New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.
The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.
Violators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney said.
The summary, if anything, understates the brazenness. There's a delightful video of the release press conference that starts out with Grisham highlighting the emergency order as a state-wide message to "start arresting people", and "just arrest everyone", and goes downhill from there to outright state intent to violate her oath of office! For an order she does not expect criminals to obey. The order declares the city off-limits for public carry, nearly exactly mirroring a specific hypothetical from Bruen.
I went to bed on this last night after trying to find a way to discuss it at a deeper level than 'boo, outgroup', and I'm still hard-pressed this morning. It's not like this is some unique and novel approach: I've written before on the prolonged efforts to provide massive resistance to Breun, or to otherwise violate the law, exploiting the nuances of standing and court timelines. Federal administrations have played footsie with overtly unconstitutional or illegal actions at length as delaying tactics over any coherent principle for matters as serious as the rental economy and as trivial as cancelling Easter. There were even a few efforts from the Red Tribe in early COVID days.
There's some tactical and logistic discussions that can be had, here. Most obvious, there's a ton of fun questions involved when the state can throw around multi-thousand dollar fines against people with no more warning or notice than a press conference late Friday night, should it ever come to that, though it's not clear that the specific stated punishment here matters. There's no evidence that the shooters in any recent murders motivating this order were carrying lawfully. There will almost certainly be open carry protests by mid-week, a completely foreseeable result that someone who actually worried about bunches of lawful gun carry causing violence would at least have planned around; the people going should plan around what happens if and when they're arrested and cited, but it's not clear that will actually happen.
The Bernalillo County police have already stated that they have not been charged with enforcing this: a sufficiently cynical reader should expect that the state police may not consistently 'enforce' the order either rather than tots-unrelatedly harassing the hell out of anyone who disobeys it.
Grisham signed a law abolished qualified immunity in some cases, but the precise text of that law and the New Mexico constitution make this unlikely to apply in the specific nexus of carry. The 11th Amendment makes federal 1983 lawsuits particularly complex, and unlikely to be renumerative or punishing.
They're also pretty boring. So I'm going to make a few predictions. Maybe I'll be wrong! Hopefully!
Grisham will not be impeached for a very simple reason. She will not be indicted, and I think it's more likely than not she never pays in her personal capacity. There will be no grand jury leaking embarrassing details, or FBI investigations doing the same, whether honestly or fraudulently established. New Mexico allows citizen grand juries, and it won’t matter Grisham will not be frog-marched before a tipped-off news media for a predawn raid, nor will we have arrest mugshots on national or local news. There won't be a long series of supposedly-unbiased news programs calling her a fascist, no baldly coordinated smear campaign to distract from someone else's failures, nor will some random employee become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution persecution. There will not be a New York Times article or The View segue fearful about how this undermines reasonable public health policy, nor will Lawrence Tribe be writing a characteristically incoherent argument about how this disqualifies her from any future elected office.
We will not have an injunction today, or a temporary restraining order the same day as a complaint was filed, to mirror the DeWine overreach linked above. The courts will not make a final determination before the order expires, even if the order extends beyond the thirty-day window. If the courts issue a TRO or preliminary injunction before the policy expires, people will still be harassed for carry, and no one will find themselves in jail for contempt of the court's order, even and especially if they Tried To Make A Message out of their disobedience. There will be a perfunctory mootness analysis when asking whether the state will do the same thing again, and in the unlikely even that threshold and standing can be achieved, the courts will instead notice that no colorable relief can be granted.
We will instead have taught a city's portion of gun owners that they can and should violate the supposed law, at length; that the government will quite cheerfully do the same and get away with it; and that the courts will shrug their shoulders and ponder what can you do thirty days later. And that is what happens if they are lucky.
Since my 'don't trust Science' threads were already toeing the line between 'Pepe Silvia!' and schizophrenic (fair!) (I didn't even touch the four-part follow-up), Nate Silver summarizes better than I can :
Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.
We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. There’s also good context around the messages here (very detailed) or here and here (more high-level).
((Silver's links carry the touchstones of conspiracy paranoia, like an emphasis on coverups and literally-by-the-minute analysis of claimed coordinated action, which would normally discourage me from pointing to them, except they also happen to be reasonable factual descriptions.))
To be clear, this isn't a case of some barely-related scientists from nearby offices in slightly-related fields being somewhat more open-minded. These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper held some of the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately. In public, they named opponents giving these possibilities conspiracy theorists for naming options they were accepting privately, or drawing out a web that actually existed. Jeremy Farrar would send e-mails giving 50:50 odds on natural (and non-natural, mostly serial passage) origins at the same day he was shopping around early drafts of the paper; while he isn't on the author list, that's its own mess. To be fair, they do change positions in private, as information comes around and as debate occurred. But they remain far from as convinced as they pretended in public, not just during publication but months later, and it's exceptionally clear that the political and pragmatic ramifications drive that.
Nor was this filled with caveats and used or intended to be used solely as a small opinion piece. It contains a few limited cautions about available data's ability to discriminate from evolution at the wet market from cryptic adaptation among humans, but serial passage was actively dismissed by an incoherent mush that steps from animal models to purely in vitro considerations. The paper's authors and 'unrelated' academics (who had been heavily involved in discussions with the paper's authors behind closed doors) cited this not-a-paper at length to justify treating anyone even considering the possibility of just serial passage or an accidental lab leak to be a conspiracy theory that must be shut down, all the way from casual shitposters to federal politicians, including those who advocated specifically serial passage or a purely transport-focused accident. These private messages make clear that wasn't some unintentional side effect, but a if not the specific goal.
Nor was this limited to the broadest strokes: at best, these otherwise closely-knit scientists did mention important information not widely available to random shitposters to each other, such as the rarity of live pangolin trafficking, or the animal makeup of the wet market's official shipments, or a variety of information about possible serial passage techniques, all of which were carefully excluded from the final paper. Some writers received confidential notice of discovery of RmYNO2, and after finding that it wasn't itself more helpful to their point than other already-known genomes, decided to instead obliquely reference it as possible to make a 'prediction', because the Texas Sharpshooter's approach would have been too on the nose.
And that's the stuff that came through FOIA-able emails or broad and leakable Slack channels. The messages show many people involved transitioning to private e-mails, to phone calls, to unrecorded Zoom meetings, often dropping to very clipped wording during that transition: they knew this could eventually be public, and they knew other conversations would not.
None of this amounts, as many COVID skeptics are calling it, to research fraud; I'm not even sure it fits most definitions of academic misconduct. But that's mostly because the publication didn't have enough numbers or analysis to need to actively lie: this paper has no pixels to check for signs of photoshopping, nor specific population numbers to hit with GRIM. Silver has joined calls to retract the paper, but Nature's staff have already said that "Neither previous out-of-context remarks by the authors nor disagreements with the authors’ stated views, are, on their own, grounds for retraction." It ain't happening.
Silver proposes that the scientists were motivated by some combination of :
- Evidence of a lab leak could cause a political backlash — understandably, given that COVID has killed almost 7 million people — resulting in a reduction in funding for gain-of-function research and other virological research. That’s potentially important to the authors or the authors’ bosses — and the authors were very aware of the career implications for how the story would play out;
- Evidence of a lab leak could upset China and undermine research collaborations;
- Evidence of a lab leak could provide validation to Trump and Republicans who touted the theory — remember, all of this was taking place during an election year, and medical, epidemiological and public health experts had few reservations about weighing in on political matters.
These aren't exactly the most charitable framings for each possibility, if perhaps more charitable than focusing on Anderson's certainty this paper got him tenure. But with a more forgiving description, I get something along the lines of :
- Prohibitions on gain-of-function and other virological research could undermine pandemic responses (and we wouldn't know about past prevented pandemics, after all), or drive research to locations with worse biosecurity or oversight (than BSL2?).
- Bad relations with China could undermine future pandemic responses or escalate to a 'hot' war.
- Trump and Republicans responding to a China with marginal scientific research could result in another Korematsu, undermine future pandemic responses, or escalate to a 'hot' war.
Perhaps @Chrisprattalpharaptor can do better. But even if these somewhat earnest reasons that business or political tribe might have controlled what these scientists were willing to say publicly, or if there was some more noble cause that they held above providing an accurate model of the world, it's still something other than providing an accurate model of the world. Which is what, supposedly, was their job.
Worse, few of these matters stop here. Trivially, a lot of academics and casual observers are saying that even if the Nature op-ed authors were playing fast-and-loose with the facts at the time, we since have a ton of evidence in favor the wet market/natural origin side and very little recently published in favor of serial passage or any intentional manipulation, and normally drawing big charts claiming almost all the experts in a field were conspiracy to hide The Truth would be the sorta thing you do shortly before the nice men give you a coat with extra-long sleeves and take you to get some anti-psychotics. Except all of the above.
Some updates from New Mexico since two weeks ago.
Firstly, the court ruled on requests for a temporary restraining order, most pertinently that:
... Defendants New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico Department Secretary Patrick M. Allen, New Mexico Department of Public Safety Jason R. Bowie, Chief of the New Mexico State Police and any other New Mexico officials (“Defendants”) are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (1) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” (“PHO”) published on September 8, 2023, which reads:
(1) No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm, as defined in NMSA 1978, Section 30-7-4.1, either openly or concealed [within complex metric that means Bernallio County]...
In addition, Defendants are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (4) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” to the extent it imposes additional restrictions on the carrying or possession of firearms that were not already in place prior to its issuance.
The next hearing, for a preliminary injunction, was originally scheduled for October 3rd, three days before the initial state of emergency was scheduled to end, though I'd expect that gets delayed. How did the governor respond?
It's not terribly clear how this will work, either as matter of enforcement or of law. I'd say that she's trying to maneuver for mootness and standing challenges to the lawsuit, but this is still unconstitutional under Bruen and the state constitution, the loose definition raises serious due process concerns, and it's not even very likely that the state's public emergency law permits it even outside of the right to bear arms problems. This revision to the emergency order can't or at least shouldn't avoid the TRO, and were it a right-wing effort it'd likely just get the judge mad; as it is, the Biden appointee sounded just disappointed during the initial hearing.
Nor, on the other side, have I seen any reports of the video-driven Grisham enforcement had claimed to be bringing during initial protests. On the other hand, even while enjoined anyone who wants to carry needs to evaluate whether they're willing to become a poster child for today's constitutional challenge.
What sort of fallout is Governor Grisham looking at? KOAT7 has a wonderful quote from one of the state politicians:
"People need to realize this is the first time in New Mexico history that a governor could be impeached," State Rep. John Block said.
That is somewhat undermined by reality: No, they don't, because no, she can't.
There's only been one successful legislature-initiated special session in New Mexico history, and its context (responding to a budget's veto) made it far easier to coordinate on top of the far simpler political calculus (the final budget vote passed 90%+ in both houses). The paper gives a single federal Democrat saying he'd be willing to vote yes to condemn Grisham, should it reach the floor of Congress, but the same man voted against considering the resolution, which failed without a single Dem yes, which isn't quite the same as a vote against the resolution (because it was mixed with two other process matters) but makes for awkward bedmates. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that the state's congressional Democratic party's official position is against a special session or impeachment.
It ain't happening, bruh.
There's been a bit of embarrassment from state politicians and police pushing back -- the state AG, another Dem, did not defend the executive order -- which, fair, kudos. Not the most significant kudos, but worth mentioning.
What about that shooting that motivated this whole thing? NBC reports:
A third arrest was made Friday in connection with a shooting outside an Albuquerque baseball stadium that killed an 11-year-old boy and prompted the New Mexico governor to issue a controversial gun ban. Albuquerque police took Daniel Gomez, 26, into custody a day after two other men were identified as suspects. Police didn’t immediately release further details about Gomez’s arrest.
Romero was already wanted for failing to appear in court in connection with alleged drug dealing, Medina said. Garley happened to be in custody when he was arrested in connection with the killing. He had been stopped by state police on Sept. 13 while returning from Arizona and authorities found a gun and about 100,000 fentanyl tablets in the car, state Police Chief W. Troy Weisler said at the news conference.
Police alleged that the men, both reputed gang members, pulled up in a car and attacked the pickup truck that was leaving the minor league game at Isotopes Stadium.
I haven't been able to find any records showing their CCW permits being pulled. Or that they had CCW permits. For some reason.
Apropos of nothing, a couple other interesting notes in firearms law :
On one hand, great work if you can get it. On the other hand, Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, the men who lead Bruen, no longer can, and it's just over half of their old law firm's typical billing rate. The reasoning, such as it is:
Plaintiffs failed to show that this was “a case requiring special expertise [and] that no in-district counsel possessed such expertise,” or that local counsel “were unwilling or unable to take the case,”.. .Plaintiffs’ arguments in support of out-of-district rates are limited to pointing to Plaintiffs’ success at the Supreme Court and the conclusory statements that “few in-district attorneys regularly practice Second Amendment litigation and even fewer practice this constitutional litigation on behalf of plaintiffs against government entities; . . . even fewer in-district attorneys have briefed or argued Second Amendment cases before the Second Circuit and the Supreme Court, like the attorneys Plaintiff selected; and . . . no in-district attorneys have the experience necessary for Plaintiffs’ challenge.”
I expect Clement and Murphy won't exactly cry all the way to the bank, to whatever extent their biglaw contracts covered this sort of case, but neither will it be a big war chest for their Second-Amendment-focused law firm, to whatever extent NYSPRA wasn't forking over those fees well before this point and is down some pretty pennies. Which matters quite a bit given NYSRPA was better titled NYSRPA II, and NYSRPA I was filed in 20_13_. Nor will it serve a particularly strong disincentive to avoid losing future court cases, or, for a matter where New York state might actually be persuadable, pad future court battles with beggaring levels of necessary paperwork to beggar their challengers.
At least they won, right? Well... Back in response to the NYSPRA II decision at the old place, a couple posters had different perspectives (with some format edits for brevity) :
Yes, the jursdictions which want to ban guns will simply claim historical justification, and the lower courts all the way up to the courts of appeals will pretend to believe them ("a bee is a fish"), and nothing will change. I expect New York's list of "sensitive locations" to include : Banks including ATM lobbies, Subways and other public transportation, taxis and other licensed transportation, All public buildings, All premises licensed to serve alcohol, Maybe all public parks.
Many, and it would require a whole-of-government sort of rebellion to engage in that level of open defiance. Even if Governor Hochul attempted to enforce the law, state judges would not follow such an instruction, especially as against an explicit binding precedent. I can go through the mechanisms if you like, but the idea that NY would openly defy this ruling is an absolute pipe dream for a few radical accelerationists on either side, and will not happen.
