Month: January 2023

This is why people fucking hate lawyers

I will give Andrew Branca credit where it’s due for what he’s done in the legal defense world for gun ownership.

We owe him a great deal for that.

Outside of that narrow field of expertise, fuck him 100%.

Whenever I (or Miguel or any other gun blogger who isn’t a lawyer) write about gun related legal issues, we always preface it with IANAL (I am not a lawyer).

I have never seen a lawyer ever preface an opinion with IANA[X], where X is whatever the expert is on the topic on which they are opining.

Take this thread from his Twitter:

 

And that is only part of it..

NASA other nations’ space agencies, and a number of private space companies are throwing an army of engineers and scientists at this nut to try and crack it.

I know, I was one of them.

I was working on thermal spray of boron and boric acid for radiation shielding.  Boron and hydrogen are some of the best shielding elements against cosmic radiation.

But some lawyer sarcastically explains on Twitter why it will never work so we should all just quit, pack up, and not bother with deep space exploration.

And the fact that I was applying my materials engineering PhD to this is no different than some 30-something woman looking at her douche bag boyfriend saying “I can fix him.”

I know enough to know that my amateur opinion on a topic of just that, an amateur opinion.

Lawyer, especially this lawyer, need to learn that same fucking lesson.

New York ringing in the new year with its brand

 

Multiple NYPD officers stabbed with machete near Times Square

Multiple New York City Police officers were stabbed by a suspect wielding a machete just blocks away from the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square.

The incident occurred around 10 p.m. at West 52nd Street and 8th Avenue on Saturday, a source from the New York Fire Department confirmed to FOX News.

At least two officers were stabbed in the incident, including a rookie cop on his first day on the job.

And this is why I avoid crowds and stay the fuck home for new years.

 

What is the future of Section 230

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is the part where it says “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This is a goodness when used correctly.  This means that if one of our readers posts something that is actionable as a comment, defamation or such, we as the owners of the blog are not responsible.

This is what allowed Facebook and every forum, BBS, Usenet, and blog to exist in this age of the Internet.

It is what protects our cloud provider and CDNs from being held responsible for every bit of traffic that passes through their servers or is hosted on a piece of their hardware.  In addition, it means that your service provider, Comcast, Verizon, RoadRunner, and all the other ISPs are not responsible for what passes across their networks.

A HUGE goodness.

Unfortunately it is also being misused.

The gist is that as long as you, as a provider, do no editorial actions then you are not responsible. If you are controlling the content then you are now a publisher and not a common carrier.

Consider the NYT. Every single word that the publish is vetted and approved as a publisher, legally speaking. They have the final word on any opinion published, on any advertisement that runs, any news article that they publish they are responsible for.

When a company or group takes on the role of editor/publisher they also accept that legal responsibility in a legal sense.

So what happens if a company decides that they will not publish an article?

When Twitter decided to suppress all references to the Hunter Biden story in 2020 did they become a publisher?

When Facebook or YouTube shadow bans a user or group, are the acting as editors?

At what point do they loose their Section 230 protections as a “provider”?

If the owner of a blog allows open commenting but deletes any post where the commenter refuses to identify themselves, have they become a publisher?

On Dec 19th, 2022 the Supreme court scheduled arguments for Reynaldo Gonzalez, et al., Petitioners v. Google LLC for Feb 21, 2023.

The question the petitioners ask is:

Does section 230(c)(1) immunize interactive computer services when they make targeted recommendations of information provided by another information content provider, or only limit the liability of interactive computer services when they engage in traditional editorial functions (such as deciding whether to display or withdraw) with regard to such information?

The question the defendants ask is:

Whether a claim seeks to treat an interactive computer service provider as a “publisher,” and is thus barred by section 230, when the claim targets the provider’s display of third-party content of potential interest to individual users.

This may get very interesting for Facebook, Google, YouTube and a few other players that have been using shadow bans and the ban hammer to push their point of view or to suppress the speech of those they disagree with.

Merry New Year!

May your ammo stock increase tenfold and your wallet does not get massacred. May your guns mysteriously multiply in your safe. May you have the time of getting both together in the range and have fun.

And on a serious note, start taking steps to keep yourself healthy. It is not death I fear but being half assed crippled by some sickness and depending on others that scares the crap out of me.

When the Title Is Good but Misleading

 

So I’m scrolling through my feeds when this pops up.  Now I read before I look at images and even so I’m not willing to leap to conclusions based on my memory and pictures.

This guy doesn’t seem to be Kyle Rittenhouse but maybe?  Last I saw he was a bit heavier than this, still carrying childhood weight.

Did the Hero of Kenosha fall from grace?

Nope, different person.  Just a heads up as I would not be surprised to start seeing reports about Kyle being sentenced for kiddy diddling or something like that.