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.
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.
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
5mo 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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
gattsuru
4mo 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.)
The Ninth Circus vs. VanDyke: Collegiality Edition
Duncan v. Bonta ('large' magazine ban) has had another order issued en banc. Like Duncan v. Bonta in 2021, the 9th Circuit has, to the surprise of no one with a pulse, issued a stay against gun rights.
About the only silver lining to that cloud from my perspective is a cheeky VanDyke dissent. And as you can guess when Hurwitz leads by trying to play cleanup and to bash the "rhetoric" of his colleagues (just like in the 2021 Duncan), this one's a doozy.
Where VanDyke's McDougall opinion included predictions of and draft copy for an en banc reversal that would find the Second Amendment covered nothing (which I almost thought would turn out pessimistic given Bruen, until the case was shoved to the lower court decided again that the Second Amendment covered nothing), this is 'just' an administrative stay during appeals, and normally such deep discussion of philosophy of law would be unnecessary and unexpected. Instead, VanDyke looks to the past in today's piece:
Apparently, even summary reversal by the Supreme Court has not tempered the majority’s zeal to grab this case as a comeback, stay the district court’s decision, and make sure they—not the original three-judge panel—get to decide the emergency motion (and ultimately, the eventual merits questions) in favor of the government. I think it is clear enough to everyone that a majority of this en banc panel will relinquish control of this case only when it is pried from its cold, dead fingers. And I think it is clear enough to everyone why...
"Comeback" cases reflect Ninth Circuit Rule 3.6 here. Butamay previously pointed out that he knew of literally no cases before where the 9th Circuit has taken a "comeback" case and made decisions at the en banc for an emergency stay rather than returning it to a normal appeal, and despite the majority's claims this is by-the-book it's also hard to miss that the ink on these books are so fresh. The "comeback" rules date back only to 2016. But that's just normal calvinball. Worse:
But the current irregularities highlighted by Judge Bumatay’s dissent are not the only way this case continues to demonstrate our court’s enduring bellicosity toward the Second Amendment. The irregularities in this case run much deeper— indeed, all the way back to when this case was first called en banc. This en banc panel was born in illegitimacy, and this case should never have been taken en banc in the first place.
After the three-judge panel first issued its opinion in August 2020, one judge on our court requested Rule 5.4(b) notice in three cases (including this one) but then inadvertently missed the deadlines to timely call the cases en banc under our clear rules. That could happen to any judge. But rather than simply accepting the result dictated by our rules, or even deciding as an entire court to waive our rules, we went in a different direction. First, the decision was made by someone— not by the rules, or even the entire court—to allow the respective panels to waive the deadlines on behalf of the entire court. Then, the campaign started: earnest conversations were had, hearts were poured out, tears were shed, and pressure was applied to the panels with mace-like collegiality. And in the end, a discrete collection of judges—again, not the entire court—struck a “compromise,” circumvented our own rules, and allowed the en banc call to move forward. But only in this one case. The agreement was made to call this case but drop the en banc calls in two other cases—_including a death penalty case_. Priorities.
I'd be a little interested to have names, here, but it's not clear even this description gives enough detail to go digging: GO5.4(b) notices aren't covered by courtlistener or the 9th Circuit's website.
We have a process for suspending the rules, upon a vote of the entire court. See 9th Cir. General Order 12.11. But no judge tendered a Rule 12.11 request. Instead, this was handled off the books by a handful of judges. Which makes it even worse. This off-books approach allowed the would-be en banc advocates to pressure the panels to be “collegial,” and simultaneously concealed these conversations from the rest of the court. It also delimited the scope of the question to whether we would “bend the rules” and allow some exceptions in three specific cases, which prevented the entire court from considering the weightier question of whether, as an institution, we should be suspending our settled rules for “particularly important cases.” Such agreement—however procured—does not somehow confer legitimacy.
In sum, not only is our court treating this case “special” now, but the process that brought this case en banc in the first place was illegitimate from the start. This demonstrates and perpetuates this court’s anti-Second Amendment posture, rewards the weaponization of (one-sided) collegiality, and damages the internal and external integrity of the court. How are we to uphold the rule of law, and reassure the public we are doing so, when we disregard our own rules and make questionable decisions like this behind closed doors?
To tl;dr: the 9th Circuit has broken its own rules on a case, of the exact sort of behavior normally considered a right-wing conspiracy theory, in order to more expediently fuck over the rights of American citizens, and this was not revealed for nearly three years.
Hurwitz's concurrence does not even contest this claim. Nor does any other part of the court.
