Go Badgers!

Badgers in the UK are demonstrating their commitment to public service by tearing up golf courses that — unlike parks and recreational areas accessible to the great unwashed — are being allowed to water their greens during the worst drought in England in a century. Just don't tell Bill Murray or he might get ideas.

• It was stolen from Count Binface! Send Lindell! Send Eastman! The Clacton electorate needs all the helplaughs it can get! (And yes, something similar could happen Over Here… but without the formally acknowledged gerrymandering and even rotten boroughs.)

  I suppose it could happen regarding election of a more corrupt, dumber, more assholish candidate. Hmm, let me think, are there any examples Over Here?

• It's not like anyone Over Here has ever misused government agencies against their political opponents. Well, not since the Sixties, anyway. No, we let the private sector do it and the government just buys the data. That's better, right?
• Meanwhile, the Ninth Circuit is howling at the moon. Again. In a "parody versus trademark tarnishment" decision. Again. Involving Jack Daniels and dog chew toys. Again. And, worse yet, on remand from the Supreme Court…

  While not trying to pretend this is necessarily easy, I find it distressingly amusing that in parody of trademark the Ninth Circuit has a better sense of humor than the Supreme Court, as apparent comparing the Supreme Court's… effort with the recent remand, while it's exactly the opposite (albeit not on remand) for "parody versus copyright infringement," comparing "big hairy women" to not-quite-telegenic judges or anything else in the Geisel oeuvre. And all the while, they're missing the real point on "parody versus satire," but that would require understanding literary history and not gun-control-effort history so it's clearly outside of judicial awareness.

  I'm really not sure what has happened to Jack Daniels in the last decade and a half. Once upon a time, that company (or at least its lawyer!) had a sense of humor and respect for First Amendment rights that overlap with commercial advantage regarding resemblance to the packaging of its (43% poo!) products. No more, it seems; one has to wonder if the graphic artist who created the most-recent version somehow got into senior management (graphic artists, as a group, don't handle parody/satire regarding their own works very gracefully). Or, perhaps, the board was just partaking of too many free in-house samples when they approved this lawsuit. This sort of nonsense, however — the overblown response, not the parody/satire — makes me want to buy some Bad Spaniels merch.

Hawley Smoot!

There's only one Canadian product that merits a punitive tariff: Wildfire smoke. But then, I'd say the same thing about coal-fired electrical generators, the Tacoma Aroma, and other negative externalities with unclear cost factors. Whether that should be applied directly to real-estate developers is… complicated.

• Speaking of negative externalities, we just had a six-weeks-long event full of them: The Men's World Cup. (And for anyone who says "men is the default, we have to separately designate women as the inherently less-athletic product," I suggest competing with Abby Wambach for a header in the penalty area.) Whether considering the perfidy of agents or of dubious fanbases — not to mention dubious individual fans with little understanding of the game (especially when their efforts are utterly meaningless) — this quadrennial event always ends up fighting mythology. In two years in/around Los Angeles, it'll be same process/different flavor…
• I've not seen Nolan's The Odyssey, if only because it's not showing in an appropriate venue: My living room. I've beaten the dead horse of miserable cinema experiences well past the glue bottle, so I'll leave that there and just point out that for those of us who wear thick glasses, 70mm widescreen and IMAX are actually less immersive than our TVs. The more-amusing side battle is Mu5k's "promise" to create a "historically-accurate proprietary-LLM-engine-generated version of his own"; one wonders whether it will include the rampant disease, festering post-battle wounds, and… well… adult content. Perhaps more to the point, one wonders if Grok can/will refrain from the Lara Crofting of the female characters, especially Helen and Athena but also Arete, Calypso, Cassandra, Circe, Eurycleia, Melantho, Nausicaa (not this one), and last alphabetically but not in importance Penelope. A "historically accurate" adaptation of Homer — one, the other, together — will have to be toned down to get a "hard R" rating, and that would put it out of reach of the adolescent boys forming so much of Mu5k's fanbase (at least until it comes out on a streaming platform with lots of ads for worthless-at-best crap).
• Meanwhile, Major Major Major has been busy "suggesting" that "older" military personnel have low testosterone (projecting much?), which rather begs the question of what qualities are normally appropriate in "older" military members — that is, more senior, whether enlisted or commissioned. And frankly, I'd much rather any military surgeon treating me after an honorable wound in battle didn't have any steroid-induced shakiness in fine motor control.

  On the Malibar Front (or at least nearer to it than headlines make it seem), journalists are beginning to recognize that among Persian rulers, it's not turtles but monsters all the way down, back to not later than the Sasanids. But then, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia…

• I've been one of the literati since I was writing my age in single digits (well, at latest single hexadecimal digits). I've never been one of the hot literati, though, and there's no chance that I'm about to start.

Comments on the final (snort!) approval of the Bartz/Anthropic lawsuit are forthcoming. Short preview: It's not nearly as "final" as the words "final approval" imply, and nobody should count on payments being made Real Soon Now.

Viking Row Link Sausage Platter

Well, FIFA has once again moved ahead in the battle to be recognized as the most-corrupt sporting organization. The irony here is that FIFA set itself up to fail, both with its "rules" regarding appeals (note: for all practical purposes, there are none… in particular, there are none regarding non-sporting-origin pressure tactics by oligarchical assholes) and the "rules" regarding the VAR review that led to the problem in the first place ("zero tolerance" and "death-penalty-equivalent only" systems just don't work to actually control behavior — ask any third-grade teacher). I'm sure the IOC will make this competitive in the next two years, but I'm afraid that just trying harder isn't going to help the NCAA.

• Somewhat more mundanely and more importantly, the illusion of privacy on the 'net appears to be getting more attention, if not more actual effective control. (Which still beats intimidation by DHS consistent with its internal culture.) Meanwhile, even the "technologically challenged" Supreme Court seems to be waking up a little.

