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.

"It's Only Treason If You Lose…

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

— Teh Orange Menace

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

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

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

Losers!

Standard of Review

Justice Kagan has mused that perhaps — just perhaps — the Supreme Court's mild suggestions on ethics should be enforceable, and perhaps inquired into by a "special committee" of seasoned, respected lower-court judges. Naturally, the Mouth of Sauron the WSJ editorial board is vehemently opposed. This particular board includes not one lawyer (or even holder of a law degree who never practiced); not one individual who has ever been part of a corporation's special litigation committee evaluating a lawsuit (or personnel matter) involving conflicts of interest by one or more members of the full board; not one individual who has ever been part of an organization (such as, but far from only, the US military) with an effective, independent Inspector General system. They clearly don't understand that an IG, which is what Justice Kagan describes (albeit not by that name), doesn't make final decisions, but instead makes recommendations of varying strength based upon the facts discerned in particular incidents. But then, given the particular biases of the WSJ and its ownership, "credible, effective government" isn't their highest priority in the first place… and they don't understand "review and recommend" and how that actually reinforces the independence of decisionmakers (nor do they care).

I have reviewed and recommend extreme skepticism regarding Judge Ho's latest extrajudicial attempt to claim victimhood — but that's all it is. Whether his remarks call into question his ability to be unquestionably impartial on matters raising issues that he has ideologically, umm, prejudged is not for me to decide; it is, however, for me to suggest that the stated factual record does not support his conclusion, particularly when it includes all of the data from the lab (let alone evidence gathered in the field).

Oops. I think I've just betrayed my own decisional framework: That when the data either fails to support prevailing decisional frameworks or even outright undermines them, continued unthinking reliance on those prevailing decisional frameworks is unjustified. Is theocratic. Is downright stupid. The scientific method cannot determine all decisions in human affairs; that way lies strictly numeric, non-context-sensitive "solutions" to the Trolley Problem (that neglect what the Trolley Problem does to those not in the frame, particularly the driver whose trolley has been diverted onto that track, not to mention the maintenance guys who know damned well that parts fail and blame themselves when they do). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: Determining what data matters requires some reference to decisional frameworks, like accepting that it's the feather's nonzero mass and local gravity that determine how quickly it will fall in a vacuum and not its color or species of origin or, well, featherness.

Too much decisional ideology, however, pays a lot more attention to the beautiful plumage of the Norwegian Blue than it does the bird's life status. That pathway leads to self-inflicted wounds based on the bigotry of (in-practice-unreviewable) decisionmakers.¹ And that brings us back to Justice Kagan's suggestion that appointed-for-life-on-good-behavior members of the otherwise-unreviewable court should be subject to some review short of the high crimes and misdemeanors that lead to impeachment. The precise mechanism will matter to merits and workability, but the concept is sound, particularly in a context in which judges in general do not recuse enough (let alone clearly).

---

1. We shall leave for another time the self-reinforcing structures that both put unsuitable persons in those roles and exclude the Other (however well suited). Not that I'm also questioning overreliance on three or four law schools as comparable to overreliance on two (now three) military academies or anything like that, or questioning how prior stovepiping of candidates when they're 18 (or 21) can be counterproductive when considering actual decisionmaking in their fifties and sixties. Or how that early judgment of potential presumes a good basis for that judgment and the suitability of those doing the judging to do so. Oh, wait, maybe I am…

Tortured Sausages Department

It's election season: I'm afraid there's no poetry (or poets) here.

• The gummint — and not just teh feds — finally filed the (anticipated) antitrust complaint against LiveNation/TicketBastard today (PDF, 128 pages). Keep in mind that this is:
  • Only an accusation,
  • That includes neither actual evidence nor a response,
  • In a highly technical (and all-too-often easily distorted) area of law,
  • In the context of what is largely a first-world problem (however culturally important): Live large-scale performances, almost entirely of popular music,

  which nonetheless pleases me a great deal. If the money was flowing through to either the performers or the frontline staff (especially those dealing with mobs of screaming fans… and cleaning up after them), that might be different. If the actual result was a uniformly better and safer concert experience, that might be different. It's not; and it's hiding some particularly dark conflicts of interest and quadruple dealing, some of which is going to get into the record (and much of which will not for Reasons).

