Tag: law

The Stupidity of Greed

According to the court documents, in approximately 2014, David TR wanted to give his sister-in-law, who was working for the company, a big raise. But he felt that his wife and son who sat on the board, wouldn’t approve it. So, David Tran came up with an idea that he was going to make a new company and just give the company to the sister-in-law as a way to get her to make more money. And that new company was going to be called Chili Co. And Chili Co.’s entire job was going to be acquiring red jalapeno peppers and ingredients for Hoyong Foods. And that was going to be that that’s how he was going to pay his sister more money.

Okay, I’m going to say that again, but slower so we’re on the same page. Uh David TR has just elected to hire somebody who presumably is not qualified to take over the operation of acquiring Red Jalapeno Peppers, which is not even a job that needs to exist because he has one guy that gets him all the peppers that he needs on a handshake agreement. But for some reason, we’re gonna interject this person that doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing to try to acquire the peppers that they already fucking have.

Okay, I’ve said this a million times. If it’s not broke, don’t try to fix it. Everybody’s making literally billions of dollars selling hot sauce and growing chili peppers. Just don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Continue making money. But that’s that’s not what somebody that’s a new hire that doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about is going to do. Absolutely not. Chili Co. starts looking at the numbers and they’re like, “Well, you know, actually, we could buy these dehydrated chilies from China and they would only be $300 a ton.” So, I think that Underwood Farms should try to compete with these dehydrated chilies from overseas while he’s supposed to also deliver brand new fresh chilies that are picked and then turned into hot sauce in 6 hours while he’s growing them in California of all places.

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.

So, Chili Co. goes to Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, we could get this competitor’s chilies for $300 a ton. We want you to be able to sell your brand new fresh chilies and deliver them to us with your semis for $500 a ton. To which Craig Underwood is like, “Absolutely not. It literally cost me almost $700 a
ton just to grow these things. That’s not possible.”

At which point the appropriate response would have been, “Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense. I’m an idiot. Forget I said anything. Is that what they did?”

Absolutely not. The next year, in 2015, Chili Co. pulls Roberts, aka Craig Underwood’s right-hand man that helps him run his entire farming operation aside and tries to hire him away from Craig Underwood. Roberts declines and kind of attributes the entire thing to a miscommunication.

He’s absolutely right.

Around the same time, David TR gets a hold of Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, can we fly a drone over your farming operation? We just want to, you know, look at the crops that are growing.” Which is weird. He’s never done that before, but also like drones are new. I’ve been working with this guy for 20 some odd years. Fuck it. Why not?

Yeah, as long as it’s for like your personal use or you just want to look at it like that’s fine. Go ahead.

So, Hoyong Foods, David Tran flies a drone over, records all this footage of their farming operation and then nothing seemingly ever comes of it. Then, 2016, Craig Underwood is on vacation out of the country. They know that. So, they have Roberts come to the Hoyong Foods factory where the Chili Co head and David TR basically sit Roberts down and say, “Hey, we’re starting this new company, Chili Co., you’re gonna work for us. Not asking him to work for them. Pretty much telling him, “You work for me now.” To which Roberts is like, “No, I don’t. I’ve been working for Craig Underwood for two decades. That’s my guy. I’m not leaving him.” They get super pissed. They then turn around and they’re like, “Okay, well, we could still buy this stuff from China for $300 a ton. You’re going to sell us your stuff at $500 a ton or we’re going to go elsewhere.” They literally can’t sell it to you at $500 a ton. It costs them almost $700 a ton to grow this shit. So, not only is demanding that price delusional, this also breaks the entire thing just by going from paying by the ton to the original agreement of we’re going to pay you for every acre that you plant because it shifts all the risk back onto Underwood Farms and now they’re screwed because they only grow jalapenos at this point and they’re stuck. So, in the coming months, Underwood Farms tries to negotiate a new price with them, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. So, by the 2017 season, he’s not able to plant any jalapenos. So, there’s no jalapenos in the ground, there is now a massive gap in the supply chain that’s going to have to be filled somehow. So, Chili Co goes about trying to buy peppers from everybody else that they possibly can because you’re never going to believe this. Um, nobody has a 100 million pounds of fucking jalapenos lying around and it’s really hard to find that many.

I am stunned. Just stunned.

