Tag: law

Believe it or not, that’s Indiegogo’s lame excuse for failing to deliver as promised on a contract. We’ve also figured out what tactics they are hiding behind; they put the information in the account instead of emailing you, then delete your access to the account so you have nothing with which to hold them accountable. Too bad for them that I’m in the habit of taking detailed notes and screenshots when I don’t trust people, so we can already prove exactly what they did and where to confirm it.

 Needless to say, it looks like we’ll be moving forward on this one. We already have several alternatives, so if you’re a backer, please just be patient and hold your fire. It will probably be a week or two before we open up the campaign version 2.0.

Unless you’re VFM, in which case you know what information we want.

An Israeli court convicts the worst anti-semite seen in decades.

A Tel Aviv district court convicted an Israeli Jewish man for making a string of bomb threats targeting Jewish community centers in the United States. The court did not name the man on Thursday since he was a teen when he committed the crimes. But he’s been previously identified as Michael Ron David Kadar, a hacker who holds dual Israeli and American citizenship.

The man’s arrest followed a trans-Atlantic investigation with the FBI and other international law enforcement agencies. Dozens of anonymous threats last year had stoked fears of rising anti-Semitism.

Police said Kadar, from southern Israel, used advanced technologies to mask the origin of his calls and communications to synagogues, community buildings and public venues.

US-resident Jews can now breathe a sigh of relief that this monstrous anti-semite is behind bars and can no longer terrorize them.

As if there should have been ANY doubt that it was constitutional:

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in favor of President Donald Trump in Trump v. Hawaii, the controversial case regarding Trump’s September order to restrict travel to the U.S. for citizens of several majority Muslim countries.

In the 5-4 opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court found that Trump’s immigration restriction fell “squarely” within the president’s authority. The court rejected claims that the ban was motivated by religious hostility.

“The [order] is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices,” Roberts wrote. “The text says nothing about religion.”

The case has been central to the Trump administration’s immigration policy, presenting a key test of the president’s campaign promise to restrict immigration and secure America’s borders.

The fact that it was 5-4 instead of 9-0 is the problem. And even if the ban was motivated by religious hostility, so what? The executive branch is, by definition, not the Congress that shall make no law.

The Supreme Court denies warrant-free phone tracking:

The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of digital privacy.

In a 5-4 decision on Friday the justices said that police need warrants to gather phone location data as evidence for trials. That reversed and remanded a decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Carpenter v. United States is the first case about phone location data that the Supreme Court has ruled on. That makes it a landmark decision regarding how law enforcement agencies can use technology as they build cases. The court heard arguments in the case on Nov. 29.

The dispute dates back to a 2011 robbery in Detroit, after which police gathered months of phone location data from Timothy Carpenter’s phone provider. They pulled together 12,898 different locations from Carpenter, over 127 days.

Interesting that it was the liberals on the court actually ruled in favor of warrants. These days, they only seem to want to increase government power.

ROBERTS,  C.  J.,  delivered  the  opinion  of  the  Court,  in  which  GINS-BURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined.  KENNEDY, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS and ALITO, JJ., joined.  THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion.  ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS, J., joined.  GORSUCH, J., filed a dissenting opinion. 

I was particularly unimpressed by Alito’s dissent. Location tracking records simply cannot be confused with ordinary documentation.

The Supreme Court finally forces online sellers to collect and pay sales tax:

States will be able to force shoppers to pay sales tax when they make online purchases under a Supreme Court decision Thursday that will leave shoppers with lighter wallets but is a big win for states.

More than 40 states had asked the high court to overrule two, decades-old Supreme Court decisions that they said cost them billions of dollars in lost revenue annually. The decisions made it more difficult for states to collect sales tax on certain online purchases.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court agreed to overturn those decisions in a 5-4 ruling. The cases the court overturned said that if a business was shipping a customer’s purchase to a state where the business didn’t have a physical presence such as a warehouse or office, the business didn’t have to collect the state’s sales tax. Customers were generally responsible for paying the sales tax to the state themselves if they weren’t charged it, but most didn’t realize they owed it and few paid.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the previous decisions were flawed.

“Each year the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality and results in significant revenue losses to the States. These critiques underscore that the physical presence rule, both as first formulated and as applied today, is an incorrect interpretation of the Commerce Clause,” he wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

This is the right decision, but over a decade too late. The effect of those earlier decisions was to favor big nation-wide retailers over traditional distribution channels and local retailers. Unfortunately, most of the damage has already been done.