  The thread connecting all of these incidents is simple to state in the abstract and horrendously complicated to confront in any practical sense: Lawyers' (and politicians') ignorance of both the actual methodology used and its means of (and potential for) abuse by nonofficial actors. It's all well and good to establish a prohibition on "the gummint" establishing policies and procedures to invade privacy. When "the gummint" — indirectly, via third-party privacy invasions epitomized by the location-data items in the preceding paragraph, or directly, via wink-wink-nudge-nudge "unauthorized exceeding of authority" by officials as in the last one — that's not sufficient when everything about how privacy is at issue is masked. At the moment, the most-obvious example of this is the underlying rationale for Google's "analytics": The purported benefit to advertisers (not incidentally enabling them to charge excessive rents). Leaving aside whether that benefit is to society as a whole for another time, it's a castle largely built on sand that is most emphatically not linearly scaleable: The relationship between overall, fully-extended costs per transaction achieved, commercial or otherwise, and the failure/success rate of communications seeking those transactions. Worse, the sand is being undermined to make more memory chips for enhanced-Eliza systems calling themselves "AI" without displaying the fundamental characteristic of true intelligence: Judgment.

• And now, ignorance on display. A purportedly esteemed commentator Over There inadvertently exposes his utter ignorance of preparing for contingencies. Perhaps this statement epitomizes the ignorance of someone who proudly proclaims that he was a member of Blair's strategic-review commission:

  When I served as a lay member of Tony Blair’s strategy defence review in 1998, we were bombarded with unquantified abstractions. We were told not to query or quantify concepts such as menace, aggression, force or “nuclear threat”. As for the last, it was said to be “like the Virgin birth”, axiomatic to the concept of deterrence. Today’s case for spending £63bn on renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent must be close to slight. Yet it receives no peep of debate.

  What part of "You have no f*cking clue how long it takes to establish, or reestablish, a discrete contingency-response program, do you?" did you not understand? Leaving aside the amount of time it takes to actually acquire the tools, there's a serious issue with training personnel — and, more to the point, their supervisors, up to three or four levels above the workers. Elsewhere in that ignorant screed, there's an implicit claim that the UK will have three years' accurate, clear notice of immediately-impending military action by Russia against the UK… which, even if true, begs the question of how long it would take the UK to build a full system to respond. Not just buy the guns off the street — recruit, train, promote, support, and deploy counterforce.

  There's quite a bit to be said for keeping things less wasteful in military, and all other contingency-based, programs. (That's not at all the same thing as "improving efficiency" — by definition, "contingency preparation" is not and cannot be "efficient.") It's always easy to pick on obvious, easily-defined-and-denigrated programs like "independent nuclear deterrent" and extend that reasoning to all else. The same for "hurricane preparedness" and "vaccine/antibiotic stockpile" and… well, I won't go on. The real point is that "the hardware" is the easy part of any contingency-response system — and even the hardware is almost always specialized and not fit for any other purpose. Conservatively (and historically), it takes ten to twelve years to establish a self-sustaining discrete contingency-response system where there is none, whether it's a new creation or complete reactivation after dismantling a prior program. That's due primarily to human factors, not hardware issues easily waved away with a finance-industry-provided magic wand… presuming that the hardware being specified and purchased (and usually not maintained because that's even more expensive!) is actually fit for purpose. Particular to this issue, do I hear any echoes of "How long did it take the UK to bring the obsolete-even-then Typhoon Eurofighter into operational readiness?" anywhere? Buehler? Buehler?

  Absolutely there must be a guns-versus-butter debate, and no partisan for any aspect is going to get everything desired. "Lack of immediate threat means ignore long-term threat because we can deal with it later if it's ever necessary," though, is not a valid part of that debate… as demonstrated by global warming, etc. And that's before considering the difficulty of changing resource allocation later, both politically and practicably.

• CNN demonstrates that arguing against someone's high statements of principle justifying a rebellion — specifically, the preamble of the Declaration of Independence — is seldom very persuasive and merely distracts from actually confronting the grievances — the rationale — behind those high principles. But I probably shouldn't be surprised: Civilians seldom learn how to run a checklist…
• Odious art, and "labor relations" in the arts, and educational directives, and even wealth all have their places. Preferably well away from me, as I can make few assurances about minimizing the collateral damage if they get too close.

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.

March Madness

…it's a break from Everyday Madness in DC, where right now the #1 seed is in trouble against #16. But March Madness is supposed to be about entertainment, thus this platter's selections.¹

• Exploitations of copyrighted materials — and the right to make derivatives works from existing copyrighted works, depending on the (very difficult and not amenable to predictions embedded in statutes) directness of derivation — are definitely in the news. The tide seems to be shifting against generative-language-model-system claims of fair use. This has ranged from government climbdowns to appellate skepticism (at oral argument at least), perhaps best epitomized by attempts to reverse-engineer writing styles and then monetize that without the originators' permission (but using their marks in commerce).

  The fundamental problem — just like everywhere else in "copyright law" — is that far, far too much argument neglects the distinction between "expression" and "factual content." Consider an LLM ingestion of the following passage:

  The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!
  Down the hill, down the hill, thousands of Russians,
  Thousands of horsemen, drew to the valley — and stay’d;
  For Scarlett and Scarlett’s three hundred were riding by
  When the points of the Russian lances arose in the sky;
  And he call’d, “Left wheel into line!” and they wheel’d and obey’d.
  Then he look’d at the host that had halted he knew not why,
  And he turn’d half round, and he bade his trumpeter sound
  To the charge, and he rode on ahead, as he waved his blade
  To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die —
  “Follow,” and up the hill, up the hill, up the hill,
  Follow’d the Heavy Brigade.²

  Using this to train an LLM that the Heavy Brigade was commanded by Scarlett, consisted of approximately 300 cavalrymen, and charged thousands of Russian soldiers after wheeling left into a line upon a trumpeter's (probably off-key!) sound — without regard to the credibility of the source, of alternate purposes, of the Agincourt Problem³ — would be fair use, because even if inaccurate that's not expression, but fact. "To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die," however, is not only analytic — it's probably not a nonobvious-enough insight to be more than mere fact — but expressive. And another generative-LLM-system response that tries to echo that is echoing expression, not fact, and thus not nearly so clear a "fair use" as LLM proponents would have us believe.