  This is yet another First Amendment rent that has instead been treated as a safely-ignorable externality. I did warn you that there's no poetry here.

• As confusing as that link sausage was (and if ever there's a part of the law that no one should want to see made, it's unfair-competition law), consider staff changes in other parts of the entertainment industry — which bear a disturbing resemblance to many other hypercorporatist personnel changes in larger businesses. On one hand, there's something to be said for adapting an organization's leadership skillsets to conditions faced by that organization; on the other hand, that gets a bit awkward when outsiders (or conflicted interests) impose not different conditions but weltanschauung on the organization — especially relating to how the organization's success will be measured. (Not that I've ever seen that before, not even after having sort-of-survived the end of the Cold War — on the inside.)
• That's especially so when the imposed weltanschuung is "ownership" in culture and the arts. It's particularly ironic when the fight is between the designated successor to conquistas of two millennia past and a present-day museum, an ocean away, endowed by the particularly dubious oil barons. And even then, it devolves to conflicted courts of questionable jurisdiction talking past each other. No poetry here, either — just my sick sense of humor.
• My sick sense of humor, however, slides close to exceptionally gleeful schadenfreude when a court stands up — again — to a serial human-rights violator who managed to get selected to high government office. I'd suggest recalibrating policy preferences, but that would definitely be an unrealistic expectation, especially given the sociopathy and narcissism that seem necessary résumé entries for "high government office" these days. Which is not to say that's never been a problem in the past; it's just that it has evolved from a bug to a feature.
• Or we could just ponder less-expected places to find bigoted fascists and their aftermath — like anatomy books.
• Last, and far from least: Go Gladis! Once I saw the word "yacht" in the story, I knew whose side I was on…

Living in the Past

It's not just a Jethro Tull album! And I'm not too old to rock and roll — just too old for the mosh pit. Or dance floor. Or TicketBastard-determined "concert seating."

• Many, many nations distort themselves, their citizenry, and the world at large by living in the past. Ranging from French insistence that the UN Secretary General must speak French (and, for those who point out how common that language is in Africa, it's worth pondering why) to Old Boys at the UK Foreign Office (which was a problem decades ago when I was dealing with them), perhaps the epitome is false nostalgia for the Iron Lady — itself echoing the false nostalgia for Ronald I Over Here.
• And meanwhile, extreme inherited wealth continues to distort matters and lead directly to unseen levels of corruption. Not just politics — neither airplanes nor orchestras have escaped, either directly or just attempting to please aggressive passive investors who are convinced that "having money" means they know how to manage organizations and mice. Which is far less a defense of mice than a rejection of leeches…
• …including misuse of technical terms for marketing purposes. It rather pisses me off, as a chemist (just short of a minor in biology, all those decades ago), to encounter "organic" and "natural" bandied about in organic-chemistry-enabled-nonrecyclable plastic packaging. Benzene is organic (and even largely results from natural processes operating on animals whose diets were, umm, completed millions of years before there was anything artificial to add!). Arsenic and amanita mushrooms are natural. But in an extension of misuse of language to deceive that wouldn't have surprised Orwell, that's not what the "reasonable consumer" understands.

  And let's not get into the class-based and "rural rage"-based misuse of "genetically-modified organisms," either — especially not if there are any AKC-breed-standard German Shepherds in the household, which developed their hip dysplasia tendencies without any help from a laboratory. It's not the method, it's the deployment (which is not a defense of the company that gave its name to my undergraduate chemistry building… almost all of whose inimical strategies have been driven by MBAs and not chemists). The past when those dirty rotten scientists hadn't yet explained mechanisms was not paradise.

Misnomer

It's worth pondering the relationship between ends and means, on a day celebrated as "good" after the execution of a dissenter against a domestic theocracy by a foreign occupier. Oh, wait, that's something we just don't do.