And neither is wrong, and indeed excepting a few quibbles Huadpe's later post is a good overview of procedural protections. No one planted their feet at the door of a school house, so it's not true Massive Resistance, it's just sparking legal warfare. On the other hand, if Nybbler had a time machine or a crystal ball, his description of the Bruen response bill and its reception in the judiciary would have been broader, not more narrow. And on those broader points, the state has been playing with mootness and standing to avoid the obvious revelation that it still does exactly what Bruen says the state may not.
And that's just the explicit stuff. One thing neither Nybbler's list nor I expected:
The NYPD approved fewer new licenses to people requesting permits to carry or keep firearms in their homes or businesses in 2022 than the year prior, data obtained by THE CITY shows — despite the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found a key provision of the state’s long-standing gun control law violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
In 2021, the NYPD — which vets firearm permits — received 4,663 applications and approved 2,591 of them, about 56%, all under the stricter “proper cause” standard the Supreme Court struck down last year. That standard required gun owners in New York to show “proper cause” in order to receive a permit to carry a weapon, but the court said licenses should be granted by default unless there was a specific reason to deny an applicant.
In 2022, the NYPD saw an increased number of new applications — 7,260 — but approved just 1,550, or 21%, even though applications filed in the second half of that year no longer had to meet the “proper cause” standard where applicants had to make an affirmative case for why they needed a license.
It's far from alone, here. Hawaii's response bill has repeated many of the same steps and components, California was just weird for waiting til this year before informing people that their right to carry a firearm is limited to sidewalks. Dick Heller from the 2008 Heller v. DC case is still working on being allowed to own the semiautomatic pistol and magazine he started that whole matter on. Defense Distributed is still fighting its mess of a case.
When I've made motions around this before, people have rejoined that lawsuits are a process: winning a case, no matter how big, does not mean winning everything forever and hearing the lamentations of your opponent's women. There have indeed been where state defiance has lead to significant costs. I don't mean to suggest that the court's never work.
But at the same time, it's hard to even find a pretense that this faces the same level of legal opprobrium or cynicism that favored rights get. Nor is it limited to guns. There's been a lot of Recognition that the aftermath of SFFA v. Harvard would result in a tremendous change in legal discrimination as teams of lawyers would be going through every admissions process in the country, and that's not wrong! But they've done so to hilariously transparent efforts. And there are lesser and lesser-known variants on a pretty wide variety of topics. There's no conservative equivalent that leads a country-wide and overnight shakeup, or even a state-level one, even in fairly egregious matters.
There's an argument that this shows what Really Matters is The Institutions, and while that might feel a little be retroactively defined by whatever conservatives aren't doing or by what they'd face massive discrimination should they wear their hearts on their sleeves -- can I point to Clement and Murphy again, and that even if you had their skills you'd be a fool to think you could follow in their paths -- it's not exactly wrong.
But then we're back to denouement of the post two weeks ago, but more so, and much broader.
The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released. [previous discussion here]
For a summary of the background: Loudoun County School District had a possibly-gender-something student sexually assault a much-younger female student who the assailant had a previous relationship with at Stone Bridge High School (SBHS) on May 28th, 2021. While eventually arrested, state law limits pre-trial detention to 21-days for this class of juvenile, and the assailant was transfered to Broad Run High School (BRHS) for the next school year. The father of this first victim was expelled from the school on the day of the assault, and later arrested by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) during a school board (LCSB) meeting where he confronted or was confronted by someone (not a part of the school board?). On October 6th, the assailant further abducted and sexually assaulted another female student at BRHS.
Get used to the acronyms; the report uses them everywhere.
The report is... a read. With apologies for transcription errors:
Later that evening, a school board member asked the superintendent "do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms, regularly? I would hope not but I'd like clarification." The superintendent responded, "to my knowledge we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms." The SBHS principle, who attended the Teams meeting with the superintendent the afternoon the SBHS sexual assault took place, testified the superintendent's statement "is not true." Another witness testified the superintendent's statement was a "bald-faced lie." We agree.
There's two separate failures, here, that I think are worth discussion and highlighting. One is the more overt culture war, and the grand jury report does make very clear that the culture war drove a lot of bad practice. It's a little hard to tell since the report uses roles rather than names for everything, but it seems like even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either, as an half-hour before the email previously made available, it turns out that:
At 3:30PM the chief operating officer emailed the superintendent, the now-deputy superintendent, chief of staff, directory of communications, and assistant superintendent, [stating in part]:
The incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040.
With extreme charity, perhaps this refers to the father’s near arrest, and not the rape itself, but that doesn’t absolve much.
At the same time, there's another disturbing component that I think a lot of 'mainstream' conservative critiques are likely to overlook:
The special education teaching assistant later said she saw two pairs of feet under the stall, but she did nothing about it. She testified this was not an uncommon occurrence, because "somebody could have their period. They might need a tampon. Or somebody had a boyfriend they had a fight with." The assailant later acknowledge that "They usually don't do anything" regarding two pairs of feet in a stall. After the teaching assistant left, the assailant again forced penetration against the female student...
That is, a teaching assistant -- in Virginia, a mandatory reporter -- walked past a bathroom stall where a violent rape was in-progress and, once the teaching assistant left, continued. Further, that this was not an unusual mistake, but enough of a practice that it was recognized by the offender. It's quite possible that Superintendent Ziegler was making a bald-faced lie not in the sense that this particular sexual assault occurred in a bathroom, but that there is little effort or interest in preventing dubiously consensual sexual behavior in bathrooms between students at all.
And this continued more broadly. On the day of the assault, the report details how the school was more intent on expelling an angry father and seeking a no-trespass order against him (e-mail at 3:09), even suggesting that the father "should have been arrested", than tracking down the at-large rapist (who was only grabbed at the end of the school day). Even once arrested, the local police showed little interest in bringing the case.
And even once that was done, there was a complex game of blame- and paperwork-passing that seemed optimized to lose track of things, and not just for this specific case.
However, juvenile intake did not call the superintendent's office, email the superintendent's office, or send a copy of the notification through the mail. Instead, the process in place at the time was to send it via inter-office envelope that was picked up at the courthouse. Further, the envelope was addressed to "David Spage," who is an LCPS employee but has not worked in the superintendent's office since 2014...
During the calendar year 2021, there were 39 school notifications sent [in this method], but it is unknown how many of those the superintendent's office ever saw.
((SBHS seemed to think the student had transferred to SBHS from another high school, THS, over similar allegations. The grand jury report says that this probably is confused and didn't happen? Which is another level of wtf, maybe.))
This continued even as other warning signs kept scaling up.
In the ensuing weeks after the assailant was released from custody, the court services unit learned information from the assailant's family that cause them to "keep a tight eye on this kid."
This included, separately, the assailant's grandmother and mother both requesting additional assistance from schools and the probation officer, with the grandmother calling the assailant a "sociopath."
In early September, the assailant had separate incidents at the new school, first following female students around school long enough to result in an art class shuffling the assailant's seating around, and then a more serious incident in an English classroom where the assailant tried to take a female student's Chromebook, and asked the female student about online nudes (and another boy if the boy's grandmother had online nudes?). This was escalated, yet:
The most senior individuals in LCPS knew about this incident, and knew is was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. Multiple people in the LCSO were aware of this incident around the time it occurred and kenw it was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. The deputy commonwealth's attorney prosecuting the May 28, 2021 case knew of the incident, and the probation officer, who had been communicating with the student and his family nearly daily for over a month, knew of the incident.
Not a single person with knowledge of the student's history or of this current action stepped in to do anything. Instead, discipline was left to the BRHS principal, who did nothing more than issue him a verbal reprimand.
On October 6th, this escalated to a second sexual assault, this time with the assailant abducting a female student without a fig leaf of a pre-existing relationship.
In "late October", the school commissioned an independent review of the incidents at hand. However:
Many board members were surprised to learn the report was subject to the attorney-client privilege.... Several board members testified they were given only half an hour to read the independent review and ask questions about it. Despite having asked for the review in the first place, they were handed out numbered copies of it and required to return it upon leaving the room. On January 14, 2022, LCSB [County School Board] issued a public statement stating the report would not be released, listing the attorney-client privilege as the third, and least-important, reason for keeping it private. The statement [link] also noted several changes and updates to LCPS [County Public Schools] policies and procedures.
It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :
The director of school administration disagreed with this assessment [that they could not proceed until police completed their investigation] and had conversations with the chief of staff about it in July and August 2021. The director, even those his office was not supposed to be doing Title IX, also created a Google document of possible Title IX violations reported from schools because he was "worried at the time that we were not reporting some things that could become Title IX."...
On September 17th, 2021, the director of school administration testified he emailed the superintendent, chief of staff, deputy superintendent, and chief of schools, about the situation. He testified the email laid out his extensive training, experts he had met with, and the fact the SBHS assault should have "immediately" and "automatically" triggered an investigation. It is unknown how the superintendent or these officials responded - LCPS refused to provide us this email -- but it was not until a month later, and after the BRHS sexual assault, that a Title IX investigation into the SBHS sexual assault was opend. The individual who ultimately conducted that investigation testified it was the first Title IX investigation she had ever done.
gattsuru
4mo ago
The Colorado Supreme Court holds:
A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. The court stays its ruling until January 4, 2024, subject to any further appellate proceedings.
[recent related discussion, slightly older]
The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.
How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:
As President Trump, argues and the Electors do not contest, section 1-1-113’s procedures do not provide common tools for complex fact-finding: preliminary evidentiary or pre-trial motions hearings, subpoena powers, basic discovery, depositions, and time for disclosure of witnesses and exhibits. This same concern was raised in Frazier; the then-Secretary argued that “it is impossible to fully litigate a complex constitutional issue within days or weeks, as is typical of a section 1-1-113 proceeding.”...
Despite clear requirements, the district court did not follow section 1-4-1204’s statutory timeline for section 1-1-113 claims. The proceeding below involved two delays that, respectively, violated (1) the requirement that the merits hearing be held within five days of the challenge being lodged, and (2) the requirement that the district court issue its order within forty-eight hours of the merits hearing.
And the other dissent:
Thus, based on its interpretation of Section Three, our court sanctions these makeshift proceedings employed by the district court below—which lacked basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and the opportunity for a fair trial—to adjudicate a federal constitutional claim (a complicated one at that) masquerading as a run-of-the-mill state Election Code claim...
and
Even with the unauthorized statutory alterations made by the district court, the aggressive deadlines and procedures used nevertheless stripped the proceedings of many basic protections that normally accompany a civil trial, never mind a criminal trial. There was no basic discovery, no ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, no workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and no final resolution of many legal issues affecting the court’s power to decide the Electors’ claim before the hearing on the merits.
There was no fair trial either: President Trump was not offered the opportunity to request a jury of his peers; experts opined about some of the facts surrounding the January 6 incident and theorized about the law, including as it relates to the interpretation and application of the Fourteenth Amendment generally and Section Three specifically; and the court received and considered a partial congressional report, the admissibility of which is not beyond reproach.
Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?
The district court also credited the testimony of Professor Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, whom it had “qualified . . . as an expert in political extremism, including how extremists communicate, and how the events leading up to and including the January 6 attack relate to longstanding patterns of behavior and communication by political extremists.”
He testified, according to the court’s summary, that (1) “violent far-right extremists understood that [President] Trump’s calls to ‘fight,’ which most politicians would mean only symbolically, were, when spoken by [President] Trump, literal calls to violence by these groups, while [President] Trump’s statements negating that sentiment were insincere and existed to obfuscate and create plausible deniability,”
There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.
Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.
gattsuru
4mo ago
I've been skeptical for a while, but to expand the reasoning:
More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals.
At the trivial level, it's worth spelling out why that is. Conservatives are a minority among the sort of identification you're talking about. But even when 'yuppie' leaned conservative, this dizzing advantage for progressive organizations still existed (it dates back to at least the Eisenhower era!), and the lean of organizations and visible political speakers today is far greater than that of their underlying demographics.
Conservatives and conservative organizations are not just uncommon but destroyed in a wide variety of professional fields, and that's a result of enemy action. Maybe that's well-intended, sometimes, but more often the good intentions or serious objections are a pretext. More often, it's not even that. Simple discrimination is common enough that it doesn't even have to pretend to hide. Demands to fire anyone to the right of the last Democratic President are common, regularly backed up by violent protest. And that persists outside of academia: state bar selections of continuing education credits have gotten hilarious recently, and one of the single most effective members of the SCOTUS bar got booted from his practice, with the threat leveled during and about an appeal. I can go into further detail if @Amadan wants to do the "you are not oppressed" deal, but it's a long list spanning decades, and I don't think you need me drop thirty examples. You have your recent tweet on Sanderson; you don't need me to spell out how suicidal trying to be a mainstream conservative culturati gets.
That doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it does change any potential solution. A conservative -- or even anything people want to call conservative, with all that implies -- working within the system is inviting a cheesegrater to their tender bits, hopefully figuratively. Any conservative organization trying to work within the system at minimum is subject to being shut down at a moment's notice, if not subject to being hollowed out and worn like a skin suit; any effective capability itself becoming justification for such an attack.
What does change the conclusion is that Doom bit. There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.
The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.
That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.
More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.
But the resulting answer is going to look very different than Kulak, or than Theilites, for better and for worse.
gattsuru
1yr ago
"Oi, Bruv, Can I See Your Porn Loisence"
I've made this joke a lot in relation to the serially-delayed and maybe abandoned UK age verification mandate, so it's probably worth talking about Louisiana doing it for real:
Act 440 took effect on Jan. 1 to create a cause of civil action for Louisiana parents whose children access pornographic websites that do not utilize an age verification process. The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Jefferson, passed both chambers of the Republican-controlled Legislature in June with little debate and only a single nay vote — from Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans...
Last week, Schlegel took to Twitter to defend the law, which has faced criticism for restricting personal freedoms, as well as questions about legality and enforcement.
"This law had bipartisan support and passed almost unanimously in both the House & Senate with close to 50 co-authors, including Democrats and Republicans. It was not a Republican win but a win for children in Louisiana. This bill is about protecting children not limiting adults," she posted. "And thankfully, the technology today allows us to not only protect children from the dangers of online pornography but also protect the privacy of those adults who want to view this material."
Text of law here: it requires porn sites -- or at least most sites with more than 33% of their content matching the law's definition of 'harmful to minors', based around a modified Miller obscenity test -- to use 'reasonable age verification methods', or be liable for unspecified damages and court costs.
In its defense, the law does prohibit age verification companies from retaining "identifying information" (with again unspecified civil damages) after allowing access. For a variety of technical reasons such enforcement would be incredibly impractical, though: it's not clear how a person would find out, would find out who actually did it, and then show damages, without getting any complaint dismissed to early for meaningful discovery, or even with enough certainty to justify starting a lawsuit.
