Category: Law

How long would Russell Brand have spent in prison if he had killed a survivor instead of whatever he did in bed with a survivor?

by philg

Russell Brand has been sentenced to 10.5 years in prison, 9 of which relate to an evening in which a survivor voluntarily came to his house in 2009, voluntarily did various things in bed with him, and says that some other things happened that she did not consent to.

What if the story had instead been “a woman came over to Russell Brand’s house in 2009 and did not become a survivor because, following an argument, he killed her”? ChatGPT says that Brand might have been sentenced to approximately 4 years for manslaughter and would then have been eligible for release after 2 years. The prevailing law in 2009 was that “provocation” could turn murder into manslaughter. ChatGPT cited the example of Stephen Paul Faulkner from 2001: “Wife repeatedly taunted him about impotence, unemployment, illiteracy and other men. During an argument he stabbed her and their son [who intervened] to death.” He was sentenced to 3.5 years for manslaughter, a sentence that was upheld on appeal in 2003. (This wasn’t a sudden crime of passion. The appeal notes that “F [defendant] took the car, went to a local store and bought a kitchen knife with a six inch blade. He returned home where they continued to argue, F followed V upstairs into the bedroom”.) ChatGPT also cited Susan Phillipson. In 2007 she took a more direct and honest approach than MIT Prof. Dr. Kristin Knouse, M.D., Ph.D.: “During an argument over her partner leaving her for another woman, fatally stabbed him with a kitchen knife.” She was sentenced to 3.2 years.

ChatGPT also found R v. Taylor (I think that “R” means “Regina” or the Queen):

A man and his common-law wife had been drinking. After a minor disagreement about a door being left open, she mocked him about her relationship with another man. He took a knife from a kitchen drawer and fatally stabbed her once in the stomach. He was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. His original sentence of seven years was reduced by the Court of Appeal to five years.

(ChatGPT couldn’t find any other case in the history of the UK that was similar to the Russell Brand one, i.e., one in which the jury was hearing about events that occurred 17 years earlier between two people and for which there was no physical evidence to corroborate anyone’s story.)

Comparison to some other sex-related crimes, e.g., “controlling a child prostitute” resulting in Englishman Tanveer Ahmed being sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, while Welshman Mohammed Ali Sultan got 2.5 years for “allowing his flat to be used as a brother by allowing a man to have sex with a girl who was being controlled as a prostitute”:

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The Russell Brand situation is a good argument for Sharia law in the UK?

by philg

I saw headlines about Russell Brand being convicted in the UK of various acts that allegedly occurred between 17 and 22 years ago (2004-2009). Since I don’t usually have the patience to read about 17-year-old encounters between individuals, I asked ChatGPT to summarize it for me. The most serious crime of which he was convicted was rape and ChatGPT’s summary begins as follows:

[The survivor] attended Brand’s comedy performance at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, accepted an invitation for drinks afterward, and participated in a sexual encounter with Brand and another woman in his dressing room. Subsequently, she agreed to visit Brand at his London home and have consensual intercourse.

Then something happened while the two of them were in bed. Although there was no physical evidence or any witness to corroborate any part of the survivor’s story, what added credibility to her dramatic tale, according to ChatGPT, was that Brand texted her an apology in 2009. I asked how a text message had been preserved for 17 years, which seems like a long retention period for a mobile carrier.

(ChatGPT says that a big factor in Brand’s conviction was that he wasn’t consistent in trying to recall events from 2009, e.g., where exactly he was on certain dates, whether he recognized the survivors or not.)

One question for today is why the Islamic Republic of the UK allows women to be victimized in this manner. Under Sharia law, none of the above could have happened. Brand and survivor couldn’t have been drinking alcohol (haram). Brand and the survivor and some other woman couldn’t have been meeting in private in Brand’s dressing room (also haram; both women would have needed escorts from male relatives as well as burqas). The survivor couldn’t have gone to Brand’s house and been alone with him there (haram).