• In a related area of concern, who has the copyright in generative-LLM-system outputs? Is it the system itself? The US Copyright Office doesn't think so, and the Supreme Court refused to review. What this neglects, however, is the distinction between "copyright ownership" (which is property) and "authorship" (which is anything but clear).⁴ Copyright ownership can exist only in a recognized juridical person that can own things… implying that before a specific generative-LLM-system can own a copyright, it has to be aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive (or at least recognized as an entity with the right to sue and be sued). Science-fictional consideration of whether Thaler was, therefore, implicitly violating the Thirteenth Amendment by enslaving a "person" is probably just, well, madness.
• Authors probably can benefit from day jobs. Of some sort, anyway; sure, a writing-related job, or even a subject-matter related job, is an obvious potential benefit (although I draw the line at being a criminal as appropriate, intentional preparation for writing about crime). Maybe being a sporadically-employed longshoreman would be enough, though.

  The real reason for having a "day job" is exposure to Other Stuff. People write what they know or is within the bounds of their existing imaginations, and there's little argument that a workplace is a good place to encounter elements to inspire imaginations ranging from speech patterns and rhythms to personality quirks to actual, ya know, ideas.

• At the opposite (financial) end of things, consider ownership of big-business sport franchises — especially those that "sell" for billions of dollars. My biggest objection is that the NFL appears to be avoiding its own Rooney Rule among those who are charged with complying with it. My second-biggest objection is that the Raiders epitomize the problems with inherited ownership interests. Epitomize, albeit with with lots of company, even and maybe especially within its own league.

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1. Noncompliance with prevailing labor and independent contractor compensation requirements guaranteed.
2. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Heavy Brigade [at Balaclava, October 25, 1854] (1854) (typography altered to US custom)
3. In accounts of military events, there is a strong predisposition to enhance the heroism of the side favored by the chronicler via inflating (or, occasionally, neglecting) any imbalances between the forces. At Agincourt, for example, most accounts not written by French observers and, later, historians estimate the size of the French army at over 20,000… neglecting that even at close intervals, the three waves agreed upon could not have fit more than 12-13,000 soldiers onto that battlefield without forcing their flanks into the woods on either side… which would have negated the dismounted tactics of the English archers later on. A bigger-than-reality French army suited those emphasizing English valor, from Shakespeare to every public-schoolboy essay. There are similar obvious problems with Tennyson's account; for one, "thousands" of Russians deploying lances (not pikes) raises one's eyebrows given the terrain around Balaclava, especially with the implication that only the Heavy Brigade was deployed against that opposing force. A generative LLM-based system's general inability to discern these kinds of issues is another flaw that gets substantially less attention than it should.
4. The biggest hint that "authorship" is not a pure property interest is that the Copyright Office will allow a petition to correct "authorship" by any "interested party," but copyright infringement suits can be filed only by the owner of an infringed exclusive right. (It's even more confusing in most of the rest of the world where droit moral is integrated into copyright law.) And this matters — a lot — to standing to sue in US courts, which is founded largely on one of two things: Injury to a property right or violation of a statutory right for which explicit right to sue has been granted. (That I believe this a too-stringent conception doesn't change the law as it exists; neither does techbro belief that copyright is an inconvenient barrier to their weltanschauung.) The irony that a more-penetrating linguistic analysis would tend to expose this morass when we're talking about something trained via linguistic constructs — even when purportedly trained on visual depictions — is for another time.

The Usual Suspect

…who will not be charged with anything, however deserving.

• In a frustrating condescension that should surprise precisely no one, the IOC followed in the footsteps of Avery Brundage. Who was, after all, the IOC's dictator and president for life designated leader in 1972. It's not that the incidents are all that comparable, it's that an organization that establishes that competition will be by national teams had bloody well better expect that the real world of international conflict is going to find its way into the Games. And as usual, fear of upsetting sponsors is looming in the background — because even if the Duchy of Muscovy isn't at these games, (a) there's talk of reinstating it for the LA summer games in 2028, (b) the IOC really wants to reopen the sponsorship money, and (c) oligarchs gonna oligarch (and I don't just mean the Russian ones; the history of how one achieves a position of power in the Olympic movement isn't the epitome of advancement on merit).

  <SARCASM> Bravo! Nothing demonstrates the unifying power of athletic competition like refusing a tasteful, nonintrusive personal memorial to slain athletes, some of whom were acquaintances of the athlete you disqualified! </SARCASM>

• Well, it looks like one of the major communication channels for hackers, cyberterrorists, and sleazebuckets even more dubious than politicians is going to require age verification in March. What could possibly go wrong?

  I suppose it could be worse than imposing an "age-verification" requirement on precisely the audience most likely to find ways around it (and then use that very service to publicize the method). Like, say, a space-oriented firm purchasing an "AI" firm (well, not really, it's an illusory transaction all under the same financial umbrella). Just a moment. Just a moment. I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure within 72 hours. Even I will be concerned if the next major lift vehicle is the Discovery series, or if the next model from Tesla is the Daisy.

• Tasty Spanish ham has a disquieting history, similar to roasted chicken in Iberia (which was frequently stuffed with bacon, making it unacceptable to The Usual Undesireables). At least the Spanish prime minister is — somewhat quietly, but still pointedly — standing up against antiimmigrant fervor.

  At least Francisco Franco is still dead.