I'm not going to make predictions, here. We are talking the same judges as the 2021 appeal and its effervescent logic -- judges willing to play so heavy-handed with the balancing test then will just as easily find historical relevance in their tea leaves -- but in turn there are some fun tactical considerations that might slow them. But on the gripping hand, the nature of this matter as an interlocutory review, leaves a lot of ways to diddle the schedule. There is no meaningful procedural appeal for a federal circuit court of appeals breaking its own rules, especially since the case has already gone back up and down from SCOTUS since. And there's no tort for being a rules-violating judge, even were judges not completely immune to lawsuit for their actions related to their jobs.
But one could understand why I'm very skeptical that Hurwitz's pretense this is 'just' an emergency stay will age well. And more broadly, to find that not only have the people in change of arbitrating the rules not only put a thumb on the scales -- long common knowledge -- but have broken and hidden the breaks from their own claimed process leaves serious doubt whether any one procedure in the 9th Circuit is available equally to all comers.
Well, that's just one court, albeit one covering more than a fifth of the country's populace.
New York v. FFLs
There's an interesting case going up to SCOTUS named Gazolla v Hochul, which was previously so far off everyone's radar that gun lawyers didn't spot it until Hochul wrote a vague and panicked tweet. It's not going to go anywhere -- it's a complicated mess asking for extraordinary relief of the sort SCOTUS never provides, while also being a bit nutty even by the standards of pro-gun legal buffs still trying to operate in New York after what happened to the NRA.
And while it's kinda funny in hindsight to see a nutty complaint allege a morass of problems amounting to infringement of the right to keep arms that ended up already coming true before the Court even reviewed the case, to which the state's response rests heavily on the claim that "The plain text of the Second Amendment does not cover the right to sell arms", that too is a little too common to be interesting and mostly a repeat of the Californian version back in Rhode v. Becerra.
To add insult to injury, Nigrelli did not even bother to issue state law required certification of the operational status of the ammunition background check system. NY PEN §400.02(2). The NYSP never did has not issued any ammunition background check form this entire past year, nor produce regulations for any administrative appeals process for denials of a firearm or ammunition background check. NY PEN §§400.03(2) and (6) and NY EXE §228(4)(a). The defendants repeatedly and persistently fail to comply with their own laws since the bills passed in June/July 2022 – an argument we repeatedly spell out. It defies logic that no judge, to date, has held the defendants to the limits and requirements of their own 2022 laws. [...]
The suit also alleges that the strict text of the law only allows Hochul and Nigrelli to put non-federal-firearms items through the state NICS system, leaving federal-firearms to direct FFL-to-NICS discussion, while Nigrelli and the FBI have cut all direct FFL access through the state to NICS. There's just a litany of this stuff: the laws required concealed carry permit holders to get training from certified courses where the course did not exist, for those wanting to buy a semiautomatic rifle to apply for a permit that did not exist, so on. In several cases, state police provided e-mails to individual FFLs or to the NSSF claiming they would not enforce the laws until relevant guidance was available, even as statutory deadlines were long-past, and while not provided that information consistently to all those covered, sometimes in contradictory ways.
Fine, he who makes the rules decides who has to obey them, anyone paying attention to this game knows that. Most states that have established mandatory time limits for background checks, as a similar matter, have often simply flat-out ignored them. What's new?
The state makes an error of federal law in this provision. There is no federal ammunition background check requirement or system. 18 U.S.C. §922(t) specifically and only relates to the transfer of “a firearm,” as that term is defined at federal law. It is illegal for a state to use or attempt to use the NICS federal background check system for an ammunition background check. 28 CFR §25.11. This point is briefed throughout our record.
Federal law specifically prohibits "state or local agencies', FFLs', or individuals' purposefully using the system to perform a check for unauthorized purposes" and gives punishment of "a fine not to exceed $10,000 and subject to cancellation of NICS inquiry privileges." Even to the extent state-run queries can be more expansive, as soon as they contact the FBI's NICS they must be limited to only firearms-as-defined-by-federal law (or explosives-as-defined-by-federal-law, in a way not relevant here). This was a hard-fought limit to the system, because gunnie groups (rightly!) feared that the early NICS would be misused; with marginal FFLs putting people they'd never sell a gun to through the system to trawl for embarrassing information, or to require people face daily NICS checks.