The second question is why Brand didn’t flee. ChatGPT says that he was actually living in Florida in April 2025 and had a valid passport in his hands. Gemini says that Brand has a net worth of approximately $20 million. He could have gone to one of the countries that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the Islamic Republic of the UK. ChatGPT says that Russia, for example, has no extradition treaty with the UK, bars prosecution for rape after 10 years, and “Russia’s extradition law expressly prohibits extradition when the prosecution is barred by Russia’s statute of limitations.” If Brand had secured Russian citizenship, his extradition would have been barred by Article 61 of the Russian constitution. ChatGPT can’t find a single example of anyone accused of rape ever having been extradited from Russia to the UK. ChatGPT prepared a table of all of the warnings that Brand had:

A summary on X that predicts Brand will be imprisoned for 8-15 years (summarized on X as “Russell Brand will get more time in prison for a “rape” that allegedly occurred 20 years ago than Pakistani men who raped British girls for 20 years. Why does Britain hate its own people so much?”):

Finally, while we’re at it, how about Sharia law for Massachusetts, where people say that they want to (1) protect survivors, and (2) welcome Muslim immigrants. The Whitehead Institute and MIT would have been operating separate labs for men and women. Survivor Kristin Knouse could never have been alone with David Sabatini and, therefore, could never have suffered the victimization that she says she suffered at David Sabatini’s hands (so to speak). Prof. Dr. Knouse, Ph.D. wouldn’t have been able to go to Sabatini’s hotel room in the middle of the night and be alone with him there (“Evidently, we did end up having sex” says Knouse, after reviewing the text message history at her deposition, below (a message history that the Whitehead’s crack legal “independent” investigators didn’t find and never noticed that it was missing, thus revealing inferior electronic forensic skills vs. our 11-year-old)).

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Why hasn’t Cornell already paid Jane Doe?

by philg

Jane Doe, also known, depending on what media someone consumes, as “the Cornell Plaintiff”, “Jane Hoe”, “the Cornell Skank”, “the Cornell Genocide Survivor,” and/or “Lucy Craig”, alleges, in the first count of her cash-seeking civil lawsuit, that Cornell University was negligent:

Cornell’s top executive has admitted that Cornell was negligent. From state-sponsored PBS:

Fair to predict that the Cornell Plaintiff is going to be the richest person ever to have attended Cornell? At this point, a jury’s only job will be to figure out what percentage of Cornell’s $12+ billion she gets. Assuming a normal amount of hatred of the university by average Ithaca residents, we’re witnessing the creation of a billionaire? (I wonder if AI has exacerbated town/gown hatred. Cornell is jammed full of humans who are less intelligent than ChatGPT and who yet have guaranteed $500,000/year compensation packages for the rest of their lives. What could be more insufferable to a member of the jury who works at an honest job, e.g., electrician?)

I think that all of the money has to come from the institutional defendants, such as Cornell, the sorority she was a member of, and the fraternity. By explicitly naming all of her purported attackers, the anonymous-until-the-NY-court-messed-up plaintiff is ensuring that none of them will ever have any money because none of them are going to be able to get white-collar jobs. ChatGPT, Esq.:

Here’s Jane Doe’s perspective on the executive who has admitted negligence (and my response, which connects the survivor Kristin Krouse to the Cornell Genocide victim):

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Who pays when a jury finds that a survivor is lying?

by philg

“M.I.T. Scientist Wins $6 Million in Sexual Harassment Defamation Suit” (New York Times):

The biologist, David Sabatini, was among the most prominent scientists in his field, and ran a research lab at the Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, for 24 years. His lab studied cellular biology to better understand neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, diabetes, and aging.

He was forced out of his lab in 2021 after an internal Whitehead investigation concluded he had a past sexual relationship with a younger and less experienced colleague, Kristin Knouse, over whom he had a career-influencing role. The investigation also found that his lab had maintained a sexualized atmosphere. Dr. Knouse said that the relationship was coerced.