There's a pretty clear and wide potential for harm. Yes, yes, getting your porn tastes revealed to the general world isn't as embarrassing as it might once have been, even as the potential for Implications remains. And while I might trust the average incredibly-sketchy-porn-site or age verification company to secure my personal data that they're totally not supposed to be storing better than, say, Home Depot or EquiFax, that's kinda damning with faint praise. For someone that wants to host material -- increasingly, a necessity to speak in any meaningful sense -- this is a pretty tremendous landmine: not only do I get to wager what a Louisiana court might consider prurient or how it might do math, or what the risks of a teenager even finding my material might be, but also such fun imponderables such as "what impact might an unsuccessful lawsuit have on my job or position in the community".
It's... also not clear how this is going to work, at a pretty fundamental level. There are some deep constitutional questions regarding compelled and anonymous speech, and some annoying legalistic ones like the dormant commerce clause, and this is the sort of thing that's had SCOTUS involved before. And then there's annoying problems like grammar issues, whether the exceptions meant for exclude CDNs or avoid supremacy clause problems with CDA230 would also exclude booru or tube-style sites that do not create content, or how ads get handled period. Nevermind how much of a clusterfuck that "33%" threshold is going to be for all but the most overtly and specifically porn-focused sites: do courts have the infrastructure to handle this when even specialty sites can have millions of files in content? What happens if it changes, and how quickly does a site need to track changes? If a site decides to host a million pages of lorem ipsum or an old copy of wikipedia to pad their SFW side?
((Example: e621 has 3.3 million uploaded images, with 26% of them "Safe" and 20% "Questionable" ratings, though this goes by different definitions than what the law here would involve, or even what non-furries would necessarily define them to be. Do I want to make bets on how the law would go there? No, because the answer is 'don't get in an incredibly humiliating interstate civil suit if you can avoid it'.))
Some is just that none of the authors of the law nor the people promoting it can agree on what, exactly, the harms or scales of damages are. Peter Gheil points to Aella as the prototype of the 'who-cares' side of the progressive and libertarian perspective, and there's a lot of Culture War in that position existing, but there's a lot of positions outside of it (sfw meme). At the other end, there's people who want the extremely unsexy nudity excised from Maus, or object to Gender Queer over one comic panel out of hundreds of pages having portraying someone performing 'oral sex' on a dildo. Presumably Heinlein's later works fall somewhere in this spectrum, or outside of it.
But there's a slightly awkward situation where, in addition to the Baptist-and-Bootlegger coalitions, there's a separate compromise where this sort of law (Utah is considering a similar one, and California's regulatory apparatus might accidentally invent it by parallel means) is vague enough to marry people who simply don't want their ten-year-olds stumbling across the weirdest porn possible after typoing a web search, those who think a seventeen-year-old seeing a nipple will immediately and irrevocably twist his or her sexual orientation, the TradCaths who think showing ankles can lead someone down the path of temptation, the feminists that think showing PIV or bondage will push men to rape or domestic violence, and the feminists that think maybe sadomasochism should start in the late teens, along with every possible or plausible position in-between. Actual policy implementations are going to get a little rougher when practice comes about.
On that bootlegger side, some sites have voluntarily complied: MindGeek-related sites (such as PornHub) have begun requesting Louisiana clients to provide driver's licenses to the third-party LAWallet (which is its own weird mess). MindGeek had been an early adopter for that currently-mothballed UK version and has done some technology work on the verification side, along with being a pretty high-profile target, so it's not a huge surprise, though in turn it's far from clear how many other companies would want to work with them. Or comply at all.
In turn, though, it's hard to not think about where this might go down the road. Many of the objections to porn here generalize beyond it, even if a number of the advocates of restrictions don't (currently) want to expand them. China has recently pushed 'video game addiction' as a concept to the point of restricting gameplay hours, and a general 'social media addiction' is a pretty common political talking point (and tbf, may not even be wrong), and there's been an increasing (and tbf, not even wrong) push to talk about how the human brain doesn't really finish maturing until whatever age the immature-brained speaker wants a matter to add restrictions to.
And a tool to bring identity to a wide swath of internet activity is a pretty nice weapon to leave around waiting for someone to be tempted by it.
FOSS and The XZ Problem
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) was discovered in the XZ Utils library on March 29th, 2024. This severe flaw allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on affected systems, earning it the highest possible score (10) on both the CVSS 3.1 and CVSS 4.0 scoring systems due to its immediate impact and wide scope.
The exploit would allow remote code execution as root in a wide majority of systemd-based Linux (and Mac OSX, thanks homebrew!) machines. There's some reasonable complaints that some CVE ratings are prone to inflation, but this has absolutely earned a 10/10, would not recommend. Thankfully, this was caught before the full exploit made it to many fixed release Linux distros, and most rolling-release distros either would not have updated so quickly or would not yet be vulnerable (and, presumably, will be updating to fixed versions of XZ quickly), with the exception of a handful of rarely-used Debian options. Uh, for the stuff that's been caught so far.
Summary and FAQ, for the more technically minded reader, the NIST CVE is here, background of initial discovery at here.
Ok, most of us who'd care remember Heartbleed. What's different here?
In this case, the exploit was near-certainly introduced intentionally by a co-maintainer of the library XZ Utils, by smuggling code into a binary test file, months apart from adding calls to execute that test file from live environments, and then working to hide any evidence. The combination of complexity in the attack (requiring fairly deep knowledge of a wide variety of Linux internals) and bizarreness of exploit steps (his FOSS history is sprinkled with a replacing safe functions with their unsafe precursors, or adding loose periods in cmake files) leaves nearly zero chance that this is unintentional, and the guy has since disappeared. He was boosted into co-maintainership only recently, and only after the original maintainer was pressured to pick him up by a strangely large barrage of very picky users. The author even pushed to have these updates shoved into Fedora early.
Most mainstream technical advisories aren't outright calling this a nation-state actor, but The Grugq is pretty willing to describe whoever did it as an 'intelligence agency', whether government or private, and with cause. Both the amount of effort and time put into this attack is vast, and the scope of vulnerability it produced extreme -- though this might be the 'cope' answer, since an individual or small-private-group running this level of complex attack is even more disturbing. It's paranoid to start wondering how much of the discussion aimed encouraging XZ's maintainer to take on the bad actor here as a co-maintainer, but as people are having more and more trouble finding evidence of their existence since, it might not be paranoid enough.
There's a lot of potential takeaways:
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The Many Eyes theory of software development worked. This was an incredibly subtle attack that few developers would have been able to catch, by an adversary willing to put years into developing trust and sneaking exploit in piecemeal.
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Except it was caught because a Microsoft (Postgres!) developer, without looking at the code, noticed a performance impact. Shit.
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This attack heavily exploited access through the FOSS community: the author was able to join sight-unseen through a year of purely digital communications, and the 'business decision' of co-maintainership came through a lot of pressure from randos or anons.
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Except that's something that can happen in corporate or government environments, too. There are places where every prospective employee gets a full background check and a free prostate exam, but they're the outlier even for dotmil spheres. Many employers are having trouble verifying that prospective recruits can even code, and most tech companies openly welcome recent immigrants or international workers that would be hard to investigate at best. Maybe they would have recognized that the guy with a stereotypical Indian name didn't talk like a native Indian, but I wouldn't bet on even that. And then there's just the stupid stuff that doesn't have to involve employees at all.
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The attack space is big, and probably bigger than it needs to be. The old school of thought was that you'd only 'really' need to do a serious security audit of services actually being exposed, and perhaps some specialty stuff like firewall software, but people are going to be spending months looking for weird calls in any software run in privileged modes. One of many
boneheadedcontroversial bits of systemd was the increased reliance on outside libraries compared to precursors like SysV Init. While some people do pass tar.xz around, XZ's main use in systemd seems to be related to loading replacement keys or VMs, and it's not quite clear exactly why that's something that needs to be baked into systemd directly. -
But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.
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There's a lot of this that seems like the chickens coming home to roost for bad practices in FOSS development: random test binary blobs ending up on user systems, build systems that either fail-silently on hard-to-notice errors or spam so much random text no one looks at it, building from tarballs, so on.
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But getting rid of bad or lazy dev practices seems one of those things that's just not gonna happen.
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The attacker was able to get a lot of trust so quickly because significant part of modern digital infrastructure depended on a library no one cared about. The various requests for XZ updates and co-maintainer permissions look so bizarre because in a library that does one small thing very well, it's quite possible only attackers cared. 7Zip is everywhere in the Windows world, but even a lot of IT people don't know who makes it (Igor Patlov?).
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But there's a lot of these dependencies, and it's not clear that level of trust was necessary -- quite a lot of maintainers wouldn't have caught this sort of indirect attack, and no small part of the exploit depended on behavior introduced to libraries that were 'well'-maintained. Detecting novel attacks at all is a messy field at best, and this sort of distributed attack might not be possible to detect at the library level even in theory.
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And there's far more varied attack spaces available than just waiting for a lead dev to burn out. I'm a big fan of pointing out how much cash Google is willing to throw around for a more visible sort of ownage of Mozilla and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but the full breadth of the FOSS world runs on a shoestring budget for how much of the world depends on it working and working well. In theory, reputation is supposed to cover the gap, and a dev with a great GitHub commit history can name their price. In practice, the previous maintainer of XZ was working on XZ for Java, and you haven't heard of Lasse Collin (and may not even recognize xz as a file extension!).
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((For culture war bonus points, I can think of a way to excise original maintainers so hard that their co-maintainers have their employment threatened.))
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There's been calls for some sort of big-business-sponsored security audits, and as annoying as the politics of that get, there's a not-unreasonable point that they should really want to do that. This particular exploit had some code to stop it from running on Google servers (maybe to slow recognition?), but there's a ton of big businesses that would have been in deep shit had it not been recognized. "If everyone's responsible, no one is", but neither the SEC nor ransomware devs care if you're responsible.
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But the punchline to the Google's funding of various FOSS (or not-quite-F-or-O, like RaspberryPi) groups is that even the best-funded groups aren't doing that hot, for even the most trivial problem. Canonical is one of the better-funded groups, and it's gotten them into a variety of places (default for WSL!) and they can't bother to maintain manual review for new Snaps despite years of hilariously bad malware.
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But it's not clear that it's reasonable or possible to actually audit the critical stuff; it's easier to write code than to seriously audit it, and we're not just a little shy on audit capabilities, but orders of magnitude too low.
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It's unlikely this is the first time something like this has happened. TheGrugq is professionally paranoid and notes that this looks like bad luck, and that strikes me more as cautious than pessimistic.
Rather famously, we spent and continue to spend a ton of money on the liberal promise of education for everyone, and it turns out that they can't do that; FCFromSSC had a pretty entertaining post on CultureWarRoundup about it when DeBoer finally admitted to the writing on the wall, though given he got modhatted for linking it contemporaneously I'm a little hesitant to link it now.
More broadly, though, there was a short time where people said "live and let live", and even if you couldn't exactly believe they meant it, they at least were willing to put more than a little lip service to the concept. And then theory encountered practice, and it was easier to believe in Santa Claus.
Firing people for their bad speech or associations was so beyond the pale that we built entire structures and train every teenager with stories of how important it is to resist, until it turns out that this was a useful power to have, and then an entire administrative infrastructure was developed to provide corporate liability should sufficiently large businesses not do it fast enough. We've found that protest is the voice of the unheard, until the wrong unheard do it, and then when countries declare martial law and confiscate bank account there's just a bit of a shrug. We've found that political abuses of law enforcement powers were so unacceptable to earn consent decree after consent decree, until it could happen to someone who 'deserved' it. We've found that government pressures to restrict free speech were awful, until they happened in ways people liked and then became a nothingburger. Freedom of religious belief was absolutely vital for two decades, then turned into lacite, and then every so often even the mention of those beliefs becomes its own violation.
And this goes on for even the small stuff, in a thousand different ways, on a thousand different topics. Anything that could be remotely read as celebrating violence was so unacceptable as to result in new reddit rules... and people who should have noticed patterns just keep missing these certain occassions. Taking kids from their own flesh and blood was to be a last-resort, even under violations of some criminal law, the sort of atrocity that left people walked in dazed horror, and also perfectly acceptable as an administratively-designed ad-hoc threat against someone using their constitutional rights. There's been a few places like EFF that at least drop a mention to their principles against their politics every few years, but the fall of the ACLU and other core institutions has been legendary; where they could once at least use a fig leaf and pretend they merely ignored rights that they didn't like because other groups focused on them, they now highlight individual people they don't like.
You're right that dissidents were silenced in the past, but the liberal movement was built, in no small part, about protecting the rights of those dissidents to speak more publicly! And then it turned out, no matter how much we avowed generalized principles that would protect everyone, the people actually making decisions and a worrying number of hangers-on either (charitably) designed their reference classes in such specific ways as to carefully exclude everyone not on their side or (less charitably) just wanted their dissidents freed.
This may not be especially severe by some historic standards -- and I agree we're pretty far from the KKK-era South, at least -- but if you wanted to do a hard comparison to the McCarthy era it's at least within an order of magnitude, and the McCarthy era is far from what the liberal movement considered a best alternative to negotiated agreement.
[Previous discussion here or here or here or here or here)
There's an interesting Atlantic article here. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve its central thrust -- that ice cream has a variety of possible health benefits -- for reasons I'll get into later, but one particular quote is rather startling if considered in any serious depth:
“The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview.
St_Rev pointed out that this is actually academic misconduct, but it's worth spelling how obvious this has been for over half a decade, even as no one called a spade a spade. Mozaffarian's conclusions say, in front the paywall, that "Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk of T2D, whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not appreciably associated with incidence of T2D." Behind the paywall, we instead find that not only did his methods give as good a set of results for ice cream, they gave better numbers in most, on a pleasant and cheerful chart that the peer reviewers either did not read or did not find incompatible with the paper's summary. So at least one author, with no small career or current-day position considers this the sort of thing that you casually joke about to a national-tier journalist, who in turn considers it not particularly worthy of highlighting.
Surely this is some schmuck that doesn't matter, widdling away his days in a glorified broom closet, writing papers no one cares to read at all?
Well, no. PubMed shows 125 papers citing "Dairy consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes", Google Scholar gives over 400 citations. St_Rev points to his efforts on a hilariously bad and hilarious broad Food Compass proposal, though at least that proposal largely hit a dead end. But he's gotten appointed to federal boards by Presidents. That's not automatically going to make him the next Wansink, who managed to change contents of store shelves across America based on numbers he just made up -- it's not even like Mozaffarian's known misconduct is even a small fraction as bad! It's a nitpick, ultimately, and one that may eventually not even fall to Mozaffarian as opposed to some coauthor.
But it's not a nitpick anyone cares about.
Now, that's just nutrition science. Everyone knows the entire field's garbage, whether or not it drives policy; the literature is filled with hilarious stories like this, and not just starting from inside.
