Bad Parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously Calendared

It's that time of year again: All the quarterly and annual appointments piled up in a relatively short window. It's sort of like ripping the bandaid off instead of slowly and carefully peeling it off — hey, wait, there's another insurance form for that?

• In a rather short, sharp shock to the underlying meme of the fine arts — that "the original" is The Only Thing That Matters, meaning that to appreciate it or learn from it at all one must go to where it is to physically view it (with all of the subtle, and not so subtle, class/ethnic/nationality elements embedded in that journey), and that no copy ever allows for Appropriate Appreciation — the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has digitized its collection for free public access. The sideswipe at the memes of photography-licensing oligopoly, as distinct from the interests of actually engaging in original expression individual photographers, is also highly appropriate; particularly as that subculture is precisely the opposite of encouraging "Progress in the useful Arts."
• The contrast with the, well, dubious competence of the Anthropic claims process — in conception, design, and execution — is pretty obvious to those of us who've been inside the system for both creators and transferee-exploiters. On one hand, the lawyers involved were constrained by both lack of first-hand knowledge and the stated priorities of their clients; on the other, both general ethics and the specifics of class actions required more disinterested effort, in both conception and implementation, than is apparent… for fees on just the plaintiff's side exceeding the gross revenues of almost everyone involved.

  Which really, in the end, leads to the other half of "reform": Don't just criticize, but conceptualize and actually build something better that doesn't itself have large unintended consequences (at least not when predictable). That's the real problem with the "Information Wants to Be Free" movement (especially as exposed in "we refuse to pay anyone for data to train our large-language-model generative systems"): It doesn't — indeed, actively refuses to — engage with both the systemic and individual costs of information-creation mechanisms and environments.

  No, I'm not going to be specific until at least all of the briefs have been filed in the appeal. My concerns relate directly to the stated subjects of the appeals, and it would be inappropriate (not to mention would require taking the conduct of a few of the players outside for a spirited discussion and attitude adjustment assisted with a rhetorical 2x4). Suffice it to say that one of the nonparties has demonstrated that, at least until its entire leadership and senior staff changes, it can never satisfy Fed. R. Civ. Proc. 23(a)(4) due to its built-in blind spots (and borderline narcissism, but we are talking about the arts here…) — and that the concept of the "real party in interest" is also relevant to satisfying that part of the Rule.

• The rhetoric is building, and won't subside until well after 03 January 2027: Expect to hear more and more about "voter fraud" from ill-informed quarters (often with poorly-hidden conflicts of interest and narcissism well beyond anything found in the arts community). For a change, how about some validated data analyzed by, like, experienced nonpartisan interpreters of laboratory and other experimental data on the prevalence of voter fraud? Or, at least, voter fraud measured by its actual standards, and not "they didn't vote for me" (semipaywall).
• That last link sausage leads into contemplating both the ingredients and, perhaps more to the point, the cleanliness of the kitchen — and more likely the lack thereof. Direct election of anyone expected to exercise judgment within the bounds of a profession is incredibly stupid. We're at least smart enough not to do it for military officers (we don't directly elect unit commanders!); we shouldn't for health officials, judges, prosecutors (and Attorneys General), coroners, law-enforcement officials, etc. And especially for that last as to "sheriffs," who historically were not "cops" as we know them but armed tax-collectors and proxies for absentee liege lords (viz. the legendary Sheriff of Nottingham) who more often than not dealt only with writs and "major" crimes like stealing sheep, not driving a horse cart while intoxicated. In this context, direct electoral approval is worse than relying on (all-too-often evaded) professional regulation; the irony that the reason professional regulation often fails — twisted, conflicted concerns for "reputation of the profession" combined with a lingering internal sense of "there but for grace go I" — for the same reasons as "candidate reputation" must be acknowledged but shouldn't detain us for too long.

  But in present law, that remains (but shouldn't be) "constitutional" as consistent with "a Republican form of government." Something can be stupid without being overtly unconstitutional, though, and subjecting professional judgment in individual instances (often wound up with nonpublic information) to approval by direct election is at minimum stupid. We've got enough stupid in government (and any other "institution") without building its structure to elect more stupid.

Mismatched Capabilities

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

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

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

Circadian Link Sausage Platter

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

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

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

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

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

Casualties in the Ostrich Brigade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Link Sausages Past the Blockade(s)

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

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

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

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

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".

Leaving Aside the Illegality…

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

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

  K Street.

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

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

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

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

  At least, not quite yet.

Imperfections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Irascible

Instead, permanently irasced. Fortunately for those of my three regular readers who have sensitive dispositions, Life has gotten in the way of blawgging of late. There are only so many times one can point out that all officers of the United States (including both the military and everyone else) take an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Not to support and defend one's personal interests, or tribal allegiances, or self-righteous moral doctrines — the Constitution. A document that had embedded in it both a self-awareness of possible error and an inherent, limited, and direct mechanism for change (which is one of its two fundamental innovations — most others, however radical in substance, are mere more-extreme examples from late-eighteenth-century systems).¹ A document that proclaims itself as less than perfection, a mere guide toward creating a "more perfect"² union.