This is what a truly nationalist government that puts the interests of the people first looks like:

Hungary’s parliament on Wednesday approved a package of bills that criminalises some help given to illegal immigrants, defying the European Union and human rights groups and narrowing the scope for action by non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been a vocal critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migrant policy and has led eastern European opposition to EU quotas that aimed to distribute asylum seekers around the bloc.

Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party tightened its grip on parliament in an April election fought on a fiercely anti-immigration platform that demonised U.S. billionaire George Soros and liberal NGOs he backs. Orban accuses Soros of encouraging mass immigration to undermine Europe, a charge Soros denies.

Under the new law, officially called “STOP Soros”, individuals or groups who help migrants not entitled to protection to submit requests for asylum or who help illegal migrants gain status to stay in Hungary will be liable to prison terms.

“The Hungarian people rightfully expects the government to use all means necessary to combat illegal immigration and the activities that aid it,” Interior Minister Sandor Pinter wrote in a justification attached to the draft legislation.

“The STOP Soros package of bills serves that goal, making the organisation of illegal immigration a criminal offence. We want to use the bills to stop Hungary from becoming a country of immigrants,” he said.

Parliament, where Fidesz has a two-thirds majority, also passed on Wednesday a constitutional amendment to state that an “alien population” cannot be settled in Hungary – a swipe at Brussels over its quota plan.

Americans should not be content with the mealy-mouthed civic nationalism that passes for the actual interests of the genuine people. Because a nation of immigrants is not a nation at all.

You don’t have to bake the cake anymore:

The Supreme Court on Monday handed a narrow victory to a Christian baker from Colorado who refused for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The justices, in a 7-2 decision, faulted the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s handling of the claims brought against Jack Phillips, saying it had showed a hostility to religion. In doing so, the commission violated his religious rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But the court did not issue a definitive ruling on the circumstances under which people can seek exemptions from anti-discrimination laws based on their religious views.

Of course they didn’t. That might actually be useful. But at least one minor injustice has been overturned. But on what planet is a 7-2 decision “a narrow victory”?

The globalists in the UK are cracking down on European and American nationalists:

Austrian activist Martin Sellner of Génération Identitaire and his girlfriend, American author and YouTuber Brittany Pettibone, have been detained by airport police in England for nearly three days.

Nobody from the US State Department or embassy contacted Pettibone’s family.

Sellner was on his way to give a speech that authorities say would cause “tension among local communities and possibly incite hatred.”

Brittany Pettibone & Martin Sellner are being held in a detention centre in London. They have been there for 2 days and don’t know when they will be allowed to leave. The immigration officer told Brittany she was being detained for ‘planning to meet Tommy Robinson, an extremist”.
— Caolan Robertson (@CaolanRob) March 10, 2018

“Yesterday, Martin Sellner and Brittany Pettibone were detained by the UK Government and effectively declared political dissidents. The government has decided that Martin’s talk about free speech is too dangerous to be heard. Don’t worry, some of our activists will be reading his speech at Speakers’ Corner at noon tomorrow in his stead. We can’t allow either the far left or the government to silence us,” a statement from the British GI chapter read.

Sellner frequently speaks out about the dangers of European nations taking in migrants. He was supposed to be addressing the issue at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park on Sunday.

Journalist and researcher Nick Monroe spoke to Pettibone on Saturday afternoon when she called him from the detention center. She told him that she is expecting that they will be released on Sunday — 72 hours after their initial detention. She has not been permitted to speak to Sellner.

Remember, this is the very same UK government who expect the public to be outraged – outraged – when China and Russia detain journalists of whom they don’t approve. And it is the same UK government that has allowed millions of Muslims and other third world natives to freely enter and settle in England, despite the way that has definitely caused considerable tension among local communities and incited hatred.

This is why it is a waste of time to talk about free speech. There is no free speech in the UK, in Europe, or the USA anymore. So stop pretending there is.

For the time being, anyhow:

A California trial court has upheld a Christian baker’s right to refuse to create a wedding cake for a lesbian couple, but the decision comes as a similar case is already pending in the nation’s highest court.

Tastries Bakery owner Cathy Miller’s freedom of speech “outweighs” the state of California’s interest in ensuring a freely accessible marketplace, Judge David R. Lampe said in his decision in the Superior Court of California in Kern County, one of the state’s 58 trial courts.

Standing to set a legal precedent is the case of Colorado baker and Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, deliberated before the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2017. A ruling is expected within months in Phillips’ fight to limit his creativity as a wedding cake baker to marriages between a man and a woman.

No one should ever have to bake a damn cake for anyone. It’s absurd that this is even an issue at all.