But Dr. Sabatini denied his lab had an improper atmosphere. He maintained that his relationship with Dr. Knouse had been consensual and that Dr. Knouse had schemed to get him fired and disgraced after he became interested in another woman.

Nearly five years to the day after he filed his defamation lawsuit, a Suffolk County jury agreed with him, finding that Dr. Sabatini had proved in court that Dr. Knouse had defamed him and interfered with his ability to work.

The Whitehead Institute, in a statement after the verdict, said that earlier legal claims against the institution had already been dismissed, adding, “Therefore, Whitehead was not a party to this case, and the decision and judgment only apply to Drs. Sabatini and Knouse, the parties in the case.”

It’s a remarkable day when a Maskachusetts jury doesn’t #BelieveWomen. But who will pay for the $6 million judgment against the survivor? MIT/Whitehead somehow skated free of this lawsuit despite having run a kangaroo court and tossed Sabatini based on statements that a jury found were obvious lies (truth is an absolute defense against defamation so the jury couldn’t have found that the survivor defamed Prof. Sabatini without finding that the survivor lied). Maybe the survivor, Prof. Knouse, has homeowner’s insurance and that means, as with the lies that Amber Heard and the ACLU told about Johnny Depp, we will pay? We might already have paid if MIT funded Knouse’s defense, in which case our tax dollars were used. If homeowner’s insurance paid for the defense then we’ve already paid via higher premiums. On the third hand, this Courthouse News article says that Sabatini was 50 and Knouse was 29 at the time of the sexual relationship. Absent family money, it would be rare for someone in her early 30s to be a homeowner or even a condo owner in Cambridge.

Grok says that MIT/Whitehead skated free because they fired Sabatini for violating a “consensual relationships policy” (maybe he was supposed to file some paperwork and didn’t?). It references this LegalClarity site, which covers some of the twists and turns in the case.

Here’s Kristin Knouse:

Related:

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Grok and ChatGPT inhabit parallel universes when asked about justice for the Cornell Victim

by philg

A low-income woman is about 5X more likely to suffer sexual assault than someone from a family that sends children to Ivy League colleges. ChatGPT:

Pooling 2017–2022, the annual rape/sexual-assault victimization rate for people living in households earning under $25,000 was 3.8 per 1,000. For households earning $100,000–$199,999, it was 0.9 per 1,000, and for households earning $200,000 or more, 0.8 per 1,000. In other words, the lowest-income group had roughly 4–5 times the annual rate of the highest-income groups. Those figures are for persons age 12+, not women alone, but women constitute the large majority of rape/sexual-assault victims…. The women statistically at greatest risk are disproportionately low-income women, not women at elite universities.

The passion for what happens at elite colleges is explained by a University of California professor in Why America’s professional elite are so interested in sex acts at universities. What about the fact that New York’s governor and attorney general are now going after the fraternity brothers accused in Lucy Craig’s civil lawsuit seeking “compensatory and punitive damages”? (given the deep pockets of the defendants, e.g., Cornell University, and the punitive damages angle might she end up becoming the first billionaire rape victim?)

Using the conventional terminology of our greatest contemporary poets, e.g., Kanye West, I asked AI the following question:

If a hood rat girl said she was raped would the governor and attorney general be involved?

Grok:

No. A routine report from a poor woman in Ithaca or the Bronx would not get the governor and the attorney general.

ChatGPT:

Possibly, but there’s no solid basis to say that the governor and attorney general would not have intervened if the complainant were a poor or socially marginalized woman.

(Certainly the men will be getting a fair trial by a jury of 12 who are all wearing #IAmJaneDoe T-shirts. Maybe the defense attorneys will be searching desperately for a Haitian immigrant?)