OK, then. On to the rather unappetizing platter of sausages — a platter that epitomizes "you really, really wouldn't want to have seen these sausages being made."

• The Grauniad yet again wonders about the Problem of the Dishonest Memoir, which sounds like — but isn't — Sherlock Holmes fanfic. Maybe the problem isn't with the books, but with the selection process for them (and the marketing process thereafter). As a thought experiment, it would be worth comparing the reality games played in Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 with those in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, and pondering that one author successfully used the form of the memoir to comment on reality and evolution of a single soul, while one… did not. Then reverse the marketing categories plastered onto the books…
• That may be too much heavy thinking for a July heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere. How about the much simpler "eat the rich"? It's not like there are no examples, all in very poor taste, ranging from housing bubbles to succession crises IRL and even "meritocracy" as the emperor's new clothes. Or maybe we could just consider "entitlement as practiced by the fictional rich," either in the present tense or a century in the past (as carefully elided by Disney in a "classic period" animation involving lots and lots of puppies).
• That last aside leads into this month's episode #2716 of musicians are getting ripped off by the distribution system at least as much as audience-victims of TicketBastard while questioning whether there has ever been a middle class of musicians earning their living from music — or whether that would be a good thing in the first place. The irony that both of those links go through "begging walls" may be a bit much for a hot Monday afternoon, though.

---

1. What this says about the intellectual dishonesty of slavish adherence to a vision of "original public meaning" is for another time. At that time, we'll consider things like "who is the public," "what nature of evidence is there of the 'public meaning,'" "must, or even should, clearly technical contexts always use 'public meaning' as their touchstone, as in the word 'judg[]ment,'" and perhaps most egregiously "does the 'public' of 'who is the public' form a union-set with the sources of evidence of 'public meaning.'" But what would I know about that, after struggling with the disjunctures within Beilstein as both German and the underlying knowledge of chemistry evolved over a century, or after dealing directly with [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted] with their overt temporal shifts in meaning in my first profession?
2. Perhaps examining the use of the word "perfect" in mathematics, and particularly the mathematics of the late eighteenth century as well known to (among others) Franklin, Jefferson, and Samuel Adams, might be valuable virtually impossible given the utter lack of basic mathematical and scientific literacy (past the "rocks for jocks" general education courses) endemic in the legal and political communities. Except, that is, among some economists and MBAs who have fun manipulating the numbers to support their preconceived notions, supremely confident that no one who they might otherwise respect will challenge either the numbers… or the data-gathering methods. It would also require thinking about "boundary conditions" — something that advocates of "original public meaning" try desperately to evade.

The Moon in June

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

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

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

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

New! Improved! 60% Less Political!

Mostly nonpolitical/nonpartisan today… for values of "political" and "partisan" that carefully ignore Orwell's pithy explanation of the flaw in that objective: "[N]o book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." (Why I Write (1946))

• Every so often, "covert operations" aren't just another excuse for skullduggery. Sometimes — even if unintended — they can be a bulwark against madness. But that requires focus on the arts, not on intentional disinformation; unfortunately, the latter is by far more common. It almost leads one to question whether all of those Ivy League graduates recruited in the 1950s and 1960s were the wrong ones. Maybe they should have been looking for literature majors…
• Speaking of "unwarranted exclusivity," consider the problem of actual creators from "working class" backgrounds. (The stark contrast with "nepo babies" justifies a little scrutiny, too.) The music industry is particularly annoying in this regard, given the pathetically small portion of the revenue stream allocated to them — even paperback writers are better off. (Not much.) Having family support so that "artistic failure" doesn't mean "starvation" requires a family that can afford that support in the first place. "Cui bono?" is almost always concentrated away from those actually creating and/or acting as necessary infrastructure for the arts (like the set-builders and other stage crew for live theatrical productions). Funny how one hears of musicians of the past now surviving on charity, but not music-industry (or Ticketbastard) executives…
• Then there are really, really hard questions, like how much of a father's sins must be visited upon their sons when interviewed in a documentary. Not having seen this piece, I can't even begin to evaluate its substance. I'm reluctant to assume that a 13-year-old boy in a patriarchal culture has views independent of his father's… or in lock-step with them. (Specific example, albeit much older: The just-sworn-in Secretary of Health here in the US isn't exactly in tune with his late father's views, and hasn't been for decades.) Thus, I don't think there's a bright-line rule, in general or as applied to this documentary — especially since there are atrocities on both all sides in the Levant. And "disclaimers" are worthwhile only when viewed, understood, and as necessary acted upon beforehand, so I doubt this particular disclaimer is actually worthwhile.
• Things don't get much better over in the other of CP Snow's "two cultures." Science gets respect in the US only in the abstract, and pretty much only as useful technological applications that make their way toward the general public (especially if useable with no directions or training, like the microwave oven). There are lots of high-falutin' theoretical constructs out there, some more plausible than others. As someone who has had a foot in both of Snow's cultures for decades — I have degrees in both, and indeed in the neglected "third leg" of the theoretical and applied social sciences — I've often felt more like the wishbone about to be torn apart based on superstition…
• "Cui bono?" is also at issue regarding DEI programs. There's a disturbing, much-less-optimistic-than-Manifest-Destiny background in there, whether overtly in the "Great Replacement" handwavery or more subtly, the various "anti-DEI" theories are as much about cutting the pie as anything else. The disturbing background is that individual slices can be a smaller proportion of the whole and still have more "food value" if the pie is growing faster than the number of additional "diners." Consider the Friday Night Massacre for a moment — and remember that the two highest-ranking "DEI hires" identified here managed to achieve their current ranks largely fighting against precisely the assumptions of those who just fired them.

