Another retreat from arbitration

Now it’s Amazon that is deciding to run away from arbitration:

We wanted to let you know that we recently updated our Conditions of Use.

One of our updates involves how disputes are resolved between you and Amazon. Previously, our Conditions of Use set out an arbitration process for those disputes. Our updated Conditions of Use provides for dispute resolution by the courts.

Please visit https://www.amazon.com/conditionsofuse to read our updated terms in full.

As always, your use of any Amazon service constitutes your agreement to our Conditions of Use.

Thank you,

Amazon 

There are several reasons for this. One, of course, is the fact that the companies now know that arbitration can cost them tens of millions of dollars even when the arbitration companies and the arbitrators are bending over backward for them and breaking both the arbitration rules and the law in their favor. Even when they win, the state courts won’t uphold their awards because awards against consumers are egregious violations of the California law where most of them are headquartered.

The second is that California is tightening its grip on the arbitration companies. The arbitration companies keep trying to worm around the law, so the legislature keeps passing new and more rigorous laws, such as SB 762, which has been passed due to the way JAMS has repeatedly tried to wiggle around the requirements of the previous year’s SB 707. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the California legislature eventually strips the arbitration companies of the legal immunity that the courts have conveyed upon them through case law.

But the third and most important reason is that the U.S. Appeals Court for the Second Circuit in New York recently agreed to review a lower court’s ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects big tech companies from civil rights liability. The big tech companies lean very, very heavily on this ruling, and it’s probably not going to hold up to the Appeals Court review, being a very stupid ruling that has permitted the tech companies to play editor without being liable for an editor’s responsibilities.

The case of Domen v. Vimeo came about after Vimeo, an Internet video-hosting company, terminated Church United’s video streaming activities after it featured videos of five men and women who left the gay lifestyle to pursue their Christian faith. Vimeo claimed that its terms of service bar streaming videos that promote sexual orientation change therapy. Church United is led by Pastor Jim Domen.

A federal district court had previously held that Section 230 exempted firms such as Vimeo from civil liability and a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling.

However, as a result of the July 16 decision, the panel’s ruling will be reheard before the entire Second Circuit. The Second Circuit covers six federal district courts in three states, including New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.

“This ruling puts Section 230 immunity in the crosshairs of judicial review. We suspect that the en banc court recognizes that Big Tech is not exempt from state and federal civil rights laws,” said attorney Robert Tyler, general counsel for the California-based Advocates for Faith & Freedom. His law firm, Tyler & Bursch, represents Pastor Jim Domen and the California-based Church United nonprofit.

The line in the sand

The Littlest Chickenhawk may not care about the demographic destruction of America and he doesn’t hesitate to support left-wing corporations, but he does draw a line. One guess where….

The elimination of England

England is going to need to field a starting 11 comprised completely of foreigners at the next Euros if this plan to “vaccinate” all English children is implemented. If there even is a Euro 2024.

Every child in the UK could be offered a Covid jab by the end of the year, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi suggested today. 

No10 is set to unveil plans to immunise Britons aged 12 to 16 who have underlying health conditions or live with a vulnerable family member. The plans will also see 17-year-olds who are months away from their 18th birthdays offered a vaccine.

But ministers will stop short of opening the rollout up to all healthy youngsters until more safety data is collected in places like the US, where it is already happening.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation — which advises No10 on the inoculation drive — will also review data from ongoing trials of Pfizer’s jab in children as young as two. 

This isn’t merely insane. It’s overt and egregious genocidal evil. Children were already at ZERO risk from Covid back when it was 16 times more lethal than it is now. And that “very low risk” of heart inflammation is still INFINITELY greater than the risk from Covid.

If a parent whose child is harmed by one of these utterly unnecessary fake vaccines hunts down and murders every single politician and scientist responsible, there won’t be a jury in the world that will convict them.

Even the official medical line doesn’t claim that Covid vaccination will benefit children in any way.

Healthy young people and children, become seriously ill with Covid extremely rarely, so there would be few direct benefits for them of vaccination but it would contribute to increasing population immunity. 

I previously observed that anyone who gets vaccinated is retarded, unable to correctly calculate risk/reward ratios, and has failed the Darwin test. And that is undeniably true. But it may be even worse than that, because now it’s becoming increasingly apparent that those who have been vaccinated are voluntarily participating in an experiment that may be more intrinsically evil than the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, and the Black Plague combined.

UPDATE: Boris Johnson has proven to be an evil bastard in the end:

Boris Johnson threatens young people with vaccine passports for nightclubs and mass gatherings unless remaining 30{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} get their jabs.

Remember, Covid now poses less statistical risk to these young people than drinking alcohol, driving cars, or socializing with vibrants does. And I don’t see Boris attempting to eliminate any of those things.

The silent war

 Someone is reportedly attacking US diplomats around the world:

The mysterious “Havana Syndrome” illness, which some intelligence officials believe might be a microwave attack by foreign actors, has claimed another 20 U.S. diplomatic and intelligence personnel victims abroad since President Joe Biden took office.

About two dozen U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and other government officials, in Vienna, Austria, are experiencing symptoms like the brain illnesses experienced by staff at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, in 2016, New Yorker magazine reported Friday.

The symptoms include hearing high-pitched sounds, steady “pulses of energy” in the head, pain, nausea, dizziness, and several other “bizarre” sensations, the WebMD website said.

The incidents continued around the globe, at a U.S. Consulate in China, a U.S. facility in Russia, as well as other countries in the Middle East, Europe, and even on U.S. soil in Washington, D.C., just miles away from the White House.

So far, officials estimate the number of victims to be more than 130, many of whom report ongoing symptoms and the inability to work, according to the site.

I’m dubious that the situation is quite as mysterious as it’s described as being by the media. As one who has read Charles Stross’s Laundry novels, I think it’s fairly apparent that these “diplomats” were dabbling in the esoteric arts and have contracted K-Syndrome as a result.

Monthly vaccine doses

What sort of “vaccine” needs to be given every single month?

Thousands of long Covid sufferers are set to be offered monthly vaccine doses in an effort to beat the debilitating illness – after reports that patients can make a dramatic recovery after a jab.

More than one million Britons are said to be suffering from long Covid, with studies suggesting 400,000 have been hit by symptoms for more than a year.

This will be the first drug trial of a long Covid treatment. 

This is looking more and more like the pharmaceutical industry imitating the antivirus industry. First they create the problem, then they sell the solution. Repeat monthly. 

Scientists have no idea

They haven’t begun to grasp how well dogs understand humans:

Dogs really are “man’s best friend” and “get” humans in a way other animals simply can’t relate to. Sorry “Game of Thrones” fans, a new study finds even the dog’s closest relatives – wolf pups – don’t gel with people the same way.

Researchers from Duke University say 14,000 years of domestication plays a big part in this. In fact, man’s best friend has actually evolved to understand human gestures and look to humans for help in a way that no other animals do.

Study authors, who compared wolf pups raised by humans to dogs who had barely any contact with people, discovered that dogs still outperform their wolf counterparts in tests of their understanding and co-operation with humans. The team behind the research adds their results show dogs instinctively understand people.

I discovered today that our dogs know what “perambulation” means. I’m not kidding. We had to find other ways to discuss the possibility of going outside for a walk without using the words “outside”, “walk”, or even “the w-word”. Saying “how do you feel about a perambulation” worked for a few weeks, until today, when one of the Ridgebacks immediately leaped to her feet and barked as soon as she heard the word, which promptly set off the rest of the pack.

I wonder how long it will take them to learn Chinese?