Tag: law

How Did This Happen?

The Dark Herald explains how the Amazon Abomination came to be. It’s a long, detailed, and rather sordid story, so read the whole thing there.

This whole mess started as a vanity project. I mean it couldn’t be anything else, could it? Amazon Prime is at maximum saturation, it wouldn’t have mattered if they had produced something as big as Game of Thrones, there would not have been any new subscriptions from it. From a business perspective, this was pointless.

That said, the timing looked pretty good to take over the TV fantasy market. Game of Thrones was ending its legendary run. The market was going to be open.

Now here is the thing you have to remember about Amazon. They are always throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. It’s just how Bezos does business, he wants as many data points as possible. So, when he set out to have his own Game of Thrones, he didn’t put all his chips in one pile. There were going to be two major fantasy series. One geared for families and another for adult content.

The adult content show was going to be a Conan show and they had made the superb choice of Ryan Condal to be the showrunner.

Slightly before this, the Tolkien Estate had gone into arbitration with the Saul Zantz company and kind of got hurt. For labyrinthine legal reasons, the Tolkien Estate was required to put the Appendices at the back of Return of the King up for sale. And for other reasons it had to be a TV series. But the Tolkien Estate was NOT required to sell those TV rights to the Saul Zantz Company. Christopher apparently said, fine anybody but you, and it was announced that those rights were for sale.

After Amazon went through a lot of people with proven track records, they signed Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, (who have nearly non-existent IMDB credits) to be the showrunners. They do have a close association with JJ Abrams and he would be a close consultant. Their pitch was for (according to rumor) a series based on the Fall of Numenor. You have no idea how much I would like to see that.

Amazon bought the rights to the Appendices for $250 million in 2017 directly from the Tolkien estate and didn’t take a close look at the veto rights that Christopher Tolkien automatically had. Incidentally, grandson Simon Tolkien is claiming that this was his vision from the start but since Christopher was still alive at the time, I have serious doubts.

Now it gets very murky. Amazon announces that it has these rights and there are words to the effect that they will be remaking the Lord of the Rings as a mini-series.

Here comes the guesswork on my part.

Bezos is a software billionaire who thinks like a software billionaire.

Ever since Microsoft infringed all over Intergalactic Digital Research to create MS-DOS, the model has been, infringe on your target, wait for them to sue you, then spend them into the ground in court and take over his whole business.

I suspect (but can’t prove) that Jeff Bezos decided to do that with the Saul Zantz Company. The rights were supposed to be reverting to the SZC soon, and they seemed willing to license those rights to Amazon but I suspect Bezos wanted to own them outright. So, during the series, they would infringe on the IP, Saul Zantz would have to sue, and Amazon would spend it to death in court until they owned the whole Saul Zantz company to include the Tolkien IP.

It was only after this strategy was embarked on that an entertainment lawyer was consulted. He informed Amazon that entertainment copyright legal precedents are different from software copyright precedents, and it won’t work. You won’t be getting sued by Saul Zantz, you’ll be getting sued by Warner Brothers and they are (at the time) owned by AT&T. They aren’t going to run out of court money, and you will end up paying somewhere around $500 million. If you’re lucky.

Then #MeToo swept through Hollywood like a typhoon. The head of Prime Video got caught up in it and had to be fired. Jennifer Salke was brought in to start making Woke content and one of her first decisions was to shitcan Conan on grounds of toxic masculinity. Put a gigantic pin in that one, we are circling back to it. She replaced it with Wheel of Time which is almost but not quite as big a disaster as The Rings of Power.

Reminding us, once more, that the Shadow cannot create, it can only twist, subvert, and mock.

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The Emergency Continues

The Fake Biden Administration declares a 22nd straight year of national emergency:

US President Joe Biden has renewed the national emergency declared by former president George W. Bush in the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 for another year.

The “terrorist threat” behind the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people “continues,” Biden wrote in a Thursday memo published in the Federal Register, adding that the “powers and authorities adopted to deal with” the attacks “must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2022.”

Ironically, it is true that the parties responsible for the demolition of the Twin Towers have never been held responsible. But losing a few thousand New Yorkers and modifying the Manhattan skyline wasn’t a national emergency then and it certainly isn’t an emergency now.