• It's not much of a surprise that young writers (as a group) lean slightly left; their own experiences, and those that they're seeing around them, are more likely to concern economic disadvantage. Like, say, working two jobs — the obvious downside of relying on "market forces" as the sole support for those in the arts (which almost by definition must include a lot of individual-instance failures).

87.1

This your host Max Greene. My producer Sara insists that I finish up tonight's requests before heading over to our weekly broadcast at 520 on your AM dial, because not everything is digital. We'll still restream everything starting at 1:00am tomorrow in all the usual places.

	We'll start out with the romance of competition, from Victoria to, it says here on the card, my lovely friend Joe. Do I hear wedding bells in the background? No? Well, we can always hope.
	Here's one from Mette to Stevie, Donnie, and the rest of the Amateur-Hour Boys' Club, with a note to "Seeya at Have af sten, boys!"
	From our affiliate in Minneapolis, this one's for Kristi from Rebecca, dedicated "May you rot in hell." Sounds like a pretty bad breakup to me — that relationship has gone to the dogs.
	I'm not sure I understand this one. James sends this classic to George, with a note "don't get caught next time."
	This one's just weird, the same song requested by Elon for Ashley and by Ashley for Elon! I can't read those dedications on the air, though, any more than George Carlin could, which is sort of weird for a song without words. Weird is more for our next few hours.

That's all we have time for tonight, folks. See you on the other side after Sara plays these important messages.

Ghost Peppers and Classic Rock

This platter gets overspiced rather rapidly, I'm afraid. I'm just trying to cover the faint odor of rot from the less-than-wholesome ingredients.

• The least-spicy sausages on this platter are the IP-flavored ones. These days, IP-flavored almost certainly involves something calling itself "artificial intelligence", especially when hoist by its (their?) own petard. Of course, one need not rely on advanced technology to find IP perfidy — mere humans can breathe deception, too.
• Senator Turtle thinks the present somewhat resembles the past, specifically the 1930s? No, really?

  Leaving aside that he's almost got first-hand memories of the 1930s,¹ and the obvious and parallel counterproductive tariff bullshit, and the overobvious aspirations to become Reichskanzler just down the street from him — not to mention familiarly-named right wingers in the news in Italy — consider "lifestyle" problems all too familiar to the 1930s (as invoked without specific identification in the musical seasoning of this sausage). One might also consider, on a similar basis that also ignored intertwined side issues,² whether "lifestyle" problems like this one are more than just "lifestyle" problems.

  I suppose I'm expected to be happy that Senator Turtle showed up to the party, however late he is. Unfortunately, he showed up while the paid-off-the-books-below-minimum-wage janitorial gig workers were cleaning up afterward. So, no, I'm not happy. You shouldn't be, either — not even with that gold-plated kazoo you snatched from the table on your way out.

• At least it wasn't a gavel being snatched from the table by rude guests. The fundamental contradiction of completely distrusting the ICC's ability or intent to engage in actual, careful consideration of facts as part of the rule of law, especially when compared to internal dissembling amongst and concerning a plethora of bad actors (and by that I mean the target institutions, not the individual grantees) and/or treating "appalled by atrocities in the Levant, regardless of who commits them" as necessarily meaning "antisemitic," appears beyond the understanding of anyone involved. Which should surprise precisely no one.

  The usual aphorism has things precisely backward: Sure, he's our bastard, but he's still a bastard (and therefore untrustworthy). Delving into that is the ICC's role — even, and perhaps especially, when it's inconsistent with immediate interests.

• Of course, the ICC seldom sticks its nose into mere civil rights when violations are short of death. Whitesheetingwashing that is a domestic issue. (Foreign source chosen with malice aforethought.)
• And then there are apologists who get things partway right (and then implicitly expect praise for their vision and forthrightness). The fundamental problem with both that opinion piece and attacks on the "university system" is that they are searching for "the soul" and "the purpose" in the singular. The entire point of bringing scholarly development, and education, and research (distinct from mere "publication"), and public service together into a university is that there isn't a singular soul, a singular means of advancing civilization — that not all problems are nails to be pounded into well-seasoned wood produced off-campus by less-prestigious craftspeople, meaning in turn that the toolbox needs to be smarter than a box of hammers. Professors Russell and Patterson do not demonstrate any familiarity whatsoever with laboratory- or field-based research in their piece, nor with the interface and implications of with "social and political issues" at the core of their concerns; engineering, healthcare, etc. are right out. This tunnel vision disserves both their rhetoric and their conclusion and reminds me very much of what happened last Friday in St. James's Library. Then, as they're both law professors, an underinclusive understanding of "research" is probably to be expected.

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1. Presuming that there's no dementia involved… which, because I've had no direct observation relevant to that, is only an assumption. "Good faith," "grasp of reality," and "actual intelligence as distinct from cleverness" are each another issue entirely.
2. Cf. my late client (and friend) Mr Ellison's contribution to a six-decade-old TV series, and the implications of attempting to apply "alternate history" models in reverse. Not to mention the costs involved no matter what. <SARCASM> But then, externalizing costs is a good thing, right? It supports higher stock prices, and thus higher executive salaries and bonuses! </SARCASM>

Qui Prodest ab Arte?

I'm afraid it's an ever-present and seldom-answered question.