What about medicine and materials safety? Those who've read [Scott's recent review of Rob Knight's From Oversight to Overkill will have seen a small mention of research misconduct:
This changed in 1998. A Johns Hopkins doctor tested a new asthma treatment. A patient got sick and died. Fingers were pointed. Congress got involved. Grandstanding Congressmen competed to look Tough On Scientific Misconduct by yelling at Gary Ellis, head of the Office For Protection From Research Risks.
The full story is a little boring, so to tl;dr: Doctor Alkis Togias proposed a study where healthy volunteers would first reduce some parasympathetic nervous system response using hexamethonium bromide, then use to methacholine induce asthma attacks. By doing so, they could better understand the role the parasympathetic nervous system had on asthma.
((name recognition is !!fun!!))
While methacholine was commonly used for this purpose, hexamethonium was not; it had started out as an anti-hypertension drug and had largely fallen off the market as other, better drugs in that class arrived. This wasn't exactly a treatment, contra Scott, so much as an attempt to test specific models of asthma. In many ways that made the death of a volunteer in the trial more shocking. It's not entirely clear what exactly happened -- Ellen Roche first reported feeling ill before the hexamethonium exposure -- but it's pretty likely that the drug was a large part of why her lungs failed. What drove the sizable regulatory response, though, was that the risks of Hexamethonium Bromide exposure were Known in older literature... kinda.
Togias had four studies safe showing use of the drug, some for similar pulmonary research. Older papers pointing to some were harder to find at the time, but even if located it's not clear how relevant they'd be. The studies he did locate were small studies, totaling only 20 participants, but not only were they allowed under similar IRB reviews, they didn't describe even minor complications.
... with an emphasis on "describe":
It's not clear how robust the other three studies were, when it came to accurate description of the observed behavior, but that single study would have given 10%, alone enough reason to take a closer review. (Lest this come across as a defense of Dr. Togias, one of his own patients had this class of side effects just days before Mrs. Roche's fatal exposure; Togias did not report those complaints nor wait until the ill patient recovered.)
In the intervening decades and in response to the death of Mrs. Roche, medical studies have expanded the extent side effects are reported to review boards. If you wonder how well that would have help someone reading through the papers, who did not have access to the internal review board records of distant schools? Well...
Space is an in thing right now, so what about space? 1I/‘Oumuamua is a space thing, that got into a lot of news reports as the first interstellar object, including this paper in Nature arguing that it was an ice comet with some interesting traits. In response, Avi Loeb argues instead that the calculations used in the Nature paper are entirely incorrect. Which happens, if true. What's more interesting is how Loeb claims Nature responded, when faced with a question of fact:
By now, the Nature paper was celebrated by science journalists worldwide. When I informed one of them about the temperature miscalculation earlier today, he told me that his journal will not post a correction to its original report in order “not to confuse the readers.”
Now, Loeb is a bit of a nutjob eccentric advocate of thinking outside the box. And we only have his word that his physical models are more correct, or that Nature editors say what he claimed.
Of course, if he is a nutjob, he's a nutjob feted by a hefty list of big names and organizations, including Harvard and the President. More critically, he's got no shortage of papers in high impact journals, both conventional papers and op-eds in Nature, none with asterisks. So either Nature isn't willing to correct a paper whoopsied thermodynamics, or is willing to publish this style of author, or both.
Well, it's not like normal people do anything with space. Outside of speculative fiction and some astrophotography, few of us are ever going to need to think more than a few hundred miles away from terra firma. Even for scientists working in the field, it's not like anyone's putting Freeman Dyson's blueprints to action. So there isn't much value riding on things, really, beyond people's egos.
Speaking of egos, anyone heard of the Hirsch-Dias feud in superconductors? Jorge Hirsch is best-known for the proposing the H-index metric in academic publishing, but more charitably also for a number of models to explain high-temperature superconductivity. Ranga Dias is the leader of a team working out of the University of Rochester, doing high-temperature high-pressure superconductivity work, some of which conflicts with Hirsch's models. If you read a pop-sci article about carbons-sulfur-hydrogen superconductors, metallic hydrogen, or lutetium hydride, his lab's the actual group in question. The two don't like each other, and it's been a recursive mess of papers seeking retractions being removed. Right now it's looking mostly like Hirsch called it, though there are still some Dias defenders, in no small part because a few of the challenged works were replicated or 'replicated' by other labs collaborating with Dias. The latter option is a damning indictment of international condensed matter research.
I don't own a diamond anvil. There's only a few major labs around the world that do, and of those not all experiments are trying to replicate this stuff. Why would anyone care?
(Outside of diamond anvils being pretty expensive to use as glorified magic-8 balls, and teams of physicists not being cheap either.)
There was a snafu around a different proposed superconductor in August, with significant coverage and attention after a coffee merchant on Twitter gave pretty long (and somewhat overstated) list of possible (if not likely) benefits. Somehow, the grapevine produced a feeding frenzy as increasingly varied hobbyists tried to mix the stuff up, sometimes literally in their kitchens. It turned out to not work, to the surprise of absolutely no one who's followed superconductor revolutions in the past. Indeed, the biggest surprise is that this seemed to be an honest and weird result which simply failed to pan out, rather than the typical fraud or instrument error.
Dan Garisto criticized this while the various LK99 replication efforts were cooking, as science as a live sporting event, where hype distorts funding and attention to near-random focuses. It's a little awkward a criticism coming from Garisto, who's a 'science journalist' himself with no small impact on where people focus (and it's not clear Scientific American proper lives up to his standards, but it's not wrong: several labs looked at and spent a couple days reviewing a series of papers that otherwise would have only received minimal attention. That's why we're pretty sure the initial experiments were performed as described, but mismeasured diamagnetism and semiconductor behavior. There's still some people looking at LK99-related research, and I might even put it very slightly more likely than all of Dias' work panning out, but that's damning with faint praise.
The alternative to serious replication isn't "we saved time on something from testing something that was useless." It's not knowing, one way or the other.
Which gets me to my actual point.
EDIT: Not just that ice cream clearly harmful or healthy, or that hexamethonium bromide's harms were or weren't known, or Dr. Togias was or wasn't responsible for Mrs. Roche's death, or 1I/‘Oumuamua is or isn't a comet, or carbons-sulfur-hydrogen or LK99 superconductors work or don't work. It's not even that we don't know about these things, or would struggle harshly to find them. I can give answers, to some small extent and with little confidence.
It's that you shouldn't or can't treat these massive systems as much more earnestly engaged in finding those answers than some rando online, and you shouldn't trust that much, either.
(For the record, probably not great or bad barring diabetes and the numbers are a selection effect, dangerous but undocumented, not really but should have tried harder, it's a rock, no, no.)/EDIT.
As a concrete example, I'll point to this paper. I have absolutely no idea if it's real or not. The entire field of covetics has an absolute ton of red flags, most overt in the sheer extent and variety of claimed benefits, but also the extent some papers look like someone just shook a can of 'nano' prefixes onto the summary to spice things up. On the other hand, while Argonne National Labs does that buzzword-sprinkling too... well, Argonne doing it is a pretty strong point in favor of it not being completely made up. For whatever it's worth, there is no wikipedia page, and Dan Garisto (and Scientific American) haven't found it worth examining.
But describing it as copper++ or aluminum++ is... if a bit of a exaggeration, not much of one. For a tl;dr, the proposed material trades off some additional manufacturing complexity (and ultimate bend radius) against vastly improved hardness, flexural strength, corrosion resistance, heat- and electrical- conductivity, even some weird things like capacitance. There are few fields using these materials where this would not have significant benefits.
If real.
Even if 'real', to any meaningful extent, it may still not be useful: there's a lot of manufacturing constraints, and the very traits that make it impressive-sounding may make it too annoying to work with. Great conductivity is a lot harder to use if the material can not be reasonably drawn as wire, for example. Excellent corrosion resistance doesn't help if it's tied to vibration microfractures, as early titanium development discovered.
But even before those considerations, there's a bigger problem that I'm not sure I can trust any of this more than some random youtuber mixing up the stuff. The literature has a lot of conflicting claims, which might be a process matter and might be more serious fucking around; the real-world progress of the lab supposedly doing the most with the stuff (maybe holding the patent?) literally involves a RICO suit. Weird behaviors like that are common-place in scientific and industrial developments that end up working out! They're also a lot of skulls.
In an ideal world, I could feed the academic literature into a big spreadsheet, average things out, and get a nice number. In this one, I can get a number; I'm not sure it wouldn't look like this.
And this is a case that matters, in the way a lot of science really matters. You could, as an individual or small business -- pending licensing agreements -- make or purchase a batch of this stuff, today, and implement it, perhaps with a sizable amount of trial and error, and if it were real, find significant benefit.
Would you want to make that bet? Because in a revealed preferences sense, no one has yet. And while every business decision is a risk, there's reasons this risk seems undesirable, despite hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of past efforts supposedly promoting public understanding.
What happens if someone does? I'm not sure even successes would be well-documented, but the academic disinterest in negative replication, even from fellow researchers, is well-known. I don't expect it would be taken any better from industry randos, were tired businesses in a huge rush to document their failures. Would even moderate success be something that could be meaningfully presented through academic means? How much could any mean, if an author or publisher can choose to drop any detail they want from discussion and still be taken seriously long after?
Or is this the sorta sphere where magics, in both the optimistic and pejorative sense, just float forever slightly out-of-reach?
gattsuru
5mo ago
Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say. Witnesses said Paul Kessler fell and struck his head during a confrontation with protesters Sunday in Ventura County, the sheriff's department said. He died Monday.
Authorities in Ventura County, California, are investigating the death of a Jewish man who was injured during a confrontation at dueling rallies over Israel and Gaza died Monday, the sheriff’s department said. Witnesses said Paul Kessler, 69, "was in a physical altercation with counter-protestor(s)," the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. "During the altercation, Kessler fell backwards and struck his head on the ground,” it said.
What a horrible freak acci-
Paul Kessler, 69, died at a hospital on Monday, a day after he was struck during pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations at an intersection in Thousand Oaks, a suburb northwest of Los Angeles, authorities said.
Witnesses said Kessler was involved in a “physical altercation” with one or more counter-protesters, fell backward and struck his head on the ground, according to a statement from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. An autopsy Monday said Kessler died from a blunt force head injury and it was homicide, according to the Sheriff’s Department, which said investigators hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the act was a hate crime.
Well, it's unfortunate and tragic to have a real-world example of the eggshell skull rule, but (ed: cw, video of a man dying)-
A witness to the pro-Palestine protest that led to the death of Jewish man Paul Kessler today railed against local police for not arresting the man Kessler argued with - as new video shows the protest continued on even after police arrived at the scene... Witnesses say he and an as-yet unnamed Palestine supporter started arguing, and that it led to the man hitting Kessler in the face with his megaphone.
A police officer is seen on video asking an unidentified man, who is unconfirmed if this is the suspect, 'So you tried to hit his phone?' With law enforcement in the background, protesters are heard chanting, 'You will burn in hell; Israel will burn in hell.'
Another anti-Semitic chant can be heard, 'Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler should've smashed you.'
Oh.
Nor does the potential for things to get out of hand seem like it was a surprise (ed: cw, video of a man dying):
The man holding the flag in the photo above allegedly lifted up his shirt to show that he had a pistol in his waistband during the October 29 protest at the same corner (Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Westlake Boulevard, just north of the 101 Freeway). Police were called to the scene, but the man left before they arrived.
It's still possible that Kessler's death had some complications, if extraordinarily unlikely. This is Ventura County rather than LA proper, so I think there's at least a chance that genuine prosecution could happen should the death be clear manslaughter or negligent homicide. The suspect has at least been stopped and questioned and is supposedly cooperating, though the amazing lack of any video of the 'confrontation' itself seems to be a complicating factor.
There's no outrage from the conventional sources, or the Biden or White House twitter accounts. There's nothing from the various ACLUs; quite a lot of people who I respected and had strong feelings on political radicalization must not have heard of it. The communities that spent a lot of time hunting down fascists and Nazis to punch and dox don't seem particularly interested by literal invocations of Hitler. And the lack of any arrest despite a clear suspect makes a bit of a mockery of all the people who in the Rittenhouse era proclaimed that any death required a prosecution and a trial. I guess to their credit (if damning with faint praise), the ADL has posted.
I've written at length about the extent and efforts pushing speech and speakers out of the public square have gone, and it's difficult to see this outside of that context. Worse, the lack of backlash seems a justification and legitimization of that behavior.
Which seems noteworthy in a few ways. There's no shortage of right-wing or Red Tribe examples, but Kessler, notably, was not. I'm not a fan of perspectives where only the cleanest hands make acceptable figures to bring forward -- to borrow from Mencken, defending freedom sometimes means defending scoundrels -- but I'll spell out when even that does not seem to be enough. It's not about X as a principle goes to this.
And at a deeper level... @FCfromSSC did a very good tactical analysis of the situation around violence at public protests in the context of the De Oñate Statue shooting. I don't want to extrapolate too hard from this case yet because it could end in a hard conviction next month. But it's looking, if anything, too rosy.
The Reload reports: (previous discussions here, here, and indirectly here).
The Center For Disease Control (CDC) deleted a reference to a study it commissioned after a group of gun-control advocates complained it made passing new restrictions more difficult.
The lobbying campaign spanned months and culminated with a private meeting between CDC officials and three advocates last summer, a collection of emails obtained by The Reload show. Introductions from the White House and Senator Dick Durbin’s (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered. The advocates focused their complaints on the CDC’s description of its review of studies that estimated defensive gun uses (DGU) happen between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year in the United States–attacking criminologist Gary Kleck’s work establishing the top end of the range.
“[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, one of the attendees, wrote to CDC officials after their meeting. “It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value – even as an outlier point in honest DGU discussions.”
Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), argued Kleck’s estimate has been damaging to the political prospects of passing new gun restrictions and should be eliminated from the CDC’s website.
This isn't the first time the CDC has papered over a study giving politically undesirable answers -- it's not even the first time doing so for a Kleck paper, though at least that one had the fig leaf that Kleck misread the survey scope.
But the discussion here is unusually damning. It's possible that Devin Hughes, the guy signing many of the initial e-mails here, genuinely believes his argument that only the defensive gun uses that make it into the tiny fraction of media and police reports GVPedia has access to 'counts'. If so it's not really a defense of his logic or math, which rests on the claim that no one has found more 'confirmed' defensive gun uses than the Gun Violence Archive, when nearly everyone, including other anti-gun groups, come away from this topic with higher counts. Instead, there's a lot of evidence that GVA finds it appalling -- and could compel the CDC -- merely on the spectre that someone might reference the different numbers and might not submit to the GVA's policy goals.