How does anyone even pretend to believe in Clown World’s antics anymore?

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Patreon Fires Security Team

This is not exactly a surprise, as anyone who was involved with the Big Bear dispute knows all about how wide-open the system was. But the much bigger problem is that for all that the media likes to pontificate about data privacy laws, neither the media nor the various justice systems have any interest in dealing with the companies who serially violate them on a daily basis.

The media won’t report the data breaches and no one else will hold them accountable, regardless of what the laws say.

So for better or for worse, I and the rest of the Patreon Security Team are no longer with the company. As a result, I’m looking for a new Security or Privacy Engineering role and would appreciate any connections, advice, or job opportunities from folks my network.

Emily Metcalfe, Security/Privacy Engineer, 8 September 2022

Here is my advice: find a new line of work. While I’m not exactly a fan of Patreon, it’s probably a good thing that they are replacing what was a nonexistent security system with something that might actually work.

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Qui Tam vs Cui Bono

Karl Denninger observes that the combination of the fraud they have committed and the damage they have caused millions of people have placed Pfizer and Moderna between a legal rock and a hard place:

The “Lincoln Law” came about because during a national emergency, specifically the Civil War, merchants screwed the government — and the people. It was the people who died, yet the government agencies failed to go after the parties who did the screwing and hold them accountable.

We now know this as the “False Claims” act, and it was passed so that when that sort of corruption occurs someone, in this case anyone who has specific knowledge, can bring the suit on behalf of the government and, if they are correct and win they get a piece of the recovered money. Since government contracts are usually for ridiculously large amounts of money by ordinary human standards this is a pretty-good incentive for anyone who has knowledge of such a thing to bring the suit — if you expose an actual fraud and win you’re typically set for life.

It is alleged that the Pfizer jibby-jab trials were frauds. I’ve pointed out several indicators that made clear they were utterly unreliable to provide scientific evidence of both safety and fitness for purpose. This suit was filed alleging that this wasn’t just poor design: The allegation is that the conduct and operation of the trials themselves was fraudulent, said fraud was material and it induced the government to issue EUAs and buy 100 million doses of the jabs. It also alleges that the purpose of the solicitation in the first place was “military readiness”.

Pfizer and the other firms involved filed a motion to dismiss.

The basis of their attempt to dismiss the claim is this:

Respondents seek dismissal without discovery, amendment, or trial. Their fundamental premise: even if honestly reported data showed their product caused more illness than it cured, inflicted more injury than it prevented, and took more lives than it saved, America’s military would still have given them billions of dollars and mandated it be injected into America’s military. Respondents claim fraudulent certifications, false statements, doctored data, contaminated clinical trials, and firing of whistleblowers can be ignored based on the theory that they contracted their way around the fraud.

Think about that last sentence.

The accused did not deny that fraud took place.

Instead they argue that fraud in the procurement, including fraud that harmed or killed the public and members of the military, is not actionable because the government and the parties it solicited to provide the jabs agreed that fraud was ok.

It’s worth noting that Pfizer is now openly admitting to having committed fraud in its scientific trials. This will hardly surprise those of us who were always deeply skeptical of the Covid vaccines, but it should serve as a wake-up call to those whose blood was polluted by them. Of course, human nature being what it is, in most cases they’ll still be blithely repeating the “safe and effective” mantra even when the manufacturers are openly admitting that their products are neither.

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Gavin McInnes Arrested

Or, at least, that appears to be the case, pending confirmation:

Former Fox News host Gavin McInnes was apparently arrested on Thursday night after law enforcement gained access to his New York studio while he broadcast his network’s Thursday night live stream.

Shortly after his “Get Off My Lawn” live show began, police officers believed by Censored.tv subscribers to be federal agents gained access to the studio. McInnes, who founded the web network Censored.tv after being canceled on social media, was heard on the live stream having a heated verbal exchange with officers before leaving the studio. McInnes’ stream was left unattended for over an hour before it ended.

McInnes, standing at his desk, told the off camera law enforcement officers, “Yeah. Alright, I’m happy to do that. I’ll get a lawyer, and we will sit down and have a conversation. We’ll schedule a meeting, and I’ll sit down with my lawyer.”

The officer’s response to McInnes was not within range of the microphone, but after he spoke McInnes replied, “I didn’t let you in.”