• In a somewhat positive squashing of some leeches, the Copyright Office has made one aspect of streaming-music royalties less egregious. The real problem here is the contracting practices — not to mention the administrative nightmare — that resulted in the "termination"/revocation morass in the first place: "Life of the copyright" is an inappropriate duration for a contract.
• At least the streaming services were making some payments to some stated rightsholders, though — unlike these guys and contrary to the efforts of these guys. Eligibility for the DMCA safe harbor depends upon having a "reasonably implemented" policy for dealing with repeat infringers. That is, part of your First Amendment rent is internalizing externalities, notwithstanding adverse effects on short-term profitability (aside: that lawsuit has been going on for a decade, and the service provider has lost at every turn…).
• And at least streaming (and pirated!) content doesn't need to get a visa — a problem/concept with which I have profound disagreements, as particularly in music the "protect local performers" impulse exposes the failure of supporting the arts both commercially and governmentally while simultaneously imposing localist near-bigotry as a "solution." Not cool. The sole criterion for artists crossing borders should be "is the art worth it?" but the politics are, well, snarled at best.
• The problem of "the original" in the arts, and in museums, is a two headed coin. On one side, there's the improper and unjust denigration of accurate reproductions as appropriate for public display when the public isn't allowed to handle the piece in the first place. The other side of the coin is what to do about damage to "the original," especially when it was politically motivated and intentional; even more to the point than "what to do" is "who decides." The object-worship forming the body of the coin deserves more attention than it gets.
• But the real coin trick in the arts is effort by the Right Kind of People to avoid paying the creators. Stop kidding yourselves, moguls and auteurists: You wouldn't be able to charge hefty admission fees to your museums, nor celebrate your creative curatorship as primary above all other aspects of your art, without having screenplaysart to display in the first place.
• So both England and the US are looking for new men's national team coaches ("managers") after allowing incumbents to remain in place for too long. There won't be many questions raised about either the process or the people involved in doing the hiring in the first place or approving extensions later on, though; and that's the real problem. The parallels to H'wood mogul treatment of screenwriters are a bit too obvious, aren't they? Especially when trying to determine who profits?
• I have nothing much to say about the shooting at the RNC this past weekend. That there were obvious security system failures (details to be confirmed) fails to engage with the inherent dangers of pro-gun culture, the impossibility of perfect security, and the dangers/price of trying for perfect security. Nonetheless, I disapprove of the impulse to kill one's political opponents (or even political allies with whom one has differences, or ulterior motives, or whatever) as much as I disapprove of sycophants treating misconduct as inherently outside the rule of law. The law of unintended consequences always prevails in the end… right, Mrs Iselin? How about a nice game of solitaire?

The 2023 Turkey Awards

An annual tradition for over a decade! This is my list of ridiculous people from 2023 (so far). Pass me one of those rolls (and cue up the media player), please:

• The Greasy Gravy Award for oily publicity that makes the main dish inedible goes to literary prize committees and their unrelated-to-art-or-reality eligibility criterea. Really, guys: A substantial proportion of the greatest literary works of all time is speculative fiction, but you'll only talk about speculative fiction when you remove all (or almost all) of the speculative elements — those elements beyond your mundane daily existence and understanding — which really, really just misses the point of "reading," doesn't it? But then, I've always been of the Devil's party. Dubious bonus: I could write the same damned thing six weeks from now (in 2024) and it would remain just as oily, just as inedible (and probably have extra lumps!).
• The Red-Tide Oyster Stuffing Award for carelessly poisoning an otherwise tasty dish goes to the VA. Keep in mind that this would largely be meaningless if we had even the intentionally-crippled "national health" system of the UK, because then the entire VA system would be superfluous. One wonders how much health care could be provided with just the profit margins of for-profit insurers… and the administrative costs of the VA and its eligibility apparatus…
• The Broken Wishbone Award for shattering dreams goes to Suella Braverman and her still-the-government's-priorities-after-rejection immigration policies (not to mention her personal immigration priorities, and BTW both of her parents were immigrants, so let's reexamine their arrivals and see if her father was an undocumented minor who later dodged the draft like someone else's grandfather). But for the cost of the truly Tory viewpoint, ask the New Model Army — the post-punk one. And ponder who profits from imposing new, harsh immigration restrictions…
• The Golden Gristle Award for assertions far too difficult to digest (and usually stuck in one's teeth) goes to the House Heffalumps, and the new Speaker in particular, for their implicit and explicit assertions that they're there to govern. If they were there to govern, they'd actually follow the Constitution on how to overturn previous spending bills: They'd get a majority in support of a new statute that alters the prior substantive statute or other provision (and, BTW, there's no power to change their own branch of government's policy through mere appropriations roadblocks stated in the Constitution — the limited duration of appropriations is that power, and if we're going to play enumerated-powers games we're gonna play all of them), introduce that bill in the House, then get the President to sign it. But because actually like, reading seems beyond their capabilities — or at least too far down their priority list — here's a half-century-old remedial video telling them how to do it. Bonus: It's accurate and reflects having read the Constitution.

  Communication, consideration, persuasion and compromise. It's what's for governance in a representative democracy. But not, apparently, for modern partisan politics no matter what manner of formal structure it operates in. Yes, there are vanishingly rare instances of moral imperatives in government and governance that cannot be ignored, but they don't arise every day unless one is a theocrat.

• The Conspicuous Consumption Cranberry Relish Award for the most-outrageous example thereof goes to football club owners everywhere, who've successfully managed to avoid, say, paying for free basic vaccinations for everyone in Africa and South America with a few percent of the summer 2023 transfer-fee total — and thereby increasing their potential paying audiences. We'll just tastefully ignore the sour taste of always referring to the buying and selling of "footballers" and not their contract rights, with dubious echoes of slave-trading. <SARCASM> One wonders if some overhyped bands might be under a transfer embargo, thus explaining their lack of a similarly-hyped (and competent) lead guitarist. Or might "fits with the team's actual needs" be a seldom-stated consideration? Is the bassist the equivalent of a defensive midfielder? Since there's a Spinal Tap sequel on the way, I won't ask about the drummer… </SARCASM>
• The Crabapple Pie Award for marketing something sour as something sweet goes to Sam Altman and the Board (former and present) of OpenAI for continuing to disingenuously create a black-box Enhanced Eliza that, in reliance on processing power many orders of magnitude greater than the original (not surprising as it's from the 1960s, and your cellphone has at least eight orders of magnitude greater processing power than did the entire NASA computer complex in 1966), hides that its baseline database operates just like any von Neumann processor does: It makes a copy to analyze. (That's what "registers" are, even when they're abstracted as "pointers" in a high-level language.)