So, in an effort to help find that, they give all the drone footage of all the proprietary techniques and technology and all the intel that they had gathered through espionage to all the other jalapeno farmers without Underwood knowing. So, essentially, Underwood Farms is basically dead in the water and they’re on the hook for all these thousands of acres of farmland that they leased for the next like 20 to 30 years. Like, they’re going to go out of business. While that’s going on, Chili Co and Hoyong Foods are getting jalapenos from anywhere and everywhere else that they can, which means the quality isn’t that great. Some of the peppers are picked too early. Some of them are dehydrated. They’re having to use green chilies instead of red jalapenos. It’s a giant fucking nightmare, which leads to the hot sauce tasting different, looking different. It’s like a burnt orange color. People are mad that the Sriracha doesn’t taste like Sriracha. Nobody knows what’s going on. So now, presumably, Hoyong Foods is also financially hurting. So they just start digging through all their accounting and they’re like actually we think a couple years back I think we overpaid Underwood Farms like $1.5 million. We’re going to take them to court and sue them. So they have to give us $1.5 million and that’s going to help with our financial burden.

What a stupid son of a bitch. Okay. And I cannot stress to you enough that this is probably the dumbest fucking idea imaginable. I’ve been threatened with quite a few lawsuits in my day and I have avoided all of them by saying one simple statement back to their lawyers. And that statement is, “Okay, sue me. I would love to go to discovery with you.” Because discovery is this magical part of the judicial process where both parties have to come to the table with all of their evidence and you can subpoena and get all of their internal records and figure out exactly what was going on, which presumably is exactly what happens.

And when Chili Co and Hoyong Foods have to turn over all of their shit, oh, it becomes very apparent that they have been plotting for at least three years to screw over Underwood Farms. At which point it goes from them suing Underwood Farms for $1.5 million to Underwood Farm suing them for $23 million and winning in court. It was perfect.

Perfect.

And this is what caused that magical time like 10 years ago, 2016, 2017, where nobody could find Sriracha on any shelves anywhere. And if you could, it was like this weird different color. It didn’t taste the same. It was all because it wasn’t the same. The whole thing with Sriracha was they had fresh red jalapeno peppers that were grown in California in a particular part of the world that were plucked, transferred to the factory, and turned into hot sauce in 6 hours flat. It was literally a multi-billion dollar money printing machine with a beautiful backstory with two hard-ass working men on a handshake agreement that built a fucking empire together. And the entire thing was harpooned by one stupid bitch.

It’s greed. It’s pure greed. Like why? Everybody was winning. It wasn’t broke. Why would you try to fix it?

You’ve got some bitch that didn’t build this company whispering in your ear like, “Oh yeah, we all have mansions. We’re all rich as shit.” But you could have a little bit bigger mansion and be a little bit more rich if you fuck over all your friends.

And then you blew up the entire thing. Congratulations.

So yeah, that’s why you couldn’t find Sriracha on the shelves 10 years ago. And that’s why the Sriracha today tastes a little bit different. Oh, but you know the funny part. You know what Underwood Farms did after they won the $23 million lawsuit with Sriracha? They turned around and started making their own Sriracha. And guess what they called it? Sriracha because you can’t trademark the word Sriracha. So now made with Underwood Farms with the actual chili peppers. You can get Underwood Farms Sriracha. And I’m going to be honest, it tastes very similar to the original Sriracha, but it’s a little bit spicier and I kind of like it more.

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Australia vs Torba

The Australian government has officially declared war on free speech, and they have threatened me with 12 months in prison for exposing their blueprints. I have been served with a production notice from their new Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. They are using expert activists to weaponize the definition of antisemitism by broadening it to include any criticism of Israel or globalist power structures.

They want to label our speech a national security threat.

Their own documents express deep frustration that platforms like Gab have shifted toward true free expression, and they are now moving to force us back into their controlled and state monitored box. They demanded I hide this information and threatened 12 months of jail time if I speak.

Good luck enforcing that. I do not answer to Australian bureaucrats, and Gab does not answer to state sponsored censors. This is exactly why we built Gab. We are creating a parallel society that is independent of their captured institutions, their corrupt courts, and their laughable threats of imprisonment. You cannot cage the truth, and you cannot stop a people who have decided they will no longer be silenced.

We are staying the course.