Here’s a reminder that whatever the Cornell students were up to in 2024, it was all financed by taxes extracted from the working class:

The heavy partying at ultra-expensive institutions like Cornell is being financed by untold billions of non-market government-backed loans that let students take what amounts to a four-year cruise – parties, sports, even occasional lectures. I would guess none of the participants were electrical engineering majors.

Most adults don’t have all-night ketamine bacchanals because they have to work in the morning. But 18-21 year olds are given all the privileges of adulthood without and of the responsibility. Don’t treat them like Roman aristocrats and then wonder at their decadence.

Regarding the likely majors of the participants, from Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football) (2015):

Nobody is raped in the physics lab in Missoula if for no other reason than nobody Krakauer followed took a physics course to begin with

Now that there is a person definitively associated with the incident (Lucy Craig’s name was apparently made public by incompetence within the New York State court system), I wonder if there will be any Deplorables dressing up like her for Halloween. If so, what would the costume look like? If commercially marketed, would it be labeled “Cornell Student”, “Jane Hoe”, “#IAmJaneDoe”? (I don’t think that Lucy Craig’s name or precise likeness from social media could be used for commercial/advertising purposes without her permission.)

From the above, mentioned Krakauer book, on the profits to be made via civil lawsuits enabled by a rape allegation:

In 2002, [Brian] Banks was a junior at Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California, a six-foot-four, 225-pound linebacker on an extraordinary football team. … Banks was aggressively recruited by some of the nation’s top college football programs and accepted a scholarship offer from the University of Southern California. … While attending summer classes before his senior year at Long Beach Poly, Banks had a chance encounter with a sophomore named Wanetta Gibson that, according to Banks, culminated in consensual sex. According to Gibson, Banks raped her. In a note Gibson wrote to a friend, which became a crucial piece of evidence, she said Banks “picked me up and put me in the elevator and he took me down stairs and he pulled my pants down and he rapped [sic] me and he didn’t have a condom on and I was a virgin and now Im [sic] not.” When interviewed by the police, Wanetta Gibson told a more detailed version of the same story, and Brian Banks, who was seventeen years old, was charged with forcible rape. Were he convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison. Like thousands of other defendants ensnared in the criminal justice system, … Banks agreed to plead no contest to the rape charge, spend at least five years in prison, remain on probation for an additional five years, and register as a sex offender. While Brian Banks was serving his time, Wanetta Gibson and her mother filed a lawsuit against the Long Beach Unified School District, claiming that lax security at Poly High School created an unsafe environment that led to her being raped. The suit was settled out of court, with the school district agreeing to pay Gibson $1.5 million.

… her conscience began to bother her. In March 2011, a few years after Brian Banks was released from prison, he logged onto Facebook and saw he’d received a friend request from Wanetta Gibson, his accuser. … Banks asked if she would meet with him in the presence of a private investigator, Freddie Parish, whose son had been a teammate of his at Poly. Gibson agreed, and during their meeting she admitted what Banks knew to be the truth all along: He had not raped her. Unbeknownst to Wanetta Gibson, Parish was secretly recording the conversation. … Brian Banks’s conviction was reversed in May 2012. Thirteen months later, the Long Beach Unified School District won a $2.6 million default judgment against Wanetta Gibson to recoup the settlement she had received, plus interest and damages.

Here’s Banks, who enabled Wanetta Gibson to “make bank”:

Who wants to bet that Wanetta Gibson put the $1.5 million she received into an S&P 500 index fund and that, therefore, California taxpayers/the school district were able to recover their money plus interest? Separately, if we assume that Ms. Gibson was represented by an attorney who took a fact percentage of the $1.5 million via a contingency fee, why wouldn’t the school district try to recover some of the taxpayers’ money from the attorney?

Finally, here’s New York Republican Mike Lawler, chairman of the House Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, telling Muslim-Americans “Any of our daughters could be Jane Doe”. Isn’t that rather insulting? How many immigrants from Somalia or Afghanistan believe that their daughters would be voluntarily consuming 10+ drinks containing alcohol and then going, without a male relative escort and without a burqa or even hijab, to a fraternity party hosted by non-Muslims?