• One feature of England's property laws that is buried in the US is the leasehold/freehold distinction. It's far from absent; foreclosures on HOA assessments and condominium fees are just two examples. But there's even less justification in the UK — at least in theory, in the US HOA/COA assessments must be plowed back into infrastructure (or held in reserve for emergency repairs/enhancements to infrastructure). The real fun comes when the various fees are instead siphoned to passive investors interested primarily in other aspects, like "maintaining the character of the neighborhood"… or "improving the character of the residents"…
• Meanwhile — and, again, more visible because it's not buried as deeply — there's the problem of the most obvious undesirable characters in neighborhoods: Those involved in the arts, and perhaps especially in the infrastructure. And by that I most vehemently do not mean art galleries… or music labels… or commercial publishing dominated by passive investors and inherited wealth… Gee, that all sounds very much like the preceding sausage, doesn't it?
• The real commonality is self-declared special-snowflake status for distributors. These behemoths demonstrate that Marx (and Engels) were looking at the wrong group as bad actors: If there's a segment of economic players that inherently abuses the proletariat, it's those who control the means of distribution rather than the means of production. (Of late, except at aircraft manufacturers — but this problem arose when those in charge of distribution rose to power, and you know that's a problem when even Forbes says that "financial geniuses" shouldn't be in charge!) Shooting at the wrong target rather thoroughly undermines one's credibility, for however much/little credibility one might have with better target selection and acquisition. Then there's that pesky problem of defining the "proletariat," who qualifies as a "worker"…
• …especially in nonprofit activities.

The Weird Stuff

Time plods when you're waiting for weird stuff. I finally have enough weird stuff to fill the platter.

• Took a little trip today to a suburb, to the library and a grocery story. Out in the parking lot, some MAGAts (in uniform — white skin, red hats, election buttons, and dubious shaving jobs) were leafletting against a tax measure with a set-aside for low-income housing. The surprise came as I went into the grocery store, to the expected "oldies station" background music, and the moment I picked up the basket this piece began playing. I got a lot of weird looks from customers because I was snickering for the next four and a half minutes…
• That was amusing, but not as amusing as "smart toothbrushes" getting compromised and used in a DDOS attack. Really? WTF? The "convenience" of a toothbrush that will order (full-retail-price-from-the-manufacturer) toothbrush heads well before they're actually worn out? Or, more to the point, a "smart" pencil sharpener for those few who still use pencils? Or even a "smart" TV with voice recognition compromised into an all-hearing listening device… wait a minute…
• Sometimes the weird stuff, though, has real-world consequences — like the increasing prevalence of scientific papers withdrawn due to scientific fraud. <SARCASM> It's a good thing this doesn't apply to judicial opinions; how many precalculus-level errors can you find in establishing policy based on "B > PL," or reliance on the centuries-old views of a notoriously misogynistic judge who believed in witches to determine the scope and weight of women's rights today? (I get to ask these questions because the few readers of this blawg are unusually perceptive — and I won't be arguing anything before those two courts in the forseeable future.) </SARCASM>
• Speaking of real-world consequences, though, the mind boggles at the concept of turf wars at the International Criminal Court — not between the ICC and another court or a nation that doesn't want to comply, but at the court itself. And those consequence may let war criminals skate. So this is a rather pissed-off invocation of weirdness…

Nonconsensus Link Sausage Platter

This platter of link sausages has been thoroughly p-hacked because I'm making an ideological point.

• We just can't seem to get away from the malign influence of eighteenth-century English privilege as expressed in not just the common law, but in particular aspects of it. Despite the US having the First Amendment — which, for all of its problems, seems superior to the conceivable alternatives, and certainly to those actually implemented anywhere — the English system still acts to suppress speech… even from Americans that would be allowable, and even encouraged, Over Here (notwithstanding ex post amelioration of adverse foreign judgments concerning that very type of speech).