Now, Hochul claims that "the State Police are authorized to use state databases to conduct background checks for ammunition purchases, Penal Law § 400.02(2), and there is no reason to believe they will do otherwise." And she's right: even were the New York background check system's operators violating federal law, it's very far from clear how anyone could find evidence of it before summary judgement on the matter of ammunition. Except there's a few classes of guns that are not firearms by FFL/NICS rules but must receive a background check under New York law, and the web interface, the only working interface for the New York background check system, does not have a way to distinguish them. That's not proof, still -- given how poorly the system's worked so far, it's certainly possible that the New York background check system has forgotten to pass a lot of its requests to NICS! -- but while it might not be enough to it's certainly matched the low standards needed to push federal investigations in the past.
Except that it doesn't particularly matter. Even in an ideal case, this is the sort of thing that gets brushed over, simply because the rules aren't written for it. And it's very far from an ideal case, for one very blatant reason: federal law is the domain of attorneys general and the federal Department of Justice, whose lead is a man who previously reinterpreted the laws mandating destruction of certain NICS records to instead allow retention. He doesn't care.
Texas v. Ruger v. WellsFargo
Okay, well, no one would mess with Texas, would they? There's an interesting letter from Ruger today:
As you know, §2274.002 requires that any company who wishes to enter into a contract with a Texas governmental entity submit a written verification that it “(1) does not have a practice, policy, guidance, or directive that discriminates against a firearm entity or firearm trade association; and (2) will not discriminate during the term of the contract against a firearm entity.” On September 29, 2021, Wells Fargo provided such a written verification to the Office of the Attorney General of Texas. When this came to our attention, I wrote to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton questioning the verification.”
As detailed in my letter, Ruger began working with Wells Fargo in September 2018. Our business relationship included a credit facility and banking operations (operating accounts, share repurchases, credit cards, etc.). However, in July 2021, less than three years after our relationship with Wells Fargo began—and just two months before Wells Fargo provided the AG's office with its verification — our local contact at Wells Fargo informed our Chief Financial Officer that ‘Wells Fargo would not extend any new credit to us and therefore would not renew our credit line. (due to expire in September) due to “reputational and headline risk” related to our industry. ‘When pressed about these “concerns,” our Wells Fargo contact cited our manufacture of modern sporting rifles as a “red flag.” ...
Well, perhaps there was some other, more serious cause?
As a result of my letter, the Attorney General's office asked Wells Fargo to provide further explanation in support of its verification, which Wells Fargo did not share with us. Ruger ultimately filed a Texas Public Information Act request to learn of Wells Fargo’s ‘explanation, which prompted the Texas AG to notify Wells Fargo of the request and invite a response. Wells Fargo, through counsel, objected to production of its explanatory letter, claiming that is rationale for refusing to renew Ruger’s credit facility constituted “trade Secrets” and “confidential commercial or financial information .. the release of which would cause Wells Fargo substantial competitive harm.”
Perhaps Wells Fargo was only discriminating two months before issuing a letter to the Texas AG:
The problems with this assertion are many, beginning first with Wells Fargo’s own publication confirming its policy of discrimination. In its Environmental and Social Risk Management Framework published in 2022, Wells Fargo outlines its then-new ESRM policy, which specifically targets “{t]hose making, selling, or distributing arms or armaments that require licensing”. Wells Fargo’s ESRM Framework further explains: We conduct additional environmental and social due diligence on clients who manufacture, distribute, or sell arms and armaments. Through this due diligence, we assess various factors which may include relevant licensing and regulatory compliance, types of product offerings, operating procedures, reputation risk incidents, human rights issues, relevant international compliance, and implementation of risk mitigation practices
Who would expect WellsFargo, of all people, to just straight-up lie to regulators and customers, in order to receive material benefits?... Uh, other than anyone who was paying attention in 2016.
Is the problem here that Ken Paxton is insufficiently prone to using state power for political ends? That Texas does not have conservative legal actors or groups? That some review at some level would prevent the state from enforcing this law, after decades of heavily-enforced policy by other states? I would perhaps believe that such regulations only operate with a large supply of inside-industry whistleblowers, except this example is visible to the naked eye, and many left-leaning equivalents have hit fields facing as or more extreme political filtering against them.
The cynical answer’s that quantity can be a quality all of its own, and one made easier when it's other people's money. As a result, a government hoping to use this pressure must be willing to risk serious harm to its own citizens.
(But, again, Ken Paxton.)
The more cynical option is that it’s a paper tiger; the threat has no value in this context but to make a group Harvel Their Greengrocer, and that only to the extent writing the paperwork is cheaper and easier than defying the law outright. But whether those reasons are specific to progressive goals or universal, that’s a lesson one would hope people were in less a hurry to teach.
gattsuru
9mo ago
Robbers Cave was the second run at the same experiment, run specifically because the first attempt had too much cooperation between the two 'teams', and this wasn't disclosed in Sherif's paper. Worse and perhaps more critically, the paper heavily concealed the extent Sherif (in the first experiment) and OJ Harvey (in Robbers Cave proper) actively manipulated the participants to make them more aggressive or be more affected by the aggression of other participants. It's not as severely a fake as, say, Stanford Prison, but Harvey was on-record as it being a script with an intended conclusion.