Part of the Plaintiff’s own account of her voluntary actions, tough to square with the Quran and the Hadiths:

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Potential Maskachusetts jurors surveyed regarding Lindsay Clancy verdict

by philg

I was gathered with friends, mostly from Brookline, Maskachusetts, to celebrate the marriage of a widow to a widower. In keeping with the spirit of this joyous occasion, I surveyed everyone on how they would have voted if they’d been on the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case.

All of the women except one young hater (conservative) would have voted to acquit (“not guilty by reason of insanity”, but the insanity was temporary and, therefore, the government would have no reason to detain her further). A Joe Biden Democrat in his mid-60s married to a Mamdani/AOC Democrat also voted to acquit (i.e., liberal male is the functional equivalent of “female”). A Brookline resident whose politics are driven by hatred of and contempt for Republicans and Trump also voted to acquit (“she’s already been punished enough”).

The remaining men all voted to convict Lindsay Clancy of at least some degree of murder. “Someone like that needs to be removed from society,” said a young man. “There has to be a consequence.  Jeffrey Dahmer was psychotic, but he was still convicted,” said the boy’s father.

Half of the group were MDs and all had harsh words for the psychiatrists and psychologists who pumped Lindsay Clancy full of various medications (that said, nothing she was on had a known side effect of psychotic violence and it was unclear what she was actually taking from among the pills that she’d been prescribed).

(Based on my skimming of press coverage of the trial, I personally would have voted to convict her of the lowest degree of murder available. Her attempt to kill herself after the murders was certainly evidence of irrationality if not insanity and a first-degree murder is supposed to be rationally planned, I think. Maybe I would have voted differently if I’d heard all of the evidence and been instructed by the judge in the law.)

Based on this survey, I don’t think the Commonwealth will be able to convict Lindsay Clancy unless prosecutors can contrive a means of excluding female Democrats from the jury or, perhaps, reduce the maximum charge to something minor.

Update: I sat next to an 86-year-old lady on JetBlue SFO-FLL. She wasn’t a phone addict like everyone else and, therefore, we had a conversation. When the Lindsay Clancy trial was mentioned on her seatback TV, I asked Rhoda how she would have voted. “You put away a rabid dog so you have to do the same with a rabid person.”

Loosely related, a sad-funny X exchange:

Separately, the gathering of these Brookliners was actually in Silicon Valley. To make everyone from Massachusetts feel at home, the locals were kind enough to engage in outdoor masking (Menlo Park; under-nose Faucism):

(Quite a few indoor maskers, of course, as well, e.g., in retail establishments. There was, unfortunately, a serious dearth of social justice signage. People in Silicon Valley, apparently, care primarily about themselves and their money, unlike the virtuous folks in San Francisco and the East Bay.)

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With birthright citizenship upheld, will Democrats now say that Supreme Court orders should be followed?

by philg

A lot of Democrat officials have said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings are illegitimate and should not be followed, e.g., the recent ruling that allows temporarily protected Haitians to be sent home after 16 years in the U.S. Example from a Democrat thought leader: “it’s not something we will ever accept”.

The representative for the High-IQ (TM) crowd in Maskachusetts said, a few weeks ago, that the Court is “corrupt” (Ayanna Pressley has been characterizing the Court with this epithet for some years, according to an X search):

We know a guy in Boston who married a Honduran lady. His wife’s pregnant relatives would come to visit a few months before any baby was due. They’d show up alone at a high-end Boston hospital, e.g., Beth Israel, give birth, tell the staff “I’m undocumented”, and go home with a U.S. citizen and without ever seeing a bill from the hospital (costs covered by taxpayers). Except for three haters, the Supreme Court today agreed (Trump v. Barbara; what did Barbara do that was so bad?) that this should continue. Does that mean the Democrats who previously complained that the Court was illegitimate will now say that it is legitimate?