  Even former colonies overtly hostile to England are in on it. The upper classes and ultra-nouveau-rich are being quite effective at maintaining parts of the colonial systems that benefit them. What that implies about how much they really have separated themselves from the colonial system is rather disturbing.

• Then there's the eternal question faced by dissenters within a government: How many wrongs make it right? More to the point, how many of those convinced that the wrongs they are engaging in create an on-balance right are prepared to pay the price… especially when that price rises to the level of lives, fortunes, and sacred honor? (Consideration of the current unpleasantness in Gaza in this context is for another time and forum.)
• Not this (dysfunctional) forum, however. With all due respect to Mr Wolfe, he has missed the forest of "who has a credible professional platform concerning interpreting not just the Constitution, but all law?" for the trees of "who should sit on this particular court?" This dataset bias problem is restriction of the pool of future Supreme Court justices, and most other judges, by not later than the third undergraduate year… when, prior to the 26th Amendment, they weren't even eligible to vote. This is a restriction in practice and effect through the law-school admission process: The vast majority of judges (and all potential Supreme Court justices nominated since the Depression-era "switch in time that by effect, if not necessarily by intent, changed a fundamental assumption in Supreme Court litigation) went straight from their undergraduate educations to law school — and law-school admission decisions (and financial-aid decisions), especially since draft deferment to keep away from Vietnam became a "thing," very mechanically sort opportunities on undergraduate GPA as of the fall-of-the-senior-year application period. Even the NFL does a better job of not relying solely upon seventeen-year-old five-star recruits to college teams for its future on-field leaders than does the law.
• All of the above feed into the impulse to make all decisions seem "objective," often through reasoning based on purported algorithms. There's a fundamental problem with doing so: Distorted datasets. Consider the coffee-shop design example in that article in the context of who is being excluded — by design — from the dataset upon which the algoritm operates. Obviously, non-coffee-drinkers (or, at least, those who don't drink tea either), and specifically non-Western-context coffee drinkers. There are also economic, health, and temporal biases in play — not just the excrutiatingly obvious "poverty line," but "wheelchair and other limited-mobility access" and "productive remote worker in another time zone" subpopulations that don't get into the dataset even as outliers.

  Why does this matter right now? Dewey Defeats Truman points the way — and so does my mail. Prerestriction of membership in datasets on the basis of presumed correlations, epitomized by my inability for four decades to get the various Heffalump fundraisers to remove me from their mailing lists as a "probable donor" because I was a commissioned officer, results in gathering data that will reinforce those very presumed correlations. (They obviously don't read this blawg, which is rather the point.) That's especially so when there's an unconsidered and intentional barrier to the data: I refuse to participate in "polling" because I not only value the secret ballot, but despise any candidate who will change his/her/their (fundamentally unreliable) campaign rhetoric to appeal to me Because Numbers and not Because Persuasion.

  It's not just for politics, either. Misuse of probabilistic analysis of flawed datasets influences what music reaches me without significant, well-above-"budget" effort, what art I might purchase (or even see, since museums follow a similar path), and — returning to the other end of this sausage — espresso versus other means of brewing coffee. Intentionally, and even accidentally, excluding outliers from the dataset means not just that the outliers won't be served, but that the "analysts" will not consider them. (Go ahead: Find a romantic ballad or personal-relationship revenge song fitting any "data-driven" hit-making model on one of the top few albums of all time.)

Poisoned Blood Sausages

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

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

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

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

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

  Soylent Pulp is authors!

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

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

Infamous Link Sausage Platter

There are two aspects of this calendar date that continue to live in infamy: Korematsu and Hirabayashi. Well, three: Manzanar. Well, four: Executive Order 9066, and an almost fanatical devotion to genteel bigotry. I'm just not going to try to explain how this kind of neglected history makes the current brouhaha over who, and how, and when people can be selectively outraged by atrocities in the Levant not just possible, but probably inevitable (if only because it would probably be book-length and still be nowhere near complete).

It's almost always a mistake to conflate "acts and opinions of political leadership however selected" with "acts and opinions uniform among an entire population that is 'subordinate' to that leadership." In the end, that's exactly the point of "Never Again" and "Never Forget."