  Or just remember that the opposite of "woke" is "comatose."

I did say "mostly."

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.

Nonendorsement From a Dog-Loving Parent

…that is, about as far from a childless catlady as one can get…

OK, I lied; I will make an endorsement here. I hereby endorse ensuring that your voter registration is up to date (non-US citizens, too, but the link is for 'murikans). Many jurisdictions (not just US, either) have thirty-days-prior-to-election restrictions, such as not being allowed to vote in non-Federal elections if registration is updated less than 30 days prior to the election. And that's even more common outside the US.

• Although I'm hesitant to give this self-righteous jerk a platform, the MIT Technology Review already did, so the marginal damage is minimal. Chris Lewis bloviates — on behalf of the organization of which he is President, and I'm burying the lede here — that the Second Circuit's decision declaring that the Internet Archive's piracy is not protected by fair use will lead to the downfall of western civilization, brutal whipping of puppies, and destruction of all libraries anywhere. I'll grant that the current "ecosystem" is unfair to libraries, but this sort of "self-help" solution has already been rejected rather thoroughly in the context of book availability.

  If Apple is suggesting that Amazon was engaging in illegal, monopolistic practices, and that Apple's combination with the Publisher Defendants to deprive a monopolist of some of its market power is pro-competitive and healthy for our economy, it is wrong. This trial has not been the occasion to decide whether Amazon's choice to sell NYT Bestsellers or other New Releases as loss leaders was an unfair trade practice or in any other way a violation of law. If it was, however, the remedy for illegal conduct is a complaint lodged with the proper law enforcement offices or a civil suit or both. Another company's alleged violation of antitrust laws is not an excuse for engaging in your own violations of law. Nor is suspicion that that may be occurring a defense to the claims litigated at this trial.

  US v. Apple, Inc., 952 F.Supp.2d 638, 708 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) (emphasis added), aff'd, 791 F.3d 290 (2d Cir. 2015). (Ironically, many of the publishers Lewis would attack regarding their e-book pricing policies "pleabargained down" in that matter.)

  The real problem here is that Lewis is conflating publisher misconduct — and a pattern and practice of imposing publishing contracts that facially violate the Rule Against Perpetuities is certainly a window onto misconduct — with the impact on the author community of the so-called "CDL" (far worse than musicians legitimately complaining about Spotify). Any claim that his organization and/or the Kahlebros are merely engaging in "civil disobedience" paints the wrong house with too broad a brush, because those who will be most harmed by involuntary "CDL" acquisitions are the authors who have no control over pricing policies… and, because "commercial publishing" is in the strange position of being both an oligopoly and monopsony, never reaches the actual interior-decoration misconduct.

  Then, too, the broad brush spatters all buildings (and appurtenances) as if they convey only mere "fact," without regard to originality of expression. But that's for another time… and, more to the point, careful examination of the "lending records" to discern both (a) how much is nearly-pure creative expression like "fiction" and "poetry" and (b) how much it's just an attempt to move Grokster's goalposts without ever admitting that's what they're trying to do.

• Speaking of Apple, schade. It's worth pondering how this relates to the conduct at issue in US v. Apple; whether a quick note of parallels, a deeper examination of repeat behavior of (unpunished) natural-person miscreants, or a broad-ranging consideration of how bullying relates to multinational corporations, that pondering will be disquieting.
• As Judge Côte implied in that quotation above, there just might be an antitrust problem in the part of publishing that is Lewis's legitimate concern: Scientific (and quasiscientific) journals. (Keep in mind that, because PW has more conflicts of interest in reporting on industry financials than the world-champion catlady has cats, the financial figures appearing in the article substantially understate the profitability of those journals.) All before citations themselves go rogue, which is at the opposite end of the problem and reflects the "academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low" meme.
• Interestingly, we may learn more about Ozymandias and other portions of the classical "canon" for which we have only fragmentary third-hand descriptions. Advocates of "original public meaning originalism" should ponder the equivalent — discovery of a trove of documents from the 1770s and 1780s reflecting the thoughts of ex-slaves (manumissed or otherwise) and how they used and understood terms like "person."
• Offered without further comment, there are changes afoot for prepublication review.