To their credit, the CDC's people did not immediately fold on the topic; their initial responses are polite, but point to other reasonable interpretations of data. Against their credit, this interest faded after an unrecorded or unFOIAable Teams meeting, set up by the strongly anti-gun Senator Durbin, including the CDC's Acting Principle Deputy Director, with the Teams Meeting on either September 15th or 16th, and basically no FOIA'able discussion after that. There was no discussion in this discovery looking to talk to any of the many researchers finding higher numbers. Nor was there any point where the CDC attempted to ask Kleck -- who is on record saying the CDC has not, so it can't merely be a FOIA foible.
Worse, while playing games with FOIA redactions has long been a boogeyman of ... basically every political activist group, here we see :
“A few of just met with the CEO of the Gun Violence Archive yesterday – Mark Bryant,” he wrote. “Odd that they would be connected to the Newtown Action Alliance!”
The CDC attempted to redact Mercy’s comment about the tie between GVA and the gun-control group, but it only applied the redaction to one of the several copies of the exchange included in the release. (The agency also failed to redact the emails and phone numbers of many of those included in the release. The Reload has redacted the non-public contact information that was left exposed.)
Incompetence, perhaps? But in addition to the pages that are redacted in full under the poorly-defined b5 exceptions (probably the 'internal deliberations' prong) to FOIA, as was the above exclamation of surprise about Bryant's NAA links, it's also noticeable what isn't there are all.
Notably, Hughes claimed to have attached a slide deck from that Teams meeting. Maybe he forgot it, and missed the Outlook/Mozilla warning? But probably not. I doubt there's anything amazing in there, but in turn it's hard to imagine anything present that could not or should not be disclosed. Maybe they had a genuinely compelling argument! But if it's the same already-refused arguments repeated, it would look a lot more like the CDC's higher-ups are driven by the influence of a Senator and the White House than by anything in the data.
It's also worth spelling out one part of the process to find this, which is somewhat unusually public. MorosKostas begun the FOIA process in June, after reading a The Trace article a couple days earlier mentioning the removal had happened sometime in April. (Notably, Hughes from above is a former Trace employee.) He only got the response on December 12th. This... leaves some !!fun!! questions about political accountability; even if this particular example would not matter, five months is a significant portion of even today's extended political seasons.
((Not that it would or could matter for Durbin; for his state, this is a nothingburger, or even a bonus.))
More broadly, though, this points to a greater issue with the death of expertise. There are increasing campaigns to open up the CDC for gun violence research, often countered by gun owners pointing out a tendency for the organization to be captured by political forces, and it's hard to see this as anything but a poster child for that problem. Worse, you can point to the existing version of the page, which now reads:
Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to study design. Given the wide variability in estimates, additional research is necessary to understand defensive gun use prevalence, frequency, circumstances, and outcomes.
Emphasis added. If they ask the question enough, perhaps they'll get the answers the political activists want -- and if not, they can ask for money to try again.
gattsuru
1yr ago
And, once the grand jury investigation had begun, the legal office's emphasis on obfuscation was not limited to its 'independent' review:
On April 22, the same attorney filed another motion to quash testimonial subpoenas on behalf of three teachers at SBHS using, again, the same arguments. The court again rejected these arguments.
In this instance, however, one of the teachers was explicitly not represented by the attorney, even though he claimed to the court in a filing that he did represent her and was advocating on her behalf. The teacher said she felt pressured by the attorney into representing her, that the attorney told her not to provide the special grand jury with anything, and that the attorney tried to "shut [her] up" because "this won't look well for the schools."...
On the date of their testimony, the two school board members did not show up. The court gave them two hours to arrive at the courthouse otherwise the court would issue a capias warrant for their arrest. The board members subsequently arrived at the courthouse in a timely manner. One of the board members testified "it was based on my counsel's advice not to show up. Otherwise, I would have been here."...
Division counsel's mere silent presence in a crowded room was enough for LCSB's lawyer to claim the attorney-client privilege and instruct the witnesses not to answer the question... LCSB's counsel also inappropriately used hand signals and other methods to communicate with witnesses while they were testifying...
We received the May 28, 2021 email from the LCPS chief operating officer regarding policy 8040 and the SBHS incident in early September, even though it should have been produced months earlier in response to the April 7 subpoena to the superintendent. Instead, this email was produced pursuant to a document subpoena to a different LCPS administrator, who had their own lawyer, and not the preferred lawyer of LCPS division counsel...
Several school board members then testified to the exact same story: the chief operating officer said the incident at SBHS had to do with policy 8040 because the father of the victim who showed up at the school that day was shouting about policy 8040.
There is absolutely no evidence the father said anything about policy 8040 that day, or that he even knew what policy 8040 was on that day. No school board member could provide any evidence that what they claimed happened had in fact happened -- even though they all parroted the same story. Interestingly, multiple school board members also corrected special counsel to the special grand jury when asked about the individual wearing a skirt in the female bathroom that day; these board members were quick to claim he was instead wearing a kilt.
It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).
Unfortunately, the Grand Jury report falters when it comes to a conclusion. Despite everything above:
Unlike federal law, no Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover htis fact pattern. For those reasons, we were unable to consider an indictment against the LCPS division counsel.
It gives, in the place of criminal charges, a list of administrative recommendations. Some range from the obvious to the tautological :
The LCPS directory of safety and security needs to be more involved in situations that threaten the safety and security of students, faculty, and staff.
While others are, bluntly, so broad and vague as to be unactionable:
Strengthen avenues of support and advocacy for faculty and staff confronted with challenging scenarios that could pose a danger and/or impede learning.
To the nearly unrelated:
The superintendent's recommendation for the non-renewal of a teacher's contract should be the subject of a separate agenda item and not placed on the LCSB consent agenda.
((Presumably a teacher mentioned fearing termination for testifying? Maybe?))
It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.
NRA + ACLU
The ACLU reports:
We’re representing the NRA at the Supreme Court in their case against New York’s Department of Financial Services for abusing its regulatory power to violate the NRA’s First Amendment rights.
For a tl;dr of the background: the New York Department of Financial Services pressured several licensed insurance agencies in the state of New York from working with the NRA, citing new interpretations of rules regarding affinity programs, and allegedly while promising during backroom meetings that the DFS would allow quiet and easy remediation programs if the companies would assist. Companies that didn't jump onboard quickly received steep fines; those that showed hesitation felt fear for their license to operate as insurers. The NRA sued, and lower courts have largely allowed all responsible parties to claim various immunity, or argued that the behavior even if true would not be unlawful.
While that twitter thread doesn't go into much of the minutiae, and there's nothing I can find on the ACLU's website, the NRA's lawyers report that the ACLU will be acting as co-counsel. This has not been without controversy just from other CLUs; the third-party complaints tend toward the hilarious. So in that sense, it's a costly signal in a way that weak-kneed amici are not -- and while I'm not optimistic about this case, it's not in that ugly spot where the ACLU's presence has no chance of impact, either.
That said, it's not clear how much this case will matter for its specific actors, even if the NRA wins at SCOTUS. Vullo and New York State and all the king's horses won't be able to put the NRA's finances back together again. It's been self-insured in an increasingly lawsuit-optimized world for years already, and that's not gonna change even if Vullo takes a hit for the team. While Cuomo takes too much credit given the internal problems already plaguing the gun group, this is exactly the type of lawsuit where 'victory' means legal fees, a token financial punishment, and a promise that the bad actors won't commit the same mistakes where they could be caught. It won't even touch the current efforts to go after bank and merchant services (also, coincidentally, a group that falls under NYDFS purview!). A victory before SCOTUS might help reduce the risk of the organization's other New York and DC lawsuits from hollowing out the leadership and wearing the infrastructure like a skin suit, but we won't see the NRA be a cultural or legal force worth mentioning again in the next decade, if not my lifetime.
But a more general precedent might matter, if it could stick. For example:
FCC v. Starlink
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr writes:
Instead of applying the traditional FCC standard to the record evidence, which would have compelled the agency to confirm Starlink’s $885 million award, the FCC denied it on the grounds that Starlink is not providing high-speed Internet service to all of those locations today. What? FCC law does not require Starlink to provide high-speed Internet service to even a single location today. As noted above, the first FCC milestone does not kick in until the end of 2025. Indeed, the FCC did not require— and has never required—any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.
SpaceX and its subsidiaries have received a lot of unusual scrutiny in recent years, but most of it could at least motion around textual (if not necessarily even-handed or reasonable) interpretation of well-established regulation. Contract challenges aren't unusual, sometimes even not wrong.
Here, there seems to be little, if any, fig leaf: the king is just naked.
It's not absolutely certain that SpaceX will be able to achieve the RDOF grant requirements, and indeed the average StarLink connection today is closer to 80/10 than the 100/20 for the target (though I don't know if RDOF grantees might be focused toward the higher end of the scale). But it's far from "not reasonably capable", not least of all because the company already supports 1.3 million customers at those rates, rather than the 650k in the RDOF grant. While total capacity doesn't reallocate cleanly, the company is clearly capable of achieving scale, and on schedule to continue doing so. And Carr's complaint that this evaluation is not standard rings a sharper tone. Even after a grant is completed it's not unusual for grantees to sputter without so much as an FCC complaint. Completely revoking a grant partway-through, without much clearer evidence of non-performance or outright fraud, is an entirely different matter entirely.
I've mixed feelings about the rural internet upgrade programs and grants, even as an (indirect, non-Starlink) beneficiary, but Simington's dissental is damning in a different way : "What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it in 2022 instead?" Simington does not give the same focus on political bias that Carr does, but in many ways the problem is more damning when considered in that frame. Starlink has committed to massive infrastructure build-out and contracted with hundreds of thousands of consumers on the basis of doing a job, and consumers have worked with the company under market conditions of doing that job.
If you genuinely believed that the FCC was just being arbitrary to the scale of almost a billion dollars, rather than 'just' trying to hammer a political dissident at the President's not-very-indirect orders, that's actually pretty bad too! I just don't see many plausible ways for that to be the case.
New Mexico Carry Bans
Ping pong, hope no one ends up with an arrest record because the courts are fucking around. The public park carry isn't as extreme as the original county-wide ban, but it's still a clear violation of the dicta in Bruen, especially in a state like New Mexico. Doesn't really matter much if you can play with the court system long enough to fuck over anyone who wants to challenge a bad regulation, though.
More deeply, there's been no serious repercussions for it. During the warm-up for the upcoming legislative session, there's been more progress on an assault weapons ban than any serious rejoinder to Grisham's adventurism. The federal censure went nowhere. Citizen grand juries ditto.
Illinois v. Due Process
Speaking of the force of law being applied in random ways, Illinois just had a hearing on its Assault Weapon law. This law requires all guns in certain classes owned by certain people to be registered with the state, deadline January 1st, after which the registry closes. New ownership, or possession of an unregistered assault weapon, after that point will be a serious felony. What does it ban?
Interested parties have until Nov. 20 to submit written comments on the proposed rules... JCAR cochair Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, told reporters after the meeting that he understands some of the technical confusion over which items must be registered, but he said the law gives ISP authority to adapt its rules as time goes on.
“The existing statute does contemplate the state police dealing with this problem and allows them to amend rules on an ongoing basis. They have that authority in the statute,” he said. “So I think that problem was anticipated. And that's how the law intends to deal with that problem.”
That is, not only is the rule arbitrary and vague, it's intended to be arbitrary and vague, able to change with little notice or opportunity to register newly-banned guns. And, indeed, the current rules are in limbo and will not be finalized before January 16th at their earliest.
There's at least some comedy in the court filings (do you know what a grenade launcher is? Because the state of Illinois doesn't think you do). But while the state managed to get a unlucky draw at the district level, this didn't last very long after appeal. And the basic problem that "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril" remains, with little recognition or response from the normal set, and a long and successful campaign to splinter the groups devoted to this topic.
There was a separate and more specific hearing on vagueness yesterday, after the 'new' rules failed their last chance to get passed before Jan 16th, and perhaps we'll get an answer there before January 1st, but it didn't sound during arguments like a pause was likely. And, of course, some people will register between now and the decision's release.
How many? Uhhhh.
Maybe this would be a good reinforcement of @HlynkaCG and "refuse to be ruled", but at the risk of paraphrasing a bad Dilbert strip, perhaps for your first felony you should pick something that hasn't given the police your home address and a reason to think you specifically dangerous. Illinois' various laws don't quite amount to sending the state the exact make and model of every gun purchase (though they do for recent 'private' transactions), but it's mostly just a matter of convenience at this time.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Second, what's up with nuclear waste? Specifically, if the waste is really a nothing burger, as I see argued often, why do I see (other) experts talking about how to communicate how bad it is to people
10k years in the future. What are those other experts thinking and why are they wrong?
There are three broad classes of radioactive nuclear waste (as opposed to material only relevant in the context of process accidents, such as Iodine-131), and one other class that's kinda been stuffed into the edge sideways.
-
Random garbage that has been somewhere near an NRC regulated environment. Mine tailings, spilled coolant fluids, used safety gear, so on. They're regularly bad stuff for other reasons, like lead or other heavy metal poisons, but in terms of radiation they're not very radioactive and sometimes not radioactive at all. Were they are radioactive, they have very low bioavailability and short half-lives. Most (though not all!) low-level waste falls into this category, including all Class A and nearly all Class B in the United States, there's a variety of EU classifications.
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Very slightly radioactive stuff. Most class C or more-than-C (in the US) and intermediate waste (in EU) falls here, as do a few other industrial process stuff. This is generally actually radioactive and can have either very long or very short half-lives, but by definition it is not at risk of thermal runaway or criticality incident in any situation, and lacks other traits making it particularly dangerous to humans (ie, not very bioavailable). You don't actually get that much from nuclear power plants, so a lot of this is the aftermath of plutonium weapons production, but some amount is unavoidable. This stuff shouldn't be mixed into paving cement or pipe metal, but it's still generally pretty uninteresting.
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Ultra-long-term waste. This mostly comes directly from 'spent' nuclear fuel, though there are some research and industrial sources, or production during criticality incidents. This is the stuff that could last hundreds of thousands of years and be meaningfully radioactive at the end of it, and it has some special safety concerns for storage as putting too much in one place can cause critical events. The good thing is that this stuff is as much an opportunity as a problem: it's mostly made of still-usable fuel, or material with other common uses (eg fuel for radiothermal generators, smoke detectors, food radiopastuerization, some industrial processes). Only a very tiny minority are genuine waste and these are generally pretty easy to isolate and store; we just don't separate them right now for political reasons. (Though there are some complicated parts to doing so: among other things, they come out of the 'oven' very hot and stay hot for years afterward, and by definition have a high risk of criticality incident if not stored well during processing.)
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The actually hard one: material with moderate half-lives (10-100 years), high bioavailability, and moderate production amounts. For uranium-fueled plants, think Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, with a small scattering of other chemicals. Like the ultra-long-term waste, this mostly comes from spent fuel. These materials aren't readily useful for further fuel cycles, and aren't economical to use industrially (or don't have enough demand), and while they technically can be transmuted into other materials that are less obnoxious there's no practically economical way to do so that's been demonstrated. Deep geological storage is overkill -- the same thing that makes them dangerous means that they burn out faster -- but it does need further storage and constraints than normal industrial waste.