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The Pedo Factory

The Devil Mouse is every bit as awful as you imagine and more:

Dozens of workers from multiple cruise ships that docked in San Diego, including one from the Disney Cruise Line, were found to be in possession of or involved with the distribution of child pornography, according to authorities.

Officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection boarded eight cruise ships between April 23 and April 27 and interviewed 28 workers as part of an ongoing investigation, federal officials said in a statement.

During the interviews, officers confirmed that 27 of the 28 individuals had either received, sent, possessed or transported child pornography, according to the statement.

A Disney Cruise Line ship was among those that were boarded and where employees were detained in connection with the investigation.

If we’re going to treat corporations like humans and permit them human rights, perhaps it’s time to start punishing them like humans too.

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Trump in the Epstein Files

Congressman Ted Lieu (D:CA): “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files, there are highly disturbing allegations — allegations — of Donald Trump raping children and threatening to kill children.”

I could not be less interested in anyone from the Trump administration or professional Republican circles complaining about Democratic Party liars or pointing to past false accusations. There is a very easy way to prove that these accusations are false: release the Epstein files and documents and videos and pictures in their entirety.

Anything short of that is a) unacceptable and b) suspicious. No amount of evasion and explanation and justification is going to make this go away. If I was accused of such crimes, I wouldn’t even hesitate to put everything out there and make it absolutely clear who was guilty of these things and who was not.

Only the wicked need to hide in the dark.

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The Satanic SPLC

Everything about Clown World is fake and gay. Especially their villains.

The U.S. Justice Department has announced an Indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (“SPLC”). The indictment alleges SPLC secretly funneled MORE THAN $3 MILLION in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups.

The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.

The satanists of Clown World always practice Order ab Chao, a deceitful strategy in which they create the problem in order to solve it. Covid-19 was one example of this; “white supremacy” is another, rabbis painting swastikas on their synagogues and blacks hanging nooses from their college dorm rooms are as well.

Not all victims are fake. But most of those whose victimizations you see reported in the media are, because playing-the-victim has worked since even before the so-called “Civil Rights era”.

UPDATE: Unite the Right is confirmed to have been a Clown World setup in the indictment. I’m not at all surprised. Richard Spencer was trying to get me to attend it and speak there. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before we learn for whom Nick Fuentes has been working and who is funding the fake “Patriot Front”.

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Fight the Power

In which one of the longtime readers here, the Witchfinder General, deals a blow to Clown World in the UK:

MHN Editor Samuel Collingwood Smith’s claim against Hertfordshire Police has been settled on favourable terms, which are included below. Police have paid my damages and costs, in total, £34,000. They have admitted that I was unlawfully arrested, detained and committed no crime. They have agreed to correction and / or deletion of various records. I generally tend to be magnanimous in victory, so I am going to park police criticism for now on this topic. Instead, I now plan to continue my public interest scrutiny of the extremists who falsely reported me and their supporters. For transparency, I have included the whole settlement below save the text of the agreed marker, the signature images and the name of the police solicitor. Those have been redacted to prevent the information being misused.

It’s important to note these wins, because in many of these cases, the process is the punishment. That’s why the police and the various government agencies often pursue pointless and unwinnable cases against innocent people.

Most people have neither the resources nor the stamina to fight back when they are attacked in this manner. So congratulations to the Witchfinder for what is an important and inspiring victory.

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The EFF’s Skin Suit

Every organization gets converged sooner or later. Sooner, in the case of those that don’t actively guard against it.

There’s a tweet from 2016 that has aged better than almost anything else on the internet:

1. Target a respected institution 2. Kill and clean it 3. Wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect

I thought about that tweet this week when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced it was leaving X.

EFF was, for a long time, genuinely great. Founded in 1990 by programmers, hackers, libertarians, and progressives united around a single premise: the internet should be free, and someone needed to fight for it. They took on the government’s attempt to control cryptography and won. They fought the PATRIOT Act. They built tools that protect millions of people who will never know their name.

That organization is gone. What remains is wearing its skin.

It’s a pity, but the surveillance state is too important to Clown World to permit pesky electronic freedoms to get in the way.