Milgram had a lot of information available suggesting that a significant number of his experiment subjects knew or claimed to know that the actor was acting, enough to overturn the conclusions, along with not actually holding to his claimed experimental protocol very consistently. Which is less severe and more borderline as 'faked', but (hopefully!) worse than all social science experiments.
gattsuru
7mo ago
Charitably, people who don't care about guns or are anti-gun to start with sometimes might have seen a recent few high-profile incidents that Hit Close To Home and suddenly justified everything. This model's kinda the dark mirror to the "conservative is a liberal who's been mugged" deal: there's a lot of people who were once willing to live-and-let-live (or at least had better places to spend their political capital) who become true believers over some incident that made things too salient for them. The resulting policy proposals aren't always this hairbrained, but you're picking from a group that's by definition not considered the space at length in the past nor been heavily exposed to other people who have. Some people are people do really believe what they're doing.
But Grisham has been in this game for a while. The more cynical analysis is that she's term-limited (New Mexico governors can only serve two terms; her second ends in 2027) in a pretty Blue and increasingly blueing state (between Californian exodus, and the aftermath of the last decade worth of redistricting), and she's been working in (otherwise unemployable parts of) the .gov since 1992. There's three major career paths available where this sorta trial balloon is a major resume-burnisher even and maybe especially if it flops: either moving to federal politics, managing state-level politics, or going into the bureaucratic activism or non-technically-state-just-state-funded activist groups.
It's possible she's gunning for Lujan's seat -- he had a stroke last year, and while he's recovered might take it as a sign to retire -- or perhaps the VP slot for 2028. But more likely I'm thinking the last option. This is the sorta thing that absolutely blocks any chance of a cabinet-level position or other place requiring a senate confirmation, short of a wildly stacked Dem Senate, but it's an excellent advertisement for Acting whatevers or bigger names at think tanks or commentary positions, where this hugely visible commitment is useful to know who's likely to stay bought.
gattsuru
4mo ago
Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.
There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.
gattsuru
6mo ago
Both. It'd be a massive humanitarian crisis just by raw numbers, but every country anywhere near that area knows of Jordan's past principled commitment to generosity and absolutely doesn't want to be them.
gattsuru
2mo ago
Political actors will virtually always use whatever weapons they can against their opponents. It's not as if we've existed in a state of peace and harmony up until this moment.
This seems untrue for any sense more meaningful than the tautological one where any tool unused 'must' have not be available.
Eric Holder was not impeached nor charged with contempt of congress after the DoJ switched hands, despite his original Congressional contempt vote being widely bipartisan. Despite the fevered wishes of every progressive on the internet from 2003-2008, Dubya never faced criminal charges. Lujan Grisham was not impeached, the calls to censor couldn't even get all Republicans, and she will not be facing a hundred citizen grand juries for clearly unconstitutional executive orders; she has not so far faced a single one.
I'm not proposing people avoided these mistakes out of the goodness of their cold, shriveled hearts. Indeed, there may well have been tactical causes, or even simple ignorance or inability. And yet.
Democrats will not sue DeSantis for fraud
That's an interesting specific example to bring forward! Let's go drink from a tall glass of water and look at some headlines from a little over a year ago.
This is very much not my recollection of that election, what are you talking about?
The current sitting President of the United States, then VP campaigned against Romney by claiming he would put African-Americans back "in chains". Romney was campaigning against hormonal birth control, somehow. Romney's VP pick faced attack ads that had him wheeling grandma off a cliff. Ann Romney was a repeated target of pretty shitty media coverage that conveniently intersected with her multiple sclerosis. People were absolutely sure Romney-Ryan were going to ban gay sex, somehow! The IRS leaked NOM donation records that just conveniently happened to have his donations included, and just so happened to get delivered to the HRC.
Harry Reid famously and falsely claimed that Romney'd paid zero taxes on the floor of Congress, and after it had been widely distributed, widely believed, and at cost proven wrong, then years later said he had no regrets because "he lost, didn't he"!
gattsuru
7mo ago
Today's scheduled drama revolves around the last-minute efforts to pass a continuing resolution funding the government for 45-days, with Congress coming in on a weekend. There's a lot of complex politics going on, between a right-wing faction that seems as interested in drama as day to day governance, Democratic interests in more expansionist efforts, the matters of Ukraine, and some politicians not being present due to COVID or death. With a bill getting through the House on widely-bipartisan efforts (with 90 Republicans and only 1 Democratic Representative voting no), some Republicans are pondering whether this will be seen as an admission of weakness. The current one's a fairly far cry from the much more significant cuts that previously faced both Democratic . That's fairly standard politics, though.