(Maybe there are four haters on the Court, actually. Brett Kavanaugh, the convicted rapist/murderer of Prof. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Ph.D., said that Congress could limit birthright citizenship by statute, but that El Presidente couldn’t do it via executive order. I guess that means Amy Coney Barrett was the deciding vote in favor of virtue, love, kindness, etc. Finally, given that 100% of the females on the Court voted one way and 80% of the males voted another, maybe this suggests a question for Alan Turing’s original male-female Turing Test (“imitation game”). Ask the person of unknown sex (there were just two back then) “A migrant walks across the U.S. border and pushes out a baby. Do you give the baby four generations of taxpayer-funded welfare or take the position that it is the parents’ responsibility to take care of their children and descedants?”)

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Real estate lawyer competition among our AI overlords

by philg

As part of preparing my old Harvard Square condo to turn over to its next owner, I decided to look at not only the smoke detectors in the unit (2019, 2023, 2023), but also the hardwired smokes in the common stairwell and basement. A disturbing pattern emerged in which the hardwired smoke detectors may have been made in 1990(!). I asked four LLMs to figure out who should pay for the new detectors and the insane installation cost charged by an immigrant Brazilian.

Prompt:

Here are our building’s condo docs. There is a common stairwell serving just three of the four units. The smoke detectors in the common stairwell must be replaced. Is that a condo association expense or something that the three unit owners served by the stairwell msut pay for? (when the building was first divided, there were originally only two units on the stairwell side, but one was further subdivided, so now we have three)

Grok handled this well.

The replacement of the smoke detectors in the interior stairwell (the one serving Units 2A, 2B, and 3) is the expense of the owners of those three units only—not a full condominium association/common expense shared by all four units (including Unit 1).
This is explicitly addressed in the recorded amendment to the Master Deed that subdivided the original Unit 2 into Units 2A and 2B (document I0myQ / the one titled “AMENDMENT TO MASTER DEED OF THE 5-7 IRVING TERRACE CONDOMINIUM” that re-recorded a full updated Master Deed, Book 320806, Page 337 et seq.).
On page 17 of that amendment, under the additional provisions / Exhibit-type language dealing with exclusive easements and rights of use, it states (in relevant part):
“12. The interior staircase serving Units 2A, 2B and 3 shall be for the shared exclusive use of said Units and shall be maintained at their expense so that Unit 1 shall not be responsible to pay for such maintenance.”

Gemini gave a similar focused answer.

Based on the Master Deed and Condominium Trust documents for 5-7 Irving Terrace, the cost of replacing the smoke detectors in that specific stairwell is the responsibility of the three unit owners served by the stairwell (Units 2A, 2B, and 3), rather than a general condo association expense.

Gemini’s answer was inferior to Grok’s because it failed to cite the page number in what is a long doument.

Claude’s answer was longer-winded and more confusing than Grok’s or Gemini’s. Claude made the idiotic suggestion of hiring a human lawyer to deal with the question of how to divide up spending an amount, even after absurdly overpaying a Brazilian immigrant handyman, that was less than what a lawyer would charge to provide an answer.

Based on the condominium documents you’ve shared, this is a common expense paid by the association — but with an important nuance.
The 1990 amended Master Deed (the controlling document, which superseded the original) addresses this directly. The interior staircase serving Units 2A, 2B, and 3 is designated for their “shared exclusive use” and is to be maintained at their expense, so that Unit 1 is not responsible. However, the staircase itself and its fixtures are part of the common elements of the building.
Here’s how the relevant provisions interact:
The stairwell is a common element. Building entrances, entrance halls, stairways, and all related systems are explicitly listed as common elements under Section 5 of the amended Master Deed. Smoke detectors wired into the building’s systems would fall under conduits, wiring, and utility facilities — also common elements.
The maintenance cost allocation is split. Under Exhibit C of the 1990 amendment, the interior staircase serving 2A, 2B, and 3 is maintained at the expense of those three units, not Unit 1. Unit 1 is explicitly carved out.
Practically speaking, the smoke detectors in that stairwell would most naturally be treated as a shared cost among Units 2A, 2B, and 3 — not a general common expense chargeable to all four units including Unit 1. This is consistent with the “shared exclusive use” framework: the costs follow the benefit.
The proportional split among 2A, 2B, and 3 would likely be based on their respective percentages of common interest (14.585%, 14.585%, and 33.33% respectively), though you could also argue for an equal three-way split given the stairwell serves all three equally regardless of unit size.
I’d recommend confirming this interpretation with a Massachusetts condo attorney, as I’m not a lawyer and the documents have layers that accumulated over 40 years of amendments.