The steelman for anti-nuclear activists largely highlight two of these four categories. The ultra-long-term waste has special safety concerns and could be used in a matter of dangerous ways, and anti-nuclear activists regularly operate under the assumption that we would not reprocess or reuse it (tbf, we aren't right now!). Meanwhile, strontium-90 and cesium-137 are genuinely bad stuff, and while mixing it into glass works okay, we're not doing that very well either; that most of the radioactivity only lasts a few hundred years or so isn't actually that reassuring for people alive today.
((To be less charitable, some anti-nuclear activists lump all four together, so they can use the volume or mass amounts for the piles of scrap lead shielding or precautionary-principled dirt as if it were glowing corite.))
On the flip side, from the pro-nuclear perspective the reasons we're not solving these problems right now largely revolve around political decisions and simply not needing to solve any. All of the spent fuel ever produced could fit volumetrically into a football field and not even get that deep (though this would be a very bad idea!). As it is, we've sat it in a few dozen ponds across the planet, instead, none of which have gotten very full. Even including the nasty intermediate waste still just isn't that much material, and it's very easy to keep it away from any place people go. That's especially true given the security situation around these plants: there's an old joke about how unsafe waste fuel cooling ponds can be to swim in, because you'd be filled with bullets before you reached the water.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The 2nd Circuit has ruled in NRA v. Vullo:
Moreover, assuming Vullo offered to go easy on Lloyd's if it severed ties with the NRA, we have never held that law enforcement officials may not offer leniency in exchange for help advancing their policy goals, especially when those policy goals aim to minimize the influence of a noncompliant business partner that has repeatedly violated the law. And again, as noted, DFS explicitly permitted Lloyd's (and the other entities) to continue doing business with the NRA.
Most of the charges against the state and its direct actors had already been dismissed earlier, either under 11th Amendment or qualified immunity prongs. But this dismisses the last of them.
To summarize, the National Rifle Association alleged that the New York Department of Financial Services held backroom meetings where DFS told an insurance provider that, while aware of widespread violations of a specific law both among many insurers and for that specific provider, if the provider dropped gun-related clients, DFS would not bring claims against non-gun-related contracts. And Lloyd's did, demonstrably, drop the NRA, something the NRA argued in a still-partially-redacted-pleading in this case. And the NRA ended up needing to go with self-insurance, entirely coincidentally to any insurance company offering policies in the state falling under the NYDFS regulatory umbrella.
But the written settlement agreement provided to a court said that Lloyd's could still contract with the NRA. And DFS did issue a few (much-smaller) penalties against one or two other providers, after a lower court did not dismiss some of the claims in this case. So it's ok!
I should mention, to start, that this did get an amici brief from the ACLU. You could write this up as 'even the ACLU thought it was an infringement of rights', or you could write it up as principles overcoming politics (if, coincidentally, in a doomed case), or even just paranoid caution lest that whole "First they came for..." poem ring true. But not something that everyone did, and even many closer to the NRA's perspectives covered the case with less sincere analysis.
This is still in the motion to dismiss phase, two years in. At this phase, the courts are supposed to treat even remotely plausible factual claims in a pleading in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, and it's hard to read this decision as having actually done so. It's possible, if unlikely, for the NRA to appeal the case. But along with the difficulty of gaining evidence of some of the alleged specific claims (it's almost certain that the redacted parts of some affidavits include specific whistleblowers in DFS or a regulated insurance agency or agencies, and very likely that there were few enough people in those meetings to count without taking off one's shoes), this highlights both the cost and the low likelihood of success for not just this case, but this class of cases. This is not the sort of lawsuit your average LLC could afford to bring, and there are some adjacent attack surfaces that would beggar even many larger businesses in months if not weeks. The NRA could afford (insufficient) self-insurance and kept some of its normal practices going, but the writing is on the wall, and no small number of real-world programs and ranges have already begun the process of trying to build away or around its likely failure.
For another, because this is in the motion to dismiss phase, this isn't particularly useful as a truth-finding tool. It is entirely possible that the NRA's lawyer completely made up the alleged behavior. It's possible that the Department of Financial Services was actually having daily or hourly meetings threatening legal action unless regulated agents acted against disliked organizations. Indeed, a lot of the legal action on the docket revolved around staying early discovery. Which is necessary to prevent the use of the courts for harassment when bringing meritless charges... but means that the real answer is that the courts do not care.
They aren't meant to be mechanisms to resolve political disputes or find out the actual facts at controversy; at best, they settle a very small and specific subset of disputes, and the scope and limits of that process can be surprising.
A Linux Cancellation
Vaxry, the creator and maintainer of hyprland, has been banned from FreeDesktop.Org and its member projects.
Background and Dramatis Personae
The Linux pipeline to an actual desktop is complicated and made of a bunch of moving parts, buried under the actual GUI itself, following the dual Linux philosophies of having everything do one task well(ish), and filling technical discussion with as many three-letter acronyms as possible. A historically important one is the X Window System, also known as X11 or xorg, but is both long in the tooth, covers an unusually wide area of ground for a Linux component, and is incredibly janky. While incredibly important for normal desktop users, the system has a long and bizarre history, with long periods of strife or minimal development: the current FreeDesktop space is technically just an independent github competitor for Linux desktop-specific development, but in practice there's a lot of RedHat Linux people in high places, in no small part because RHEL is the biggest way to be a linux dev and actually make money from it.
In recent years, many X11 developers have moved over to create a new version that better separates responsibility between the display protocol and everything else, along with covering a number of places that X11 just made bad mistakes in 1990 has been stuck with since, and this has turned into Wayland (and some related libraries like wl-roots), developed on the FreeDesktop.org gitlab. It's not quite ready for prime-time, especially for tasks like gaming with a nVidia card, but it's getting pretty close, and there are already some capabilities (eg, multiple displays with different refresh rates) that are a single text-file mod away in Wayland and you'd have an inconsistent time with in X11.
While some existing desktop environments, such as KDE, have worked to directly port over from X11 to Wayland, many Linux devs have taken the opportunity to try Weird and New things, instead, either because the need to develop several components previously internal to X11 seems like the best opportunity for such novel task, or because they're Linux devs. One branch consists of tiling window managers: while not new to Linux (or even Windows, they've taken some increasing popularity in the Wayland environment. Two of the most popular current ones are Hyprland and Sway. Though I'll caveat that popular here means you can find people using it: there's reason it's hard to find packages for them outside, and even harder to find prebuilt distros with it enabled. (Manjaro has a Sway community iso, in case you want to make three bad decisions at once.) Both are independently developed from FreeDesktop, though dependent on the Freedesktop-built wl-roots library.
Hyprland was founded by the psuedoanon Vaxry. I've described it in other contexts as catgirl thighhigh, and even the official github glamour shots are very clearly within that ethos, with many of the community themes being even more so. You could force it to look Professional, but the defaults provide a bizarre combination of mouseless window management, varied and sometimes obnoxious keyboard combinations, a fully text-based and live-updated config system, strong support for transparency and multiple desktops virtual or otherwise, and highly performant and kinda goofy animations (and fucking default-on rounded window corners, wtf). You don't have to own a Blahaj to like the theme, but there's a cluster of personality types that it seems to appeal toward, and the other half of them involve the sorta person that can leave leekspin on repeat for five hours on a second monitor and find it keeps getting funnier every single time they see it. Sway is intended as a drop-in-replacement for the much-older (x11) i3, and [a little more professional/grognardy in its base form, for better (hypr considered a license switch in a PR without having consulted a lawyer first) and worse (manual tiling).
Like a lot of Linux desktop environments (begun, the why-is-gnome-pronounced-that-way wars have), they Don't Like Each Other. Hyprland gives Sway special thanks "For showing how 2 do stuff the overkill way", Sway's original author has written multiple blogposts over the last six months with names like "Hyprland is a toxic community". This mostly didn't matter for Freedesktop.Org, though, since it's the sorta linux space where things like an official irc server would be a little too newfangled and a little out-of-scope.
And They Kept Using Discord
Which means most of the drama happens in weakly-affiliated channels. Hyprland has a Discord server, and while its membership is a mix of Blahaj and leekspinners, its ethos is very much toward the latter. In addition to mainstay stuff like a server ruleset that might as well be summarized as "don't make me come over there", right under announcements channel is the #days-since-vaxry-was-an-idiot, and not far under that is the official list of all accepted fanart of hyprchan, the hyprland mascot. (I didn't say the leekspin side was never trans, anymore than the blahaj side solely trans.) But while the server and Vaxry were willing to tolerate and use what could charitably be called 4chan humor and more accurately be called rude and bad jokes, they do keep to the rule poc||gtfo.
In early March, a Red Hat employee operating under the auspices of FreeDesktop contacted Vaxry about things he, and moderators of his Discord, had done. And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks. However, toward the end, that employee spelled out that that "... if more bad and more recent behavior ends up coming to our attention - it can be damaging to freedesktop's reputation as well, and we would have to consider steps to protect our community's reputation". Vaxry took this as a threat, and this escalated, first with the Red Hat employee highlighting that "The code of conduct team absolutely has the right to remove you from Freedesktop.org and ban you from the gitlab instance", and then when, when Vaxry said "further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand", the freedesktop Code of Conduct team pulling that trigger, Vaxry put various comments on his blog, yada yada.
Bang-Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head.
Both Vaxry and the unnamed RedHat employee come across as prats in the e-mail chain. It's very easy to read that chain as RedHat wanting on paper an official "It won't happen again" commitment and show of contrition, especially as hypr has become a bigger part of the wayland world (there's no serious census, but hypr's userbase seems the biggest among novel Wayland compositors; hyprcursor is genuinely a major improvement over the fucked-up xcursor, and has no serious competitors). It's also very easy to see this e-mail exchange as somewhere between requiring hypr spaces to act fully under RedHat corporate norms, and more cynically hanging up a Sword of Damocles for later -- even assuming arguendo that Vaxry's behavior retroactively justified the threat in the first e-mail, it made it very clear it was a threat.
((And for various reasons it's a little concerning to have two desktop environment developers that aren't quite clear on how capitalization works.))
There's a certain irony in the stolid and more formal Sway being the Blue-Tribe-themed one, and the purple-and-pink-and-blue-everywhere unprofessional hypr-active world being the not-Blue-Tribe-themed one, but there's another sense where it's not a huge surprise.
Ostensibly, this shouldn't matter much. Yes, hyprland and wayland and wl-roots are still buggy messes. But to the extent hyprland might be more vulnerable now to Wayland or wl-roots bugs, if Vaxry can't supply PRs or even bug reports to wl-roots, it'll drive the fixes to hypr, to the broader Wayland ecosystems' detriment. There are other people using hypr that could still report it up (and Vaxry has already forked wl-roots). In practice, any dev taking hypr-like conventions, especially newer devs, can and should be a little cautious in freedesktop environments, and there's already been a slow siddle away from hypr among the influencer set. There's been calls in some package managers to pull the project after some early posts from DeVault, which to be fair have been mostly rejected; we'll see if that changes. Which still doesn't matter.
But there's a tendency among a Certain Set to talk about how cancel culture has peaked, or how it doesn't impact 'normal' people, or how it's just a fiction, and I think it's worth mentioning the examples that don't show up in google news or conventional culture war channels.
... some relevant context here:
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Massachusetts isn't a statutory 'sanctuary state', but mostly because the courts decided to do that for the legislature. Most major cities are, or have effective rules equivalent to such, for what little it ever comes up.
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Martha's Vineyard is a 45-minute ferry ride from Falmouth, and from there 2-3 hours bus ride from Boston.
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It's also ridiculously rich and notorious for large and sudden parties: the perspective that it couldn't scale to shelter for 50 really doesn't pass the sniff test.
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There has been over a decade-long and massive surge of undocumented immigrants into border states, almost none of which has particularly been focused on parts of the border which have had shelter capability. Federal ICE policies have, at the very least, minimized the ability, and drastically demoralized any interest in enforcement where it remains possible (cfe 'reins').
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There's been big mess about releasing undocumented immigrants minors in a handful of cities to relatives, 'relatives', or sponsors, which is required in by law and existed under the Trump admin but has scaled up dramatically, with a lot of !!fun!! questions about consent that would normally scare people given ICE Airlines, and abuse of the policy has probably been tied to a recent high-profile homicide.
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A lot of the scale-up of that problem is downstream of aggressively coached asylum claimants, who -- while generally not actually falling under the statutory examples for asylum -- began to be released on recognizance in far more cases in recent years. Which looks a lot like... this, just with different political goals, since in no few cases the admin just bussed the applicants to random cities (edit: which sometimes then bus them again to random suburbs), gave them provisional status, and then shrugged about things like shelter capacity, often to defang criticism about custody numbers. Which, as with other times in the past, people didn't seem to care about.
I'm not a fan of this show-boating from DeSantis, but I don't think "$12 million ‘immigrant relocation program’ Own The Libs/Desantis for President" is a very strong steelman.
For largely dull reasons... the conference became more important over time and was eventually attended by many European and later world leaders, often for many of the same reasons noted above... Nobody has ever attended his conference to hear what Klaus Schwab has to say.
Another, unmentioned and even more dull reason's that Schwab charges quite a lot for corporate access to WEF (along with a ton of donations etc), while giving free access for politicians, NGOs, and media, along with offering a lot of very favorable amnesties. That's not an unusual form of scratch-your-back just-pols-being-pals, but it's a lot about how a lot of this runs.
The quote actually came from the relatively kooky Danish socialist politician Ida Auken, who used it in predicting a kind of utopian-dystopian society, in which people in wealthy communities were prosperous and able to rent whatever they needed (houses, cars, vacation homes) cheaply, with goods delivered by drone, while a great population of poor people would live 'outside the city', struggling to survive. This prediction, a dull mainstay of science fiction from the 1950s onwards, was misinterpreted by some social media manager for the WEF as a purely optimistic forecast, and then inserted into the Facebook video.
There's a certain risk involved whenever writing dystopian fiction, as any serious reader of Huxley knows, but I don't think this an accurate summary in the slightest. In particular:
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
To steelman, there's a Huxleyian "I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard", where this is supposed to be the measures imbued into the speaker's preferences changing their opinion and perspective, rather than outside measures of value or those measures from the view of the described group. But it's a really reaching one and very hard to make compatible with the buzzword-laden groping that the writer gives otherwise: the City is nearly free, closer to 'nature' (or at least the City's version), long-lasting goods with a variety of environmental and practical benefits, yada yada. The intuitive read is not people who were poor, and it's notable that the lost are separated not by those who were obsolete by robots and AI (the viewpoint character themselves seems in this category, given "When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people."), but those who felt obsolete.
