Likelihood of Success

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For want of a nail

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 25, 2009

I blogged at LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® about what Sam Bayard explains masterfully as the

settlement of Jones Day‘s trademark lawsuit against real estate news site BlockShopper.com.  In the lawsuit, Jones Day alleged that BlockShopper infringed and/or diluted its trademark by using the name “Jones Day” to identify two of its associates who purchased homes in Chicago and by using anchor text in hyperlinks from each associate’s name back to their lawyer bios on Jones Day’s own website (here, here).

In my post, in Sam’s post, and in another post I linked to by blogger Ryan Gile, the main question is:  What did Jones Day accomplish?  By virtue of the bad publicity garnered by this lawsuit, as well as what appears to be a friendly rollover by a local federal judge, these associates’ bio pages at the Jones Day website are getting hit more often than could conceivably ever otherwise happen.  The settlement is essentially a face-saver for Jones Day, which must realize that on appeal it would lose the bit of leverage it got in early proceedings due to inexplicable rulings, while having outgunned the financially overwhelmed defendant website that could not afford an appeal anyway.  What was gained, we all ask?

Simple:  That rare commodity of loyalty.

It is not, as Bayard quotes Public Citizen blogger Paul Levy as saying, “in some ways, Jones Day ‘achieved a great deal.’  It sent a message to other websites that “it is not a firm to be trifled with, and that, when Jones Day ‘”asks” you to do something, you had better do it or you are going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend yourselves.'”

No.  No major law firm needs to prove that by going through what Jones Day did in this case.  That’s what they’re selling right out of the box.

What Jones Day did was keep an implied promise to its employees, Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gelt, Lex scripta, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

Good morning!

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 22, 2009

Craig Karpel:

Iran’s satellite launch earlier this month should have been a wake-up call. Instead, the West has reached over and hit the snooze button.

We’d rather think we were only dreaming.

Posted in Orient, Packing heat, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

Von Clausewitz, calculation and perception

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 16, 2009

Zenpundit over at Chicago Boyz questions the assertion by von Clausewitz that the challenge of a comprehensible military reality has almost the same effect as the acceptance of that challenge and actual engagement.  This is because the playing out of that scenario in an adversary’s strategic calculus is little different than it being played out on the battlefield, except for the slight matter of the cost in blood and gold, and of course the chance that everyone is guessing wrong about the outcome.

Mark Safranski, the author of the post (he is Zenpundit), says von Clausewitz places too much stock in not only the quality of information about strategic reality — a surprising error considering the master’s own teaching regarding the fog of war — but the quality of, well, thinking:

Cultural differences, too, when civilizations are at war, create a cognitive “fog” for commanders. Alien value systems create a “noise” that interferes with the “signal” intended by the offer of engagement by one side to the another. They will not be calculated “right” because the shared understanding of war and the valuation of objectives is much more limited. The Iran-Iraq war dragged on as a Middle-Eastern version of WWI primarily because of the differences in worldview between the leadership of Saddam Hussein’s secular, Baathist, Sunni dominated, Arab, Iraq and the radical Shiism of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary, Persian, Iran. Two countries in the center of the same Muslim civilization! How much greater is the “fog” between Washington and the hills of Pushtunistan where al Qaida’s leaders reside?

This is not to say that Clausewitz’s principle of possible engagement does not exist under conditions of opacity, it just offers far less data to work with for the commander. The “unknown unknowns” predominate.

Indeed, can’t it be fairly argued that the great Prussian really was a victim here of his own cultural limitations?  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Homo sapiens, Past is prologue, Stragety | 8 Comments »

Waiting for the end of the world

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 12, 2009

duerer-apocalypseA blog called Zero Hedge says “the world almost came to an end” last September — and we’re hearing about it just now:

LiveLeak has caught a scary moment of previously undisclosed insight by Paul Kanjorski where he reveals some facts that have not been captured by the media previously. At 2 minutes and 20 seconds in the video below, Democratic Representative Kanjorski explains how the Federal Reserve told Congress members about a “tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars.” According to Kanjorski, this electronic transfer occurred over the period of an hour or two. And it gets worse. Kanjorski paraphrases the following disclosure by Bernanke and Paulson:

On Thursday (Sept 18), at 11am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there.

Urk.  Well, I guess that did work, after all.  But all in all, it’s surprising that The End didn’t really come then, or around then, or before now, at least not in the form of a run on financial institutions, for the simple reason that a who-o-o-o-o-ole bunch of money that used to be there no longer was, or shortly would no longer… be.  As in “no longer be.” Concludes blogger Tyler Durden:

Interestingly, Kanjorski, and likely more and more Democrats, are starting to shift to the camp that more time is needed to make a correct decision this time (which may explain Geithner’s decision to postpone the “bank-rescue” announcement by one day to Tuesday), instead of rushing into another half-baked plan. Very scary stuff.

Too much leverage, folks — in a lot of ways.  Hat tip to stock market maven Jerry Coleman, my dad.

Posted in Gelt, Nuvo-Techno, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

Remember to show your work!

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 7, 2009

Item:

As far back as 2007, salmonella-laced products were shipped by a Georgia peanut company that knew the peanuts probably were tainted and sometimes after tests confirmed that contamination, inspection records show.