What appear to be chirping noises made by police radios can be heard in the video, but viewers reported only silence after McInnes left the frame until the stream was taken offline.

Prior to the Thursday night incident, McInnes told viewers of Censored.tv that he had reason to believe he was under some sort of surveillance.

My assumption is that this is probably not connected to anything McInnes said or did, but is related to the recent raid on President Trump’s residence in Florida, and the way in which the FBI is attempting to build a case to arrest the president on grounds related to January 6 and the Proud Boys. If they don’t have anything useful on Trump, they’ll need to be putting pressure on people who might be able to give them something they can use to conjure up an indictment.

Unless, of course, it was this public act of shameless and unequivocally transphobic hate speech that landed him in hot water with the federal thought police.

Brittany Griner is a dude.

Gavin McInnes, 8 August 2022

Needless to say, the media won’t react to this arrest in anything like the manner they would if a CNN or ABC News host was taken into custody live on air. So keep that in mind the next time you hear them yapping about “freedom of the press”.

UPDATE: Or maybe it’s just pathological attention-seeking….

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A Good Start

Fake President Biden announces the first step in what we can hope is a path to forgiving all student debt and banning all student loans.

The president will forgive debts of up to $20,000 dollars for students who went to college on Pell grants and $10,000 for students who did not receive Pell grants. Debt forgiveness only applies to individuals earning less than $125,000 or couples filing joint earnings of $250,000.

Don’t make the mistake of defending the wrong thing because bad or stupid people happen, for whatever reason, to be doing the right thing for a change. Student debt is a scam, it should never have been legal in the first place, and the law preventing student debt from being discharged.

Make no mistake: if you’re on the side of the bankers and the Boomers and the universities here, you are absolutely and without question choosing the side of evil. And there is no amount of solipsistic argumentum ad personalem is going to make your argument any more convincing or moral, or any less economically ignorant and churlish.

Don’t forget the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant either.

Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

And FFS, discharging debt is not inflationary, so don’t even think about trying to cite that sort of media ignorance at anyone. In a credit money economy, debt-forgiveness is literally deflationary.

UPDATE: Stonetoss shows how to silence the Boomercon critics.

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Was Mar-A-Lago a Trap?

Karl Denninger thinks it might have been:

It has now developed that the Raid at Mar-A-Largo was supported by an affidavit that positively identified both the presence of documents that were retained or taken by Trump in violation of Federal Law and where they were.

The FBI was specifically interested in Trump’s “newer” safe, so presumably that’s where they were told the documents were.

Except…. The safe was empty.

Trump has refused to release the copy of the warrant served on him, which is his right. But let’s take a slanted-eye view of this, which upon learning that very specific information was presented to the Judge immediately came to mind.

Let’s presume Trump believed he had a mole in his organization and he thought he knew who it was. And let’s remember that the DOJ and FBI did screw him with Russiagate, which they knew, it was developed, was bullshit and yet used it to go after him anyway, and even worse, fed it to Congress as Articles of Impeachment. That was an active scam and nobody was prosecuted for it, while if you did the same thing as a false report to them you could and would go to prison for it.

Further, Trump knew the Archivist was sniffing around because they’d contacted him back in February and he turned over a bunch of stuff. Ok.

So let’s put forward the theory that he leaks that he has something particularly juicy, very illegal for him to have retained and its in the safe.

He leaks this to one — and only one — person.

The raid happens.

It’s certainly an intriguing theory. And President Trump is certainly devious enough to have gone along with such a plan. But only time will tell; if the raid is followed up by a world-shocking arrest of him, that would tend to signify a very different situation.

I’m more than a bit dubious myself. What would this accomplish besides unmasking yet another traitor inside Team Trump?

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The Daily Kabuki

I think we all know what Miles Mathis is going to conclude about the “Alex Jones trial”:

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones immediately took to the airwaves after the verdict in his defamation trial on Friday – which will see him be forced to pay nearly $50million in damages to the family of slain six-year-old Jesse Lewis.

Lewis was among the 20 children who were shot dead by crazed gunman Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Another six people were killed in the massacre.

For years Jones claimed on his InfoWars platform that the shooting in Newton was a ‘false flag’ operation perpetrated by the US government to further gun control.