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Literary Relevance is Not Guaranteed

The Dark Herald explains how the modern exploitation of the Tolkien legendarium is likely to reduce the chances of JRR Tolkien’s future literary relevance, and provides a rather devastating example of how that decline in relevance takes place:

In his prime, Roger Zelazny wasn’t some niche cult figure, he was one of the biggest names in speculative fiction, standing shoulder to shoulder with the New Wave heavyweights of the 1960s and 70s. His novel Lord of Light is often remembered as his breakout, and it was certainly his most decorated, winning the Hugo (when it meant something) and cementing his reputation, but Zelazny’s real impact was broader and more sustained. He was a constant presence in the major magazines, a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the few writers equally comfortable blending myth, science fiction, and fantasy into something distinctly his own. By the time The Chronicles of Amber hit in the 1970s, he wasn’t emerging… He was already established, and Amber became the work that proved he could translate that critical acclaim into lasting popular success.

Except it didn’t last.

Roger Zelzney’s old hard covers frequently go for three digit figures and I’m not talking Easton Press editions either. But his works are mostly published directly by his estate on Kindle.

Roger Zelzny is moving from the thing everyone knew about to the guy who is studied by writers. Most of his works have six figure sales ranks on Amazon.

And when Gen X is gone, he’ll be forgotten.

Zelazny, at his best, was very good. He wasn’t a first-rank SF/F author, but he was at the top of the second rank. And it’s true, he has been largely forgotten today, which is deeply unfortunate.

As an author, I’m aware of this phenomenon, which is why it has been my intention to release my books into the public domain upon my demise. The advent of AI and the lowering of barriers to entry in the video market may inspire me to rethink that, but at present, the way in which copyright guarantees that all literary properties are eventually acquired and controlled by corporate interests inimical to the long-term interests of an author’s literary legacy means that the best way to combat that is to put one’s works into the public domain immediately upon one’s death.

The problem isn’t that the corporate interests can alter the original works, but rather, the way in which they alter the common perception of the author’s works. How does the average Gen Alpha individual distinguish between The Hobbit and The Rings of Power, or between The Two Towers and whatever abomination Stephen Colbert and Peter Jackson end up concocting?

The only way to level the playing field between the community that loves the literary creation and the corporate interests is the public domain. Indeed, the public domain is the only reason that classic, but hitherto unknown works from the likes of Yoshikawa Eiji and Benito Pérez Galdós are able to be published in English, which is a project you can support via the Castalia Library. We’ve already translated nine works by these two authors, in addition to other amazing novels by Ozaki Koro, Oguri Mushitaro, Naoki Sanjūgo, and Luigi Capuano.

Who are they, you ask?

Exactly…

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The Pipelines are Not the Police

This is a very sensible ruling by the US Supreme Court. The RIAA is one of the more rapaciously evil organizations out there, and speaking as someone who is nominally represented by them, they don’t do much to make sure the musicians actually get paid.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday (March 25) rejected a billion-dollar music piracy lawsuit filed by the major labels against telecom giant Cox Communications, ruling that the internet service provider cannot be held responsible for infringement by its users.

In a decision against Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music, the justices unanimously overturned an earlier ruling that held Cox liable for thousands of songs illegally shared by its users — a decision that led a staggering $1 billion infringement verdict in 2019.

“Countless people use the Internet for legal activities, but some use it to illegally share copyrighted works, such as songs and movies,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

In a statement, the Recording Industry Association of America said it was “disappointed” in the ruling, saying there had been “overwhelming evidence” that Cox “contributed to mass scale copyright infringement.”

“To be effective, copyright law must protect creators and markets from harmful infringement and policymakers should look closely at the impact of this ruling,” RIAA chairman Mitch Glazier said, though he stressed that the “narrow” ruling would apply only to internet service providers and not to websites that host infringing content.

In its own statement, Cox said the ruling was a “decisive victory” for internet providers and their users: “This opinion affirms that Internet service providers are not copyright police and should not be held liable for the actions of their customers — and after years of battling in the trial and appellate courts, we have definitively shut down the music industry’s aspirations of mass evictions from the internet.

Copyright law is a joke that protects gatekeeping corporations instead of the financial interests of the creators. It hurts more than it helps, especially given the limited viability of the average creative product, which is mostly measured in weeks, if not days.

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Feature, Not Bug

A young woman is taking legal action against her high school, alleging she was awarded honors at graduation even though she’s illiterate. – Thomas Sowell

The problem is that a class action lawsuit of this kind that encompassed even a small fraction of those for whom this is true would create sufficient liability to end public schooling in America.

Yeah, so, that’s not at all a problem.

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