  The same goes for all of the other AI advocates, of course; but they haven't made themselves quite as ridiculous. Not quite. Not yet. Give them time…

• The Wilted Salad Award for the one part of the meal that's supposed to be "good for you," but is instead rather past its sell-by date, goes to the Authenticity Police everywhere, in every form of the arts. The failure to distinguish between views presented (explicitly or implicitly or even just with 20/200 hindsight) and the pre-speech background of the speaker, or even less the shadow-on-the-wall actor presenting the speaker, is just… well… preliterate. There is a distinction between Al Jolson physically acting as a caricature of a black man seen through overprivileged white eyes and Ursula K. Le Guin writing about a black man despite being a white child of academic privilege — and those Authenticity Police who can't see that the distinction exists, or matters, should have their police powers revoked (not their right to merely advocate for more representation; only their right to, well, arrest those who don't meet their self-proclaimed exclusionary criterea that usually just happen to be to their own economic advantage).
• The Brussels Sprout Award for stinky, slimy, overcooked, gentrified little cabbages goes to the Orange One (you knew he was going to appear in this meal — it was just a question of which dish). We'll leave the purely civil little cabbages — the ones with the slugs under the leaves and the "f"-word that just isn't used in Polite Society (five letters is too many) — for tomorrow's leftovers. Which nobody will eat because they won't fit in a sandwich very well.
• The Dried-Out Breastmeat Award for overcooking the books goes to convicted felon Samuel Bankman-Fried. I mean, really: Just because it's "not really money" doesn't mean you get to treat it all as yours. Especially not when it's a proxy instrument paid for by "it really is money."
• The Rancid Drumstick Award for something that should be edible, but isn't, goes to Senator Tommy Teletubbyville (T-CSA) for deciding that his personal morals are so offended by a political-appointee-established Pentagon policy, primarily relating to people who don't share his religious/theocratic basis, that he's going to take it out on career officers who have nothing to do with establishing that policy and very, very little to do with implementing it. Because, like any playground bully, he can — despite the opposition of his own party.
• The GMO Tofurkey Roast Award for a main-dish item that's supposed to be more wholesome, nutritious, and/or ethical, but merely hides something that's perhaps worse under that veneer of virtue, goes to a different Congresscritter from the former Confederacy for, well, obvious reasons. Even aside from her actual partisan loyalty being theocratic.
• The Unwanted Obligatory Guest Award for the guest at the banquet that you had to invite (but wish you didn't have to because you knew would spoil everything) goes to El0n Mu5k (ooooh, noooo, don't file a thermonuclear lawsuit against me for calling you out! Not the briar patch!). Mu5k makes that bigoted aunt or uncle or neighbor or business associate invited as a courtesy (c'mon, every family gathering has at least one) look tolerant. His leadership ability and technology savvy show in his big rocket going boom (again) and slogans over reality for his car company. Before considering labor practices.

I've now done my part for curbing obesity: After looking at that Thanksgiving spread, I bet your appetite is at least a little bit suppressed.

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleven Minutes Into the Eleventh Hour

No sausages today. At least in Western democracies, military personnel and veterans seldom get to see the laws or the sausages being made — they find it difficult, not to mention often unlawful, to stick their heads up above the bowl, even to watch (let alone object to the spicing… or the blade). This is therefore merely a snarl at a bullying theocrat — or is that theocratic bully? — who cannot be bothered to actually deal with those who oppose him. Instead, he insists on taking his power out on those who have no responsibility whatsoever for the policies he opposes.

Policies put in place by the electoral winners, who happen to Not Be His Type, because they don't believe in the Lost Cause or any variation thereon. Neither are they theocrats inclined to overtly discriminate against every person who doesn't share their particular sectarian bent.

Policies consistent with the apparent inclination of most of the nation. Perhaps, you arrogant jerk, in the bowels of Christ you should think it possible you may be mistaken.¹

So instead of actually engaging with the policy makers, he's taking it out on those who cannot call him out on it. This particular policy preference is — in the eyes of Sen Teletubbyville (T-CSA) — so important that he cannot be bothered to do the one thing that veterans stood for, that active-duty military people stand for, that is the foundation of both this nation and every representative democracy: Listen and persuade. Instead, he's beating up Quaker kids (or at least Quakers as to him) because he doesn't like something their parents did. No, not did — they didn't force all military personnel and dependents to have abortions; they contemplated that eliminating an economic barrier might be appropriate for others.²

Of course, there's one other difference between Sen Teletubbyville and those nonpolicymakers whose promotions and appointments he's blocking: At least for the active-duty folk (an experience set he doesn't share), they're so senior that the majority have served in command positions in which a soldier/sailor/airman under their command, or a dependant, became pregnant through nonconsensual sex (up to and including "rape" in its most technical sense) or under circumstances in which carrying a pregnancy to term will directly, foreseeably impair military readiness.³ They thus have had the opportunity to learn a bit about what it's like for those personnel to not have the resources to respond to a peacetime horror.

---

1. There is no public evidence — none whatsoever — that the particular target of today's screed has any concept whatsoever of what this means, or its context, or what it was opposing. And the ironies of that demonstrate why no "football coach" should ever be elected to statewide office again, in any state: For all of the years that he made two-digit multiples of wet-behind-the-ears junior faculty, none of that rubbed off on him because he was unwilling to learn. Stick to dogcatcher next time.
2. Any resemblance between this nonsense and both the causes and the conduct of the Second Thirty Years War… will just really, really piss me off. And does.
3. So have I.

Ouruboros Link Sausage Platter

Because sometimes the link sausages turn around to bite their own… tails.

