad "follow the money" in itself and an indirect issue with the following sausages, none of which leave a rich sensation behind.

• At least in Germany, wallpaper isn't like a mural when considering the right to photograph it. This rather inverts the ordinary result when the same conduct and similar copyrighted work get considered under the Eurocentric "fair dealing" framework versus the First-Amendment-centric "fair use" framework. I suspect that the latter was distorted by the problem with "The Original" in a way not immediately apparent in the opinions, but that's a suspicion only.
• Unfortunately, the "The Original" problem is not limited to the so-called fine arts: It also relates to recorded music, as demonstrated by the "ownership" of performance rights (not copyrights… at least outside the Sixth Circuit) in musical recordings in the US. The "owner" of the reproduction right is the possessor and physical owner of the "master recordings," recently epitomized by the Scooter Braun/Taylor Swift/rerecording of Swift's earlier albums fiasco. It's worth remembering that US law is a distinct outlier here, thanks to judge-made law (with more than a whiff of corruption) from the early part of the twentieth century, actually originating with photography and the 1870 Copyright Act. It's also worth remembering that even the "biggest" performance acts may not get paid (admittedly, it's a bit too historical for Generation Z, but at least it's not the Rat Pack).

  The fundamental problem with the entire chain of reasoning is that it grievously misstates the relevant facts and even-more-grievously ignores the "process versus product" problem, then slaps lawyerly/judicial misunderstandings of "what it takes to create a musical performance onto a 'master'" both at the origin of recorded music and now — especially when founded on analogies drawn from nineteenth-century photography and lithography. There are no heroes here, only antiheroes — which should surprise precisely no one. Even thinking about this makes me a bigger nerd than you expected, right?

• The same commercial pressures are impairing the advancement of the useful art of long-form fiction. "Author" is apparently an unduly dangerous occupation, anyway.

  It's not just Over There, either. An enterprising PhD student looking for a dissertation topic in behavioral economics could do far worse than examining how the two-and-a-half-century slide from "encourage" to "necessary and sufficient" has distorted "authorship." (It wouldn't hurt to note the irony of such research being done in the unpaid context of a "PhD dissertation," either.)

• Whether it's real property or larger swaths of the economy, money-laundering of ill-gotten financial capital (I'm looking at you, too, exploiters of scientific and advertising fraud) seems to be a Problem. <SARCASM> But surely that's never been a problem in either "common" or "rarified" arts, has it? We don't even need to consider outright theft…. </SARCASM>
• But at least that's overt corruption. (Which doesn't really make it much better.) That new flatscreen TV is stealing your soul — or at least information that should damned well remain private. One wonders if those content recognition systems extend to material routed in from one's recorded video collection… as might the owners of Potomac Video.

— 30 —

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

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