Instead, we have something hilarious:
(Bowman later voted for the bill.)
There's obvious comparisons to Other High-Profile Incidents though they're pretty inapt; as funny as Bowman photoshopped into the Lectern Thief's or Qanon Shaman's faces is, the lack of trespassing does matter. Between this, Santos pretending he's a whole lot more interesting than he was, The Squad playing with edgy racism, and Boebert giving an inexpert handjob during the showing of Beetlejuice, all we need now is a pregnancy and a Congressman buying shitty alcohol with a fake id to complete the whole high school bad decisions spread. To really complete the farce and the metaphor, Bowman's background includes some time spent as work at a school that would suspend or expel people for this. Bowman's claim to have confused an alarm system and a door release is not especially likely, but it's enough of a fig leaf that I'll be surprised if the House GOP's resolution to expel him goes anywhere, let alone the potential charges for falsely pulling a fire alarm in DC. Bowman's district is 84% Democratic, so it'd not mean anything even if he were to voluntarily resign, and it's not like he's Menendez.
Maybe he'll end up with a token fine? I'd be surprised.
Which doesn't matter, but eventually you run into the "that's how escalation works" bit.
... I realize that this was meant as an off-the-cuff response, but can you provide a single example of a statue-toppling or courthouse-torching person receiving a 15+ year sentence?
Actual burned-down cars or buildings arsonists, even when doing so killed people while trying to conceal /other/ crimes, aren't getting that sort of sentence. As far as I know, even where statute-toppling nearly killed someone, as far as I know no one was convicted and the people who were charged and assisted got a sizable settlement from a local government that fired the police chief that charged them before any serious attempt at trial. Actually literally-directly-murdering a teenager in cold blood at CHOP/CHAZ? 14 years
In theory, the guy who plotted to kill Kavanaugh could by statute get sentenced to literally anything, if the court case ever starts, but if I'm reading the sentencing guidelines probably maybe he'd get 14 years at the high end?
Obviously it's easy to draw a thousand lines such that each reference case is a class of one, and there's a million ways you can talk about how all those other protests that interfere with various proceedings are totally separate such that it's absolutely reasonable for them to end with an arrest and no charges ever being brought. But it's kinda hard to draw lines without making the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy obvious.
And that's... kinda the issue. You can well say how much you hope that anything near this gets smacked down with a sledgehammer no matter who does it, but if you want to actually have a norm what matters is what people actually see happening, and the last time a progressive-themed group got hit hard for anything on this class involved a literal bombing, and even that ended up becoming a cause celebre.
gattsuru
11mo ago
There was a pretty famous one in 2013 that received NRA support, but was shot down because Dems preferred a version that didn't bother with a fig-leaf of due process.
Which kinda points to the problem. It is quite possible both for the ATF to require ridiculous levels of paperwork and come down like a brick shithouse on FFLs that don't require clients to spell out Yes and No on every line, while also ignoring a vast realm of straw or otherwise unlawful purchases (plausibly including the son of a sitting president!). It is quite possible for there to be a lot of support for Universal Background Checks in general, and then actually-written background check proposals to be so badly drafted as to require restructuring hunter education classes.
More broadly, there's also an issue where this is all very obviously just another step toward the next big restriction. We don't have particularly good reason to believe the rules that actually do get enforced actually prevent mass or spree shootings, and a lot of times they get brought up even when they very clearly couldn't prevent them (eg, several bills named after an incident where the mass shooter stole a firearm involved background checks) ... but they are great at making it difficult to be into firearms, or to get new generations into firearms.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Concord better get ready for long hot summer of battles between red hat crowds trying to tear down the sign and black flag ones trying to defend it.
Do you want to bet on it? Because even if it does bubble up to common awareness, it seems the more likely result is the first time a bunch of red hats try to tip a sign (or try to deface it using a car, insert your own more vivid alternatives involving chain here), they get arrested, the entire country uses their misogyny as an example That Must Be Stopped, the moderate Republicans denounce them, the RINOs want them hung like meat, and the Trump/Loomer axis gets distracted with an internal sex scandal instead of even noticing.
The people dropping a statute of Christopher Columbus into the sea were doing what a significant part of t he city council wanted done, but couldn't. That's how this works; it's not a sword that cuts both ways.
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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