Federal law forbids producing or shipping foods under conditions that could make it harmful to consumers’ health.

For fifty points:  Does this report, if true, make us more skeptical of the claim that the free market leads to safer consumer outcomes?  Or does it makes us more skeptical of the claim that regulation and government leads to safer outcomes?

Do we say that consumers assume — incorrectly — that something wouldn’t even be on the market if it were dangerous, because “the government wouldn’t allow it”?

Or do we say this goes to prove we need a bigger, better FDA, because businesses are overall pretty comfortable with poisoning some percentage of their customers as long as the revenue keeps coming in?

Posted in Gelt, O Mores!, Stragety | 1 Comment »

“War and Decision”

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 4, 2009

John Hawkins reviews Douglas Feith’s War and Decision at Right Wing News .  Two of my favorite bullet points:

  • The CIA comes across as frighteningly, almost unbelievably incompetent and petty, even though they often didn’t inform the people relying on their advice of how little they really had to base their opinions on.
  • The worst criticism, however, was reserved for the State Department in general and Colin Powell, in particular. In Feith’s view, Powell was an arrogant, passive aggressive, disloyal bureaucrat who never said that he opposed going to war, but dragged his feet at every opportunity and fought policy battles through leaks to the press.

Yoiks! Sounds like good reading.

I wonder if government is too dumb to handle stuff like policy and war.

Posted in Orient, Past is prologue, Politics and Poker, Stragety | 2 Comments »

Deep in

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 14, 2009

Drawing of me in old federal courthouse, Newark

Pencil sketch of your blogger in another courtroom at another time

Today was one long day of litigation in federal court in Long Island, New York. I don’t want to report anything in particular about it — too many sensitive issues still in the air for blogging during the trial.

It is exhausting, though. You really can’t have any idea unless you’ve ever litigated a multi-claim commercial and business tort case in a jury trial where you client has millions in exposure. But maybe some day I will try to convey it to you, now that’s I’ve done it several times, and all, and never had a client have to write a check after the jury came back. Just saying. And poo-poo-poo.

Did I mention exhausting? Draining? Enervating?

Yes… absolutely exhilarating!!!

Posted in Heart and spirit, Lex scripta, Stragety | 3 Comments »

The continuation of blogging by other means

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 12, 2009

bpk 664Over at Chicago Boyz, a round-robin of a Clausewitz Roundtable.

Posted in Blogophilia, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

How it’s done

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 12, 2009

This you have to like — remarks to reporters from an  an Israeli battalion commander in Gaza:

“A couple of days ago, an armed squad popped up from a tunnel that was concealed by a nearby building. We took them out with tank fire and a bulldozer,” he said.

In another incident, the commander said, his men spotted a suicide bomber on a bicycle.

“He ran off to take cover in a building, presumably to draw us in,” Yehuda said. “We demolished the building on top of him with a bulldozer.”

Sounds like a plan.

Posted in Orient, Packing heat, Stragety | Leave a Comment »

The offense of existence

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 5, 2009

The “Muslim world” and its friends caterwaul constantly that America never gives its leaders and its people fair consideration, that it doesn’t treat them as “full partners” in various and sundry “dialogues” and “processes,” and that it unfairly favors the literate and liberal Zionist regime that causes all the world’s problems. It’s really quite a thing to see, for they don’t merely have a problem with this tilt, but with any assertion of self-defense by either the U.S. or Israel for any reason. Thus the very concept of the war on terrorism is considered objectionable by Muslim populations: The effort by the United States, and the West in general, to undermine the power and capacity of terrorists is considered an offense, for the obvious reason that it is directed at, well, terrorists.

So it’s not surprising that the usual suspects are outraged, shocked, horrified at Israel’s long-overdue (strategically, if not tactically and logistically) assertion of its fundamental right of self-defense. Read this story, and see how many times you search for an actual argument based on fairness or some sense of shared humanity before you give up, as usual:

In Turkey, more than 5,000 people held an anti-Israel rally in Istanbul, waving Palestinian flags and burning effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President George W. Bush. Also in Istanbul, club-wielding police broke up a small demonstration by protesters who hurled eggs at the Israeli Consulate . . .

Israel’s weeklong aerial bombardment of Gaza and the start of the ground offensive Saturday against Hamas have drawn condemnation across the Muslim and Arab world and news coverage of the invasion has dominated Arab satellite television stations.

Thousands in cities from Tehran to Damascus have also taken to the streets to protest the attacks, which have killed about 500 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,600, according to Gaza officials.

In some cases, the protests of the past week were as directed against Arab governments as much as Israel, with many criticizing their perceived inaction or lack of sufficient support of the Palestinians.

On Sunday, the leaders of Egypt and Jordan — the only two Mideast Arab countries to sign a peace agreement with Israel and maintain diplomatic ties — condemned the ground offensive and called for an end to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.

I’m not saying it’s surprising that they don’t share my view, or that of the Israel government, that this campaign was justified. I’m pointing out that not a single leader, protester or other representative voice is heard in this article by Lebanese reporter Bassem Mroue (more here) explaining why — given the objective fact that Israel has been under bombardment from this territory for months, by the ruling government of it, and no one has said or done anything to stop it — Israel’s actions cannot possibly be justified. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Oppression, Orient, Sisyphus, Stragety | 2 Comments »

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