• First up, a comment on judicial appointments, hiding inside sporting issues. Consider for the moment the not-only-possible-but-plausible-even-though-improbable possibility for this NFL season:
  • The San Francisco 49ers get back on track and win almost all of their remaining games, specifically including their remaining game against my hometown Seachickens. So do the Philadelphia Eagles… meaning that the 49ers are the second seed in the NFC playoff bracket.
  • Dah (Chicago) Bears scrape, bite, kick, and rely almost entirely on the ghost of their recently departed all-time great middle linebacker to a 9–8 record, winning the last game on a two-point conversion with no time remaining. Unfortunately, their high-draft-pick quarterback is injured on that last play… but it was enough to get Dah Bears the seventh seed in the NFC playoff bracket on the fifth tiebreaker with the Dallas Cowboys. (Yes, there are multiple, plausible-if-somewhat-improbable, sequences of results in the rest of the regular season leading to this.)

  So in this not-impossible scenario, the starting quarterbacks would be Mr Irrelevant 2022 — Brock Purdy of the 49ers, the very last player selected in the 2022 draft, from a university not known for producing "skill position" players — and Tyson Bagent, an undrafted free agent from a Division II school in West Virginia.

  What does this have to do with "judicial selection"? Ask yourself where we get our judges, particularly appellate judges… and analyze the analogy…

• Or we could just worry about something else trivial. Like fixing the internet (which is not really about tech issues), rescuing it from decades of bad design choices — and bad attempted solutions. Most of which actually relate to "what's in it for me?" being the primary motivator for those actually making decisions… a substantial proportion of whom are entirely unknown to those either pointing out problems or charged with fixing things.
• So, Governor InSantis, "liberal" soft-on-crime policies cause mass shootings? Well, liberal policies would have led to (a) better gun control and (b) better mental-health care for an individual whose behavior had raised questions about his mental state in those who knew him. Maybe what he really means — subconsciously, that is — is that conservative soft-on-white-collar-crime policies set the conditions that encourage the feelings of helplessness that trigger mass shootings, beginning with the refusal to teach that a smaller share of a much bigger pie is more pie per serving. Naaaah — that would require far too much self-awareness of the distinction between "sloganeering" (even before it becomes bigoted dog-whistling) and "real consequences to real policies and priorities."

  So, too, does the dissembling of retailers about retail theft, followed by locking up boxer shorts as "high-theft" items instead of, say, considering how many fell off the truck and how many were, well, shorted or spoiled from low-cost overseas manufacturers. Not to mention the effect on shareholder profits of excessive executive compensation just short of actual embezzlement… not just Over Here, either. Neither are we going to analyze the disproportionate gender, class, and race structure of the executive class (because that would, itself, turn around and take a nice chunk out of the first sausage on this platter — even more Over There than Over Here).

• Which is slightly less disreputable — only slightly — than either a state governor personally attacking a journalist-immigrant who dares to engage in an actual, consistent-with-journalistic-principles inquiry regarding that governor's potential/actual conflicts of interest, right? At least InSantis (and retailer C-suites) aren't being overtly racist… On second thought, maybe resorting to dogwhistling and coded descriptors is really no less disreputable.

  Or it could just be reconsidering the status of the "Unification Church" in Japan (which won't happen over here, but should — and far from uniquely as to "commercial enterprises masquerading as religious organizations," even if one accepts that religious organizations should have tax-advantaged status because "free exercise" does not properly relate to cost-free… but "establishment" might).

Mid-Strike Link Sausage Platter

Before getting to the link sausages, consider that the H'wood strikes may be winding down. There's still a long way to go before we can get new scripts, let alone new performances, though; we're gonna be stuck with unreality TV for at least a few more months. Fortunately, it's football season so there's plenty of more-real unreality stuff to keep us befuddled. (Really, guys: They're adults. They get to make their own choices about dating, or not, or whatever. Back to your lives, citizens, nothing to see here.)

• I note that the Supremes rejected the proud white establishment Confederate-legacy state of Alabama's request for a stay in the redistricting battle (pdf; companion case same with separate order). This is typical and expected: Alabama had no legal entitlement to a stay and no valid argument that as a matter of law (as distinct from "on these facts") the three-judge panel below had so clearly erred that there would be irreparable harm to the state itself (as distinct from the persons forming its government… at present, anyway). As noted last time, the six white male Alabama congresscritters objected, apparently feeling that their seats may be in jeopardy (on the theory, I suppose, that once elected they're entitled to them — forever). The only thing that surprises me is that this guy didn't file an amicus brief supporting the motion for stay — he couldn't intervene (Georgia, not Alabama).
• Speaking of white supremacy movements, consider the white male auditor of the State of Mississippi's proposal to cut funding for non-white-male cultural studies. He's, umm, not a member of a relevant group. Or we could just declare all media not controlled through inheritance as "treasonous" when they don't agree with us (the dysfunctional NBC "family" is the one that isn't controlled through, or at least identified with, inheritance).
• So Sen Menendez (D-NJ) has been indicted on corruption charges. Again. Hint, Bob: A stash of gold bars is not "for personal use" by a government official — not even by the child of Cuban refugees. Some of your colleagues (including your same-party counterpart from the same state) think you should resign, as "innocent until proven guilty" is not the standard for "ability and right to govern." The most damning position from a fellow Congresscritter, though, is that at least one of them thinks you shouldn't resign — and this is one of those times when "evaluating based upon the identity of the source" is nowhere near an ad hominem argument.