The former stems from a 2017 twitter post by the leftist magazine 'Mother Jones' (which, by the way, made fun of the idea of eating bugs) and some human interest stories by food blogs about eating bugs, which is common in some countries and so hardly particularly modern or degenerate or whatever, that noted their farming emitted less methane than cattle farming.
That's... a bit of a weakman. "Some human interest" stories are coming at a near-monthly pace not just from food blogs but a half-dozen times in the NYTimes, TIME magazine lauded a Clinton initiative, so on. "I will not eat the bug" became a meme because it keeps fucking coming up.
Now, I don't like lobster (or crab, or most other shellfish), to the point where I prefer 'imitation crab sticks' even in sushi, but I also like cinnamon in chili and pineapple on pizza: my tastes are... unusual. And as a furry, in general I kinda need to support the rule de gustibus non est disputandum. If someone wants to chew down on a nice tasty roach, I'm not gonna join 'em, but that's their opportunity.
Except one can't help but notice that this comes at the same time and from many of the same outfits also curiously interested in making beef more expensive and less available -- and you can't help notice it because the same sources will happily make the link for you. Sometimes it's for health reasons, sometimes it's cow farts, sometimes it's land usage, and sometimes it's whatever new purpose of the day pops up.
And yet it's there.
The latter phrase stems from a 2019 WEF report on housing options in densely overcrowded cities that notes possibilities in 'tiny homes' or shipping container apartments to create more 'affordable housing'. That these housing options might be much better than what the average proletarian in Chennai or Chengdu currently has was the point, rather than to force affluent American picket fence suburbanities into modern banlieues.
Again, this is a bit of a weakman. This one's a little harder to show since so many of the search times are bloated with shipping container houses, but even ignoring them as noncentral there's still an absolute ton of emphasis among an amazingly wide number of sources promoting tiny living spaces while (more importantly!) attacking and arguing for state restrictions or discouragement of more conventional living conditions. More broadly, it's also the subtext for almost every complaint about suburbia and a lot of the complaints about 'auto culture'.
And I think this focus on weakman kinda undermines your point. Contrast:
In the mid-2010s, a bizarre conspiracy theory emerged in which Klaus was a central figure in a cabal of illuminati-esque global elites who got together to plan their annual strategy at the World Economic Forum, as the conference came to be known, each year.
from your op, with the later
The argument isn't that the WEF isn't a generic neoliberal organization, it's that it's (a) powerless and (b) doesn't really stand for anything outside the status quo. The UN is also a broadly progressive organization, but that doesn't make it not powerless.
The "bizarre conspiracy theory" you originally brought up wasn't that the WEF has secret police powers and its own army, or that it's proposing some nightmare vision scifi dystopia only one man would want otherwise. I mean, I'm pretty sure someone has proposed that, if only because there's a lot of nutters out there, but it's still not the actual softball you t'd up.
It's that Schwab was a leader of a group planning their dire acts. Which, to be fair, is still wrong: he's 'just' bringing a whole bunch of people together, pointing the ideological to the powerful, and selecting which match his viewpoint. As you say, he doesn't have the breadth of vision or charisma to really drive people. But that still does have a ton of powerful people and corporations meeting and listening to his carefully-selected goals that happen to overlap with theirs, which they often go out afterward to use their power to implement.
That tells us that if Schwab made the wrong stock picks and went backrupt and the WEF disappeared, these positions wouldn't go away. The commonness of this sort of giant coordination conference, if seldom so high-profile or large-scale, tells us that it isn't and never was the only coordination mechanism. But it doesn't tell us whether the WEF acts as a significant coordination mechanism.
I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.
I'm... not sure this is a good model. This is from a little over a year ago, and it's not exactly slowed down.
Since, the RPGNet forum has a new header, proudly informing everyone that "With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions." A quick look through the rules forum shows examples like this. The person who ran a Minecraft server I contributed personalized code for wrote, casually, about how proud they were to have personally punched a Prop 8 funder. I've got a lot of sympathy for the Quilt side of that culture war, but it's not like it's hard to find loads of conversations in the Quilt Discord hunting for even a sniff of 'right-wing' alignment and shutting down conversations or people they see as doing so. There's been a 'fun' battle in a STEM outreach organization I volunteer for, less about the LGBT and pronouns pins (fine), and more about any team where the mentors show too much discomfort with them (understandable if not great), and what needs to be done to move students (little paranoid) and resources (problem!) around that.
Now, people have a right to not be perfectly accepting and making everyone feel safe, competing access needs, yada yada. But it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and self-identifies as a duck.
But at a deeper level, I think the inability to even think of anti-racist slurs is... kinda showing a big blind spot. Even for that specific example! Karens (and their distaff Kevins), MAGAtards, so on, are all 'about' racism. Do you think "Nazi" is a real specific term describing an ideology, or a boo-light? How about "reactionary", whether on twitter or coming from the President of the United States? And that's ignoring the complex ones, like 'alt-right' or 'white supremacist/nationalist' (which sometimes actually means that, rarely even by self-identification, but just as often means 'somewhere to the right of President Obama in 2014).
And it's not like those are special. Outside of race, "gun nut" was reclaimed, but want to know a place where you can call people groomers on Twitter? These aren't slurs in the sense that a lot of the progressive movement cares, and I've had long debates with TraceWoodgrains about the bounds of it... but that's kinda the point.
Colgan Air 3407 was a 2009 aviation disaster, where regional commercial airliner on final descent to Buffalo New York stalled and crashed, killing all on-board and one person on the ground. For those interested in more precise details, the NTSB report is here, while MentourPilot has a video breakdown of the timeline and personnel here.
The majority of US airline disasters leave an impact on airline regulation and aviation in general, if sometimes not quite enough, or only after a delay. While far from the most deadly western air disaster of the the time, or even the worst western stall-related crash of that year, CA3407 had an unusual impact. Where older historical reports are filled with tragicomedic disasters and near-misses, the majority of recent accidents tend to rest on extremes, where either mechanical problems coincided with areas well outside of training focuses encountered pilots who made heroic efforts, or where pilots operated with long periods of outright disregard for safe operations, with perhaps a scatter of situations where bad practices mixed with mechanical error.
Instead, CA3407 fell due to a few seconds of phenomenally bad judgement by its captain encountering a spurious stall warning. Stalls are caused by insufficient lifting force on the wings, usually due to insufficient airspeed or high pitch (more rarely, extreme icing). Stalls and especially low-altitude stalls reflect fundamental aspects of flight, and pilots will do simulator (and sometimes real-world) drills both directly focusing on them, and on weather conditions that can induce them, such as microbursts. They're probably just up there with single-engine-out procedures for matters that a pilot should know by heart.
The normal behavior for a low-altitude stall is to give as much engine power as possible, with wings level to the horizon, until airspeed recovers. Instead the captain instead increased speed to a lower threshold and then pitched up well above the horizon -- a behavior that would have doomed a stalled aircraft had that warning been correct, and in normal landing profiles initiated an extreme stall. Worse yet, the time between the initial spurious warning and impact with the ground was less than half a minute; the aircraft was probably only recoverable in the first five to ten seconds, making takeover of effective command by the first officer impossible. While the first officer may not have been physically able to override the pilot's erroneous control behavior, if she had been willing to defy protocol and procedures, her response of lifting flaps was likely not harmful but neither procedurally correct nor helpful.
Like most incidents, there was no one single cause. The NTSB mentions pilot fatigue (and first officer illness), weather, flight manual inconsistency, and the combination of a first officer new to commercial flying with a pilot-in-command who had just moved to a new aircraft, among others. Training at the time would emphasize maintaining altitude during recovery, which made historic sense when terrain and obstruction information around airports was not always great and aircraft power profiles looked different, but was increasingly outdated around modern airports and unrealistic in modern aircraft.
But pilot capability was the big one. CA3407's pilot-flying and pilot-in-command had many hours experience, but also had a spotty training and especially checkride record. Checkrides can be considered the 'tests' for aviation certification, where the pilot flies along with an FAA-registered designated pilot examiner to undergo certain practical tests. The pilot in command here had four checkride disapprovals (effectively failures) across his career. While individual disapprovals at checkrides are not uncommon and do not necessarily indicate serious problems if corrected, these tests are neither convenient nor inexpensive to set up, and a pattern of first-attempt failures can, to quote the NTSB report:
"However, the captain’s established pattern of first-attempt failures might have indicated that he was slow to absorb information, develop skills, and gain mastery or that the training he received was not adequate. This pattern might also have indicated that the captain had difficulty performing required skills while under the stress conditions associated with a checkride."
((Though the FAA does not necessarily agree here; it holds that there is almost no correlation between checkride failure and later citations... which is a bit streetlamp-examination. But where CA3407's pilot would be in the bottom 5% of commercial pilots by simple count of checkride disapprovals, I absolutely agree that this isn't proof he was in the bottom 5% of commercial pilots by ability.))
This issue gained additional poignancy in public awareness due to the voice recorder conversations shortly before the crash, where the first officer discussed her unfamiliarity with icing conditions before being hired to Colgan, and the pilot mentioned his own employment history with the company.
Flight certification is heavily controlled by a new pilot's logged flight hours, with different licenses and certifications requiring certain thresholds or conditions of hours in a pilot's logbook. These hours aren't all literally flying, with some complex rules about what simulator hours can be logged in different grades of gear. Since an hour of flight can cost 100-300 USD/hour (and even BATD/AATD simulator time isn't free), including fuel and aircraft maintenance, optimizing hours someone else is paying for matters a lot.
Before 2009, one common route for new pilots involved self-funding their way through the private pilot's license and commercial license with instrument cert, which usually meant 150-300 hours, then zooming off to whatever regional airline needed first officers. While those first officers would not (and could not, legally) be pilots in command for the next 1200-1350 hours of flight, they would still get experience as pilots-flying and have time with various airline training and currency checks. Only then could they apply for an Airline Transport Pilot license, necessary to operate as a pilot in command. In theory, this would give a lot of experience in a variety of environments, most closer to 'real' pilot operations and some of which (like icing or flying near New York City) general aviation avoids like the plague, while still having the eyes and hands of an experienced pilot nearby to watch, and to catch any obvious faults.
After 2009, that was illegal. In response to CA3407, Congress passed the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010, which along with mandating a system for employers to more readily learn about applying pilot's past records (not finalized until 2021!), mandated that both the pilot and copilot of a commercial scheduled operating have an ATP. While a few exceptions were carved out (a new license, the ATP-r, was made available for pilots with a four-year pilot's degree, or two-year pilot's degree, or military flight training, at 1250 hours, 1000 hours, 750 hours, respectively), this rule remains today, and it has had no small effect on both the availability of airline pilots and their possible career paths. That's not as vast a change as it appears at first glance -- almost every airline had stricter hour minimums for hiring -- but it still significantly increased the number of hours a pilot would have to get on smaller aircraft first.
The argument is that many first officer roles would look to have a lot of varied flight experience, while not actually flying a plane most of those conditions. Pilots had to get a certain number of hands-on-stick landings to maintain currency, but a pilot-in-command would and often should take over landings and takeoff from a first officer in bad weather or awkward conditions. Especially in recent years, a lot of time would be flying the computer to set autopilot controls and monitor instruments mid-flight. To the extent small problems might show up, it would be very hard for documentation of those problems to show up if a pattern of. By contrast, flying a contract plane or as the flight instructor leaves you responsible for the safety of flight, and even recovery of a serious incident can and often is recorded.
And that argument is controversial. For CA3407 specifically, both pilots had significantly more than 1500 hours at the time of the crash, and while the pilot had earned most of his pre-Colgan hours at a flight school emphasizing bigger birds, the first officer had earned a lot of her hours as an instructor in a flight school. It's not clear that the theoretical argument applies, and there are some arguments against it. While not all arguments against are all well-founded (the rule is a little more complicated than allowing you to just log a thousand hours of tethered hot-air balloon time, even before considering that even overseas airlines would laugh you out of the office: pilots everywhere hate ballooners), some are more reasonable (flight instructors and flight schools will avoid many of the critical conditions and some aren't great about required incident reports, general aviation equipment in even newer aircraft is vastly different than even old airlines). While some groups like airline pilot unions have been strong advocates for the rule, there's reason MentourPilot and AOPA argues against it -- and there's more general-aviation pilots wanting in than airline pilots pissing out. Funding 1500 hours or a 4-year-degree in aviation is ludicrously expensive, and while some commercial operations remain legal for commercial-equipped pilots, the whole ecosystem is a mess, with a glut of flight instructors and contract pilots mixed with shaky demand for training and contract work. On the other side, when airline pilot demand is high, this has lead to flight 'clubs' or 'schools' that exist solely to burn hours and gas at the bare minimum of familiarity, or even airlines 'hiring' near-threshold pilots to build their last fifty or hundred hours in a rush. These markers are (and even pre-2010, were) disfavoured in airline hiring practices, but their increased prevalence makes them harder to filter out. The limited availability of pilots has even lead to consideration of tradeoffs against other forms of fitness, such as boosting the mandatory retirement age or decreasing flight medical rules. I'm generally against it, albeit not very strongly.
Ultimately, if this rule is a test of merit, it's a weak indicator, and selected more for convenience and politics than as the best option.
But enough about such culture war questions like pilot training requirements or FAA reporting guidelines. You know what nobody hates each other about yet? Race and (dis)ability!
Wait.
The FAA promotes diversity, and has for some time. Insert the joke about autistic people and transportation obsession here. The matter, however, got some increased traction after A Certain Someone on X Twitter highlighted a few sections of a Boeing DEI statement, and this quickly turned into discussion about what exactly that might mean, especially as diversity might include air crew entirely of one race for a flight (Canada, not US). And to be fair, there are no small number of nuts to pick who blame DEI for every fault, or popular idiots who think everything the FAA does involves their eyeballs, or who are using the matter as a poorly-camoflauged way to hate black people.
I am and long have been skeptical of the racial explanations for entire continents, and especially given the selection effects present for pilots, I am skeptical of any claim that African-American (or female, or gay, or whatever) pilots are categorically different in skill. Especially in the modern day, the Damoreish arguments don't apply: no one falls into commercial aviation, and everyone who tries to work in the field is fascinated by it to a large extent. What does it matter, here?
Because I have seen people say things like "The worst case for DEI is ending up with the lower end of the top 1% of candidates - where the difference between the best performer and the lower performer is measured in tenths". And there's some fair discussion whether the pilot of CA3407 was merely the lower performer, or so low he should not have been considered.