• Of late, self-regulation of judges has been somewhat in the news, even at the state level. These problems are both inevitable and avoidable. One need not even note the overt conflicts of interest (which are also inevitable when we foolishly-but-avoidably elect judges… or prosecutors and chief law-enforcement officials). In virtually every state, the entire legal disciplinary system is under the supervision of the state's highest court, which builds in even more blind spots than a military whose discipline system runs through and is dominated by the Academies (that still have Certain Statues at their entrances)… but is still subject to dedicated civilian control, unlike the legal profession.

  All of this also underpins the organized bar's inability to recognize that its prior ethical requirement of "zealous advocacy" is self-defeating when the entire job of lawyers is to assist the clients in resolving (or better yet preventing) disputes short of bloodshed, short of resort to that military. Sometimes — and it's utterly disfavored — one must tell one's client that there's little or no justification for further pursuit of the client's interest in the legal system, in court or otherwise. We don't actually teach that, and we bloody well don't reward that in practice. Sometimes the client is actually liable (leaving "criminally guilty" for another time), or deluded (or worse); we're seeing that play out in Manhattan right now concerning the Orange One, and that's far from the clearest or most prominent example.

• Then there's the slightly-less-inflammatory context of "intellectual property rights," which is an incredibly misleading misnomer. Some of the most-important (and most-annoying) rights often lumped in with, or at least treated as equivalent to, "intellectual property" are not "property" at all, like the right of attribution — a right much clearer in Europe, but that the US assured everyone was embedded in US law (just not the Copyright Act) when it joined the Berne Convention 35 years ago. The problem is not with IP rights per se — and copyright is merely an example, things are just as distorted in patent law and elsewhere — but with the monomaniacal quasireligious obsession with the economic activity of transferees and distributors, especially when misstated, misrepresented (that's not just a whisper of "Copyright Clearance Center" you're hearing in the background), and/or misused to actually suppress originality. Presuming that originality has an objective basis is the least of the problems… except if it's referring to "the original of a bank statement."
• Gee, it almost sounds like the legal system has a "blind spot" regarding "creativity." Almost as if the relentless demand — whether one is in a common-law or civil-law system — to prove that one is right by demonstrating that someone else has said the same thing before, even if only in an out-of-context soundbite, limits perspectives. Almost as if scientific ignorance and blindness on the Supreme Court, even when resolving an overtly scientific dispute (and notice that I didn't even have to resort to the abortion/viability/beginning of life issue?), are perhaps inevitable when the last time that any Justice was in a lab was an introductory general-education class as an undergrad. The last Supreme Court justice we've had with a STEM degree of any kind graduated with a math degree — not a laboratory-science degree — in 1929, and wrote the decision that gave us rigid trimesters. So I guess I wasn't so successful in avoiding the abortion controversy here…

  Not fit for purpose. In large part I blame decades of overemphasis on undergraduate grade-point averages at the top law schools that feed into the Supreme Court, and the judiciary as a whole. Laboratory science programs who send their graduates into law do so from a cohort whose GPA is half a point (out of four, in the US system) below that of the polisci/econ/literature/philosophy core, if only (albeit not only) because the grading systems are discontinuous. This makes those with creative, rigorous backgrounds in the sciences largely noncompetitive for admission to the "feeder schools."

  Any parallels to the blind spots in the US officer corps in Vietnam and since are, well, bloody obvious — things like a paramilitary structured like Napoleonic despotism having predictable failures of command responsibility and authority arising from that very structure. Hint to the "naval services": The median middie or seaman recruit today is better educated than the median admiral of 1807, so treating that seaman as if his/her/their brain is a piece of deck planking is not going to work.

• That's less infamous, though, than theocratic bullshit often excused by self-deception. But pointing out that self-deception and bad reasoning leads to further self-deception and bad reasoning is just not very popular. Or populist. Or electable.

So maybe "infamy" tends to arise from ignorance and tunnel vision. Like that's a surprise.