  Corruption in national, or New Jersey, or Congressional, politics? I'm not outraged; I'm barely surprised. Some of us (but not any of the current "debatable" Heffalump candidates for the Presidency) put our butts on the line for a government not based on entitlement through divine right of kings et alia. That Menendez was chair of Foreign Relations just makes matters worse; at least he resigned from that without forcing action under the existing rules. Of course, in contemporary politics actual governance is not a very high priority…

• Or I suppose one could just set off real fireworks for a private party viewed from the deck of rented yachts (whose passengers are hiding behind as many privacy shields as they can conjure). Without regard to collateral damage, like scaring the crap out of endangered marine mammals or fire risk (and although I don't wish the years of distress upon the child, karma would result in the child going through gender reassignment — a possibility that should give pause to gender-reveal stunts, but won't).
• I'm all in favor of parents being actually involved in their kids' choices of entertainment, especially reading materials. I'm not at all in favor of other kids' parents getting involved in my kids' (or my!) choices of entertainment. Especially not at public libraries, or even school libraries. The entire point of an open-stacks library is exploration/discovery of the unknown — and if you're that worried that your kids may be "contaminated" by "icky stuff," that says a lot more about your parenting (or lack thereof) than about the icky stuff they might find. But don't impose your own incomptence on me or my kids, or demand ideological or cultural purity. (And these links? Far from the most interesting stuff — merely a sample.)

Overstuffed Link Sausages

Or maybe just bloated. These days, who can tell?

• Shockingly, "school choice" is another name for "segregated schools" — no surprise at all if you look at a picture of any conference concerning "school choice" (or paid any attention whatsoever to the leadership of the Department of Education under the… prior administration). The real problem is that "school choice" advocates don't want to pay for a system that doesn't reflect the same priorities as legacy admissions: Visiting the merits of the fathers upon the sons. Schools, of all kinds, are not (or at least should not) be about predicting successful individual assimilation of the entire school experience and its expression in achievement and life years and decades in the future… except, of course, when that's viewed as strictly competitive division of a shrinking pie of "Opportunity."

  And one wonders just how happy these "school choice" advocates are going to be with the health care provided in nursing homes in thirty years, while their own charming little darlings are too busy with Important Careers to provide any assistance themselves, and the low-paid/low-prestige/absolutely essential direct-contact healthcare positions are being filled by all of those black and brown and non-xtian — perhaps worse yet, non-evangelical xtian — kids who couldn't take advantage of "school choice." All they have to do to avoid this future is pay for real education now. Education policy — not uniquely, but most visibly — in this country is all about "Let's you and him pay for it." Then, too, not all of the "payment" is economic. And more to the point, "school choice" is about ensuring that all of the kids in the class look and act the same, regardless of how diverse the neighborhood has become since the undesireables were allowed in. (I don't think I really need a <SARCASM> tag there, do I?).

  The real problem with "school choice" programs is that they are not about educational quality or opportunity being evaluated by people who know one damned thing about how educational quality or opportunity actually work. (Sadly, I include an awful high proportion of non-academically-elite-themselves "education professionals" in there.) They are, instead, about choices of indoctrination — not education. But then, as a class traitor, I would say that, wouldn't I?

• On the other hand, sometimes those "school choice" advocates, and their allies and fellow-travellers, get exactly what they deserve. The real problem here is that gun rights and gun violence — and I'm not minimizing the issues on their own merits — have become proxies as other means of actually effecting change have become unavailable. Once upon a time, one could write to one's own legislators — local, state, or federal — and have some chance of the legislator him/her/themself actually seeing the communication, and actually responding with something other than a bloody form letter. Now, if one isn't a potential/actual campaign donor or writing on an issue/matter that is already being exploited for some advantage by that legislator, that's… not gonna happen.
• Which explains all too well why the Democratic Party is starting to fear loss of young voters. Leaving aside that the actual policies are only marginally friendly to those below the 30–54 "prime advertising demographic" for the moment, just look at the age of the leadership. If your first impulse when you need to talk to a "youngster" you haven't met before who isn't in the same room is to pick up the phone and wait for the dial tone, you've already miscommunicated! And the less said about "paying one's dues" as a prerequisite to even having a voice, the better — if only because "paying one's dues" requires the spare resources with which to pay in the first place, and that is something largely being denied to those born after "the era of big government is over" (chosen because it's a convenient marker for those now in their late 20s and facing the resumption of student loan payments — for themselves or their managers/customers/associates/doctors and nurses/lawyers/etc.).
• That also reflects the simultaneous advantages and flaws of single-cause thinking. Looking for singular fundamental differences, however broadly defined, can provide some valuable insights… that almost never extend to practicality. The obvious flaw in Mr Jung's piece is, simply, "What would 'standing up to business' in the UK in 2020 have looked like?" The less-obvious flaw is "Please explain why '2% inflation' is the appropriate target"… because there actually isn't a good rationale for it, let alone specific evidence that is not drawn from instances in which government/other central authority did not "stand up to business."

  In reality, it's not "business" that a government needs to stand up to. It's "those wealthy individuals who control business" that one needs to stand up to. No matter what the "wealth maximization" imperative for a business is, its decisions and everything else about it are still being made by individuals. This is why militaries have the concept of "command responsibility," and why we had Nuremberg trials for people who never pulled triggers themselves. Only the appropriate and proportionate consequences change (not necessarily diminish — consider the epistomologically-appropriate ultimate fate of this "rags-to-riches" story), not the evaluative rubric. Of course, the same goes for standing up to a government; which makes this all very circular indeed.

• One last thought on all of the mock-schadenfreude spewing forth from Certain Quarters regarding the US Women's National Team exit from the World Cup at an earlier stage than ever before: In almost any other context, these same commentators would be (and uniformly have been) calling for a clean sweep of top management. Out of thirty randomly-chosen opinion pieces expressing carefully-subdued glee at the "demise" of the "woke grrrls," I've seen not one word suggesting that "management" at US Soccer House needs to be changed; the highest level anyone reaches is "fire the coach." Comparison to the ire being directed at Disney by those same commentators is instructive… and rather disheartening… and entirely consistent with another "coach" who should be fired (and the snarled relationship to the first sausage on this platter bears some further consideration in itself).