In his Friday broadcast, Jones claimed the trial against him was ‘coordinated and run’ by billionaire philanthropist George Soros and ‘operatives.’ He did not identify the other ‘operatives’ by name.

The host also accused Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of being a ‘blue-haired SJW’ and insinuated that she was corrupt by saying that she ‘altered the record of the trial.’ ‘SJW’ stands for Social Justice Warrior.

The fact that the UN and the governments of the post-West are now going to such extreme lengths in order to try to prevent people from even whispering their doubts about the official narrative only serves to further convince the intelligent observer that literally nothing they say even remotely corresponds with reality.

Inversion theatre is the order of the day.

The only thing they’ll accomplish with these highly publicized efforts is to ensure that the reality patrol – aka “conspiracy theorists” – becomes even more focused on obtaining rock-solid evidence disproving the narrative before publicly expressing any doubts about it. This is why I no longer pay any attention to “current events” reported by the media. If they weren’t fake in one way or another, they wouldn’t require legal muscle to enforce their “truth”.

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The Racism is Shocking

These South African rapists are fortunate that they didn’t commit their gang rapes in Sweden.

A teenager who was among eight models viscously gang-raped by an armed gang of illegal miners in South Africa while they were shooting a music video has described the horrific attack and told how she and her sister had their virginity ‘stolen’ by the men.

Nombosino, 19, whose name has been changed, and her 21-year-old sister had accepted a £15 a day job to model in a gospel music video when they were ambushed by the gang near an abandoned gold mine close to Krugersdorp on July 28.

The teenager, who feared for her life at the hands of the heavily armed gang, told how the men raped the black and Indian women but left the three white women who were among the 22-strong production crew alone.

The models and crew, the youngest of whom was 19 and the eldest 37, were raped up to ten times each over several hours by the criminals.

While these vibrant gentlemen wouldn’t face any jail time or have to worry about being deported from Sweden for committing gang rapes, they would almost certainly have found themselves imprisoned for the horrific crime of racist not-rape.

Ain’t Clownworld grand?

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Close Your Account

Before they do it for you, you thought criminal:

Halifax customers are closing their accounts today after its social media team told them to leave if they don’t like their new pronoun badges for branch staff in what is being branded one of the biggest PR disasters in British business history.

Britons have been pulling out millions of pounds in investments and savings as well as cutting up credit cards or transferring balances to rivals after they accused the bank of ‘alienating’ them with ‘pathetic virtue signalling’.

The row began this week when Halifax tweeted its 118,000 followers on Tuesday revealing that it would allow staff to display their pronouns on their name badges, in a post that read ‘pronouns matter’.

It showed a photo of a female staff member’s name badge, which featured ‘she/her/hers’ in brackets under the name Gemma, and said the policy was to help avoid ‘accidental misgendering’.

One customer replied: ‘There’s no ambiguity about the name “Gemma”. It’s a female person’s name. In other words, it’s pathetic virtue signalling and is seen as such by almost everyone who has responded to the initial tweet. Why are you trying to alienate people?’ Within 20 minutes a member of the Halifax social media team, calling himself Andy M, replied: ‘If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account’.

Andy M’s response has outraged customers, and seen hundreds claiming they will boycott the bank with many saying they have closed their accounts. Others have cut up their credit cards or getting rid of insurance policies.

It’s going to be fascinating to learn if corporations can survive without customers or if customers can survive without the services provided by corporations. Because it’s only a matter of time before corporations start exercising the rights they have granted themselves in their contracts of adhesion – the one-sided EULA statements to which one “agrees” by virtue of using the service or purchasing the product – to deny those deemed thought criminals their services.

On its website, Halifax say any customers they deem to be ‘transphobic’ could have their accounts closed.

Underneath a page titled ‘what we stand for’, they say: ‘We stand against discrimination and inappropriate behaviour in all forms, whether racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist, regardless of whether this happens in our branches, offices, over the phone or online on our social media channels.

‘Such action may include account closure or contacting the police if necessary.’

And as we saw with Patreon, this self-granted corporate right to police customer behavior has been, in practice, expanded to include places and platforms that have nothing to do with the corporation itself. This is another reason why the BRICS economy is going to completely swamp the converged neoliberal economy.

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