But that's not the option on the table. All the children in Lake Wobegon can be above-average compared to the country; not all of the country can be above-average compared to itself. Individual businesses or (possibly) entire fields could, perhaps, attract the 1% of subpopulations, and still remain at 1%-level capabilities: there are enough African-Americans in the United States that the top 0.1% could fulfill all pilot demand, even though I expect the majority have better things to do with their time and abilities. Piloting and the FAA are not the only places looking to fulfill DEI objectives. They are not the only one of ten commercial-pilot-sized places looking to fulfill DEI objections.
To be fair, there are other groups discrimination in hiring DEI hopes to help. We might just be downscoring half of qualified applicants in a crowded field, on matters completely and totally unrelated to their merit, rather than six out of seven.
There are ways to credibly challenge whether this is a problem. Perhaps training or experience matters more than innate ability; perhaps structure . Perhaps eventually everyone becomes a minority in some way; perhaps the position of modern equality has minorities as most equal.
But to suggest that the difference can't matter is to overlook literal piles of charred corpses. To complain that one extant metric is not optimally tied to merit while glossing over a new one that is disconnected from it does not strike as serious engagement.
President Biden has announced new executive action (... on twitter):
First: I’m pardoning all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession. There are thousands of people who were previously convicted of simple possession who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result. My pardon will remove this burden.
Second: I’m calling on governors to pardon simple state marijuana possession offenses. Just as no one should be in a federal prison solely for possessing marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either.
Third: We classify marijuana at the same level as heroin – and more serious than fentanyl. It makes no sense. I’m asking @SecBecerra and the Attorney General to initiate the process of reviewing how marijuana is scheduled under federal law.
There are some big, and not always obvious, caveats here. There are very few federal prisoners for simple possession, and most of those are border-related cases where the person will (or would normally) end up deported afterward. Leaving sale, manufacturing, and distribution charges and convictions alone is more tenable at the federal level, where most thresholds are high in practice, but it still leaves a lot of sympathetic cases in prison or with serious criminal records for what is often a bullshit crime. Even if state jurisdictions follow along, lower state and local thresholds for distribution or intent-to-distribute will have far less impact than the eye-popping numbers pot legalization advocates bring. Many of the jurisdictions not already seriously considering decriminalizing pot offenses at the state level are unlikely to find this Call On Governors very persuasive; while there is a crossover component, some Red Tribe-leaning states may consider the political nature of this call legitimate cause to adopt wait-and-see approaches at best. The overlap between pot and general soft-on-crime aren't perfect, but it's not non-existent, either.
And it's hard not to see the timing as political: this was a campaign promise, held off for over a year and a half. While a lot of friendly reporting points to requests from other politicians, that doesn't actually make it less political, even were it not their midterm election season.
On the other hand, there's limits to how much I can complain about someone doing a good thing for selfish reasons. I am not a fan of marijuana, and marijuana legalization advocates tend to get incredibly unrealistic promises for the benefits and ignorance of the costs of legalization or decriminalization. It's hard to see the drug as safer than vaping, for another matter the FDA has crusaded against recently, even for optimistic reads on the risks of schizophrenia or lung disease. But it's also very hard to consider most federal or state extant rules good on their own merits, or even legitimate uses of government power. And, notably, this route has been available to other Presidents, who had similar political benefits (and risks), and who did not take it.
((If it actually happens; announcing a policy on Twitter does not implement it. It's quite possible that the actual real-world version runs into stumbling blocks -- a Biden pardon series is unlikely to face the sort of legal friction a Trump one would, but there's no shortage of unsympathetic prisoners and very unpleasant border cases. Bulk pardons aren't unprecedented, but they may be rough in practice here. And this would easily dwarf those past examples; this isn't quite nullifying a federal statute, but it's a lot closer than anything done in the past.))
The other interesting side is this taking so long to happen. There's a lot of good reasons to be skeptical of policy polls on the matter, but support for decriminalization is one matter that's replicated fairly well in actual referendums and ballots. This is a place where federal legislative action is plausible, and also largely unexplored entirely. The actual FDA rulemaking is a charlie foxtrot waiting to happen -- emphasis on the wait, as I'm skeptical it goes anywhere in a year -- but the power of the pardon is broad. It's understandable that major politicians are less likely to have inhaled than the average American, but it's not like President Obama or Clinton were strong pot advocates, and in turn Biden's historically been almost as skeptical as Trump was.
gattsuru
3mo ago
Hawaii v Heller
The Hawaii Firearms Coalition claims:
A recent change in Hawaii law that goes into effect in January requires instructors to be certified or verified by the county police department is being used to ignore the constitutional rights of Hawaii citizens. Despite having more than 5 months to set up a process, Honolulu and the other counties took no action until now. Due to inaction or incompetence, this lack of a process means that Hawaiian citizens could be left with no legal method to obtain firearms for weeks or months after the law goes into effect.
The recent decision by Police Chief Logan to require people to be certified by nonexistent instructors means that NO ONE can purchase a handgun or rifle until after he holds a public meeting to change his previous rules to reflect the new state law. The chief has a meeting scheduled for January 9th and then must wait for the mayor to sign his rules before they go into effect. This means that until then, he has no legal process to verify or certify instructors.
- UPDATE - Honolulu police contacted me and said that they are interpreting the new law to give them 40 days to process applications. They say that this is enough time to certify instructors and to get those instructors to teach people that have previously applied trained.
The specific statute is here, with the most relevant components being :
no permit shall be issued to an applicant earlier than fourteen calendar days after the date of the application; provided that a permit shall be issued or the application denied before the fortieth day from the date of application.
Note that this is a permit to acquire; the permit to carry involves different timelines and different requirements. There's some lack of clarity here -- where HFC claims that the police stopped accepting applications on the 18th of December, the police claim that they're accepting applications and will only require the training certification when people pick up a permit. It's possible, if not especially unlikely, that the permit training process will be resolved in a reasonable timeframe, to plausibly fair ends, but if the Honolulu Police genuinely were still accepting permit applications on the 18th, their best-case timeline to meet statutory requirements has less than a week between .
There are various other issues with this statute -- like other jursdictions, Hawaii's law defies 'complies with' Heller and Bruen by changing "good cause" requirements to a "good character" one (requiring denial of a permit "if the issuing authority determines that issuance would not be in the interest of public health, safety, or welfare because the person lacks the essential character or temperament necessary"); it demands permitee applicants provide the police open access to their mental health records; it removed external validation of training courses (before this law, the NRA could certify instructors). And there's the general dissolution of trust, when gun nuts have long cited concerns that training requirements would be used to throttle or delay lawful gun ownership, and it just so happens to not be a priority for five months after the law itself was an emergency.
But the timeline provides a clearer problem of justiciability. As Illinois and New Mexico recently demonstrated, the courts are not particularly willing to step in early, but here it's not particularly clear how the courts would do so. By leaving the "certified or verified firearms instructor" up to local police, nearly-any challenge can be instantly mooted or otherwise have its factual underpinning pulled away with no more than a minute's effort, only to be upset again later (not even necessarily by bad action by the police, if only a few trainers sign up to start with!). And a court not willing to could leave this catch-22 in place for months, if not years.
Well, at least that's a one-off, and Hawaii's long been a basket case so-
California vs. Carry Permittees
In response to Bruen, California pass SB2 on September 26th, to take force on January 1st of the new year. Among many other restrictions, the law overhauled concealed carry within the state, including where a permittee could lawfully carry. Politicians supporting the law stated, both in press conferences and during the resulting lawsuits, that about the only place permittees could lawfully carry after the law passed would be a public streets and sidewalks, and that's actually a little more broad than the actual text of the law allows. There's been a few California-side gunnies who've videoed long and non-exclusive lists of behaviors that the law bans, though unfortunately I haven't seen any set to the Animaniacs country song (yet).
On December 20th a district court judge enjoined the law's enforcement, in a biting order that focused mostly on the restrictions on the right to bear arms, but didn't stop from noticing where the law was also often just built to make compliance difficult if not impossible, for example, that:
Notably, this provision poses a practical problem since a person may not approach the business with their firearm to get close enough to see the four-by-six-inch sign Section 26230(a)(26) requires without violating the statute.
This decision was, unsurprisingly, appealed along with a request for a stay, allowing the law to go into effect. On December 30th, an administrative stay was granted, and the "stay pending appeal, and the supplements, responses and replies thereto, are otherwise referred to the panel assigned to decide the merits of these appeals".
It's not clear if a merits panel has even been assigned, as of January 4th.
What happens next will depend very heavily on that merits panel. Traditionally, the calculations for a stay pending appeal would strongly favor blocking a law that hasn't yet come into play. But a number of justices at the 9th Circuit have a long history of both antipathy toward the Second Amendment and willingness to buck SCOTUS dicta; while I'm not going to say that a sizable number would never block enforcement of a gun control law, I've already winked suggestively. There are also non-trivial reasons to suspect the odds of a favorable merits panel to not be quite as simple as a dice-roll.
And the longer the statute has been allowed to apply -- four days already! -- the easier is it to imagine this becoming the new status quo.
Well, at least it's easier to get a permit, even if you can't do anything with it-
California vs. Carry Permit
Over the holidays, California DoJ also issued a intering emergency rule-making package. Among a wide variety of other regulatory changes, the process submits a new BOF 1034 CCW Program DOJ Certifed Instructor Application, which among other requirements demands application attach a copy of a certification from :
- Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, Department of Consumer Affairs, State of California - Firearm Training Instructor
- Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, State of California - Firearm Instructor or Rangemaster
- Authorization from a State of California accredited school to teach a firearms training course
And a shooting course qualification from one of :
- Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, Department of Consumer Affairs, State of California - Firearm Training Instructor
- Federal Government, Certified Rangemaster or Firearm Instructor
- Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Firearm Instructor Training Program or Rangemaster
- United States Military, Occupational Specialty (MOS) as marksmanship or firearms instructor
- Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, State of California - Firearm Instructor or Rangemaster
- Authorization from a State of California accredited school to teach a firearms training course
At least from a casual read, this looks to be in explicit conflict with relevant California statutes, which also include the Civilian Marksmanship Program and NRA. It's also... not especially clear if any of these programs exist and are available to normal people: of the few that aren't explicitly tied to law enforcement or military training, like the State of California accredited school firearms training course, are still mostly law-enforcement-focused. ((I also wonder how well California's administrative notice law is being served by a notice for rule-making that was only open between December 22nd and December 27th.))
At a deeper level, though, it's a near fulfillment of long-standing gunnie fears that training requirements could be leveraged into otherwise-controversial restrictions. It's hard to take the requirements as seriously focused on preventing harm. Perhaps there's some argument about applied evenly-
New Mexico
An organization known for its gun buyback events is under investigation. It comes after the group dismantled guns over the weekend. San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari says he’s trying to find out whether or not the gun buyback events New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence does are legal. He said the investigation comes after community members reached out to him with that question.
“I’m still not understanding how these transactions are taking place without a background check,” San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari said.
It’s all centered around a New Mexico law that says the sale of a firearm without a background check is unlawful. There are a few exceptions to the law, but Ferrari says he doesn’t know how the nonprofit falls into the mix.... New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence actually helped pass that law. The group’s co-President Miranda Viscoli explained the difference between what the group did last weekend versus what she says would be unlawful.
Further posts from the group make very clear this is almost certainly in violation of both New Mexico's new laws, but also long-present federal ones, sometimes in hilarious ways, and that the NMPGV knew those rules.
These laws often stupid, especially in this context! Officially, a local sheriff has opened an investigation, but realistically, nothing's going to happen here but some egg on some faces. Yes, it's the sort of illegal that gets federal agents to shoot your dog and son and wife if they need to pump up their rookie numbers, but not the sort of illegal that those agents treat seriously. After all, going after political allies "would not promote public safety".
(Revealing the name behind an anonymous account of public note is not “doxxing,” which is an often-gendered form of online harassment that reveals private information — like an address or phone number — about a person without consent and with malicious intent.)
Prestige Biotech
TIME reported:
This, if anything, seems to be an understatement, since the initial federal investigation starts with:
and quickly turns to :
The AP has a... more forgiving description, though that's damning with the extent it bends over backwards. Let's all get the obvious jokes out of our systems first. My personal favorite so far is "I didn't even know there was a wet market in Fresno", but if you have a particularly good one (maybe Black Dynamite?), fire away.
There's a bit of an obvious question, here, and it's "what the fuck".
And there is a plausible, charitable explanation. Looking at the current charges that fugitive from Canada is facing, it's quite possible that this lab was genuinely making lab tests, using these viral agents and lab mice to validate each batch, and just took 'move fast, break things' to an extreme level. Even the Ebola-labeled fridge, if it did have ebola samples, could maybe be about various biosensor demands that even pre-COVID were already being floated around; it's also possible that Zhu just got the thing on discount from a normal lab and didn't wipe off the marker. If that was the case, perhaps the strangest thing is here's that the scuzzy Engrish medical stuff marketed by a fraudster with a couple different IDs with different names on them, was actually trying and moderately-'real', even if it also had tremendous unnecessary risk and iffy environmental awareness. The criminal complaint even has a dedicated note for :
... but that answer is a little complicated by rough questions about who, if anyone, has actually been looking. Beyond the CDC's apparent unwillingness or inability to test any of the samples found at the lab, it's not clear where they came from, or what Prestige would have been doing with them. Prestige mostly sold pregnancy tests, drug tests, so on.
And the charitable story has more than a few holes: none of the public documents show much evidence of Prestige BioTech's ability to manufacture the scale or variety of tests that they published, and the congressional investigation suggests that the company may have simply relabeled non-US-manufactured (and possibly non-US-certified) ones. It's illegal to import many of the found infectious agents without a license that Prestige did not have, and so the CDC may have presumed that they were provided by US companies... but it's a little worrying if some rando can order supplies of dengue or malaria without anyone caring. Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.
... but it's not clear what, if any, alternative explanation would make more sense. Assuming for the sake of argument that Zhu is an undercover agent for the Chinese government, they don't exactly need James Bond to get Dengue fever samples. Nor would someone wanting to mix up bioweapons find it particularly useful to save on shipping by doing in-situ development. Perhaps there's something particularly funky about these particular breeds of transgenic mice, and given Zhu's previous modeus operandi of stealing biotech IP that would be in line with other practices, but there's no obvious way to get there from here, and a ton of inexplicable chaff around that. Maybe if the biological samples were meant as literal chaff and contained entirely different materials, in the sense that no sane person would test them for 'normal' corporate espionage?
That's further complicated by the federal investigation's general unwillingness to conduct the sort of testing or investigation necessary to assuage concerns; even were this particular case fully in the 'scuzzy Enrish dropshipper' category, the feds don't seem to have or be interested in getting the information necessary to demonstrate that. The charitable view, I suppose, is that the CDC runs into variations of this problem a lot (!) and doesn't think there's much to be gained from knowing the scale of the issue (!!) rather than simply spooling up the vacuum cleaners. Which... isn't especially good.
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