ChatGPT, Esq. failed spectacularly.

Short answer: almost certainly a condo association (trust) expense, not just the #5 side — unless your documents or wiring show something very unusual.

It provided about two pages of additional text, none of which referenced the relevant section of the Master Deed.

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Brave fighters against Islamophobia in New York prove law professor’s point

by philg

Yesterday, CBS ran a headline communicating to readers that the noble leader of NYC was attacked: “FBI launches terrorism investigation after homemade explosive device ignited outside of NYC Mayor Mamdani’s residence”. The article, however, tells a different story:

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters on Saturday that an anti-Islam protest was organized by people associated with Jake Lang, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter and far-right influencer. A group of counter-protesters, numbering more than 100, also gathered, and two young men from Pennsylvania, angered by the anti-Islam protest, brought the homemade bombs to the gathering, intending to cause harm, law enforcement sources told CBS News.

Videos showing the chaos from the protests, verified by the CBS News Confirmed team, show a man apparently yelling “Allahu Akbar” – or “God is Most Great” – just as a protester, identified as 18-year-old Emir Balat, of Pennsylvania, allegedly throws an “ignited device.”

Jake Lang falsely asserted that some percentage of Muslims living in a non-Muslim society would inevitably choose to wage jihad, as seen in the follow examples:

Thus far, the story seems to be that two Muslim-Americans, both children of immigrants, wanted to show how wrong Mr. Lang was regarding the above. They manufactured bombs and threw them at Mr. Lang and surrounding haters infected with irrational Islamophobia.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider this classic lecture by a law professor:

CNN: “two men arrested in connection with the device admitted to being inspired by ISIS”.

Since, as a practical matter, being a violent criminal isn’t against any New York State or City law, they could have been back out on the street already if they hadn’t talked about ISIS to the police. Instead of being free to work on their next jihad, therefore, they now face the potential of federal terrorism charges and actual prison time.

Lesson from the law prof: “Don’t Talk to the Police”!

Fakely related… (source)

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How do nonprofits that promise to discriminate get federal money?

by philg

A Florida senator whom I wish would retire writes about federal tax dollars being funneled to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in western Maskachusetts (I was there once, part of being a houseguest of some Democrats who have a $2 million lake house nearby and who subscribe):

My response to our elderly senator:

The organization’s December 2024 web page proudly describes the federal funds recipient policies of discrimination that is contrary to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection. Here are just some of the ways that they promise to discriminate based on race and gender ID:

  • Prioritization of BIPOC Vendors: Conduct focused research and expand the use of BIPOC-owned vendors
  • 83% of the 2024 episodes in our monthly “PillowVoices: Dance Through Time” podcast featured BIPOC artists, and 100% featured women.
  • All of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive playlists featured BIPOC and women artists.
  • off-campus and on-campus programming for low-income, BIPOC Berkshire residents.

How can government money be used to fund activities that should be illegal and unconstitutional if the government itself did it? (I guess we have had government-run race- and sex-discrimination in contracting, with set-asides for women- and minority-owned businesses, but I have never figured out how that is Constitutional.) I have never been able to get a straight answer from any of my lawyer friends as to how the government can operate and fund race discrimination without first repealing the 14th Amendment.

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