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‘I Can’t Think of Anything More Tyrannical’ – Judge Benitez Will Block California’s Gun Control ‘Fee-Shifting’ Law

The sharpest thorn in the side of California’s gun-grabbers has done it again. Federal Judge Roger Benitez — who has already issued rulings, currently in the appellate and post-appellate pipeline, tossing California’s “assault weapon” and standard capacity magazine bans — ruled Friday that he would be enjoining a California law designed to discourage challenges to California’s gun control laws.

The newly-minted California law makes litigants and their attorneys liable for the state’s legal fees if they challenge a California gun law and are not 100% successful.

That inverts the usual practice under federal civil rights law, under which a plaintiff is considered the “prevailing party” (and thus eligible for an award of attorneys fees and costs of court) if it prevails on any of its claims challenging the constitutionality of a law.

A plaintiff can also be a “prevailing party” eligible for fees if the state moots the case by changing the challenged law, a la New York’s last-minute dodge in the first New York Pistol & Rifle Association case.

While there are situations (e.g., copyright infringement lawsuits) where an unsuccessful plaintiff can be held liable for the defendant’s attorneys fees, a party’s attorneys are typically personally liable for an opposing party’s fees only if they sign onto utterly frivolous filings (i.e., materials that violate Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11), disobey a court order, unreasonably and vexaciously complicate a case, etc.

The California law at issue was passed earlier this year in a fit of pique after the Supreme Court issued the Bruen and Dobbs decisions, and refused to enjoin a Texas law that authorized private actions to enforce the state’s “fetal heartbeat” law. California’s attorney general asserted that while the state believed the Texas law was unconstitutional, California would play “tit for tat” by passing a similar law designed to make it prohibitively expensive to challenge any California gun control law.

Understand that fighting a state like California in federal court is an inherently very expensive proposition, beyond the budget of all but the most well-heeled individuals. This is why organizations like the Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, and others are so essential to protecting our Second Amendment rights.

If you file a challenge to a California gun law, the odds are strong that you will draw a judge who will be, shall we say, not as disposed to Second Amendment rights as Judge Benitez. Litigating such a test case will thus likely be a very long and expensive process designed to eventually get the expected adverse decision from the California district court and the Ninth Circuit in front of the Supreme Court.

But under the new California law, if the district court or Ninth Circuit rules against you on even a subsidiary point of your lawsuit, you and your attorney would be immediately liable for what would probably be hundreds of thousands of dollars…or even more. That would make challenging even obviously unconstitutional California gun control laws so economically risky that few if any victims affected by the law could do so. And very few attorneys would be willing to represent them, given the economic risks.

That, of course, was the state’s reason for passing it.

Fortunately, the Firearms Policy Coalition stepped up to challenge this law. And in a master stroke of lawyering, they were able to do so in a way that made it very, very likely that the case would be assigned to Judge Benitez. The FPC moved for an immediate injunction against the law.

California reacted predictably. First, it claimed the state would not enforce the law until its constitutionality had been decided, and therefore there was no need for an injunction. Judge Benitez rejected that almost immediately, noting that California has already used the threat of liability under the new law as leverage in other cases. Judge Benitez thus not only set the matter for an evidentiary hearing on the request for a preliminary injunction, but also consolidated that with a trial on the merits. This isn’t unheard of in a case like this, where the facts are not in dispute and the only issues are legal ones.

After that ruling, the California attorney general – who was in a legally untenable position, given that he had already admitted that he believed the California law was unconstitutional – bowed out of the case, requiring the governor to hire outside attorneys to take over the defense of the law.

The hearing and trial were held yesterday. The transcript isn’t yet available, nor is there anything on the court’s docket at this time, but according to the press account of the hearing (h/t to Cody Wisniewski of the FPC for sending it to me last night) Judge Benitez ruled from the bench that he would be enjoining the law.

        “A federal judge on Friday said he will block part of a new California measure that critics say was designed to make it nearly impossible to challenge the state’s gun laws in court.” https://t.co/mT6idlbACk

        — Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) December 16, 2022

Judge Benitez ripped the state for playing games with people’s constitutional rights, saying, “I can’t think of anything more tyrannical.” He similarly castigated California’s claims that it was somehow justified in enacting the law response to the Texas abortion law, stating “[w]e’re not in a kindergarten sandbox. It’s not about, ‘Mommy he did this to me so I should be able to do it to him.’”

He also tartly asked the state’s attorney if he would be willing to pay the plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees. When counsel claimed not to understand the question, Judge Benitez noted he was wise not to answer, because no attorney would want to risk being personally liable for paying the other side’s attorneys fees if he loses.

As is required by federal law, Judge Benitez will have to issue a written opinion making various findings and formally explaining his reasoning. I expect it will be out within the next month, and will likely be blisteringly critical of the state of California.

For now, let’s all raise a glass to Judge Roger Benitez for once again upholding the rule of law.

Cheers, Judge Roger!

Musk Is In Over His Head
December 16, 2022

Elon Musk is in over his head when it comes to free speech.

Musk is quickly learning that in order to run a free speech platform you need two things: thick skin and a fanatical commitment to free speech, even when being pro free speech is bad for business, and even when being pro free speech means tolerating the most excoriating criticism of yourself.

Elon’s “free speech” saga at Twitter is really nothing of the sort. He’s treating the product, and his users, as his playthings. Flailing, hyper-feminine emotional outbursts are a substitute for a “leadership style.” All told, he has revealed that he has no interest whatsoever in bringing actual free speech to Twitter.

Twitter was, ironically, more measured and free when there were thousands of mentally ill blue-haired Communists with their fingers on the ban hammer. At least the Communists tried to come up with an objective and consistent rationale for their actions. Contrast with Elon, who waved the flag of free speech as soon as he took over but immediately began compromising on that promise for the sake of business expediency.

When it came to Alex Jones being reinstated, Elon had an emotional reaction and invoked the loss of his child. When it came to Kathy Griffin impersonating him, Elon had an emotional reaction and swung the ban hammer on anyone in his way. When it came to Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, posting a symbol of a French UFO cult which combined a swastika and a Star of David, Elon had an emotional reaction and banned him so as to be hip with all of the other California types who were throwing Ye to the wolves.

Now with the ElonJet and journalist ban situation, where constitutionally protected information which is publicly available is being removed from the site (despite being massively available practically everywhere else on the Internet) Elon is once again “leading” with his emotions and treating Twitter not as a product, not as an essential and vital publication utility for the entire world, but as a toy, and one controlled by a petulant child at that.

Men who lead do not make decisions and dictate on the whims of their emotions. Weak, hyper-effete men “leading” with emotions instead of reason and logic is a big reason Western society is crumbling. Given Elon’s Reddit-tier political takes and patchy soy beard, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that he is low on the testosterone side. But I digress.

Gab is for free speech. The lefty journalists recently banned from Twitter might not believe it but when they find that they get zero engagement on Mastodon and are looking to join a serious social media platform again, but Gab will be here waiting for them – and we will protect them from all censors, foreign and domestic, to the greatest extent possible– as long as their speech is lawful.

Some of these journalists who were banned last night, like Matt Binder, have been extremely critical of Gab and our users in the past. I don’t like Matt. He’s been unfair to Gab in the past. But Gab exists for him. Gab exists to provide a home and a megaphone for viewpoints that don’t have a home anywhere else. Until Elon took over Twitter, that meant we were a home for the right and center-right. After Elon took over, we are ready, willing, and able to provide that home for the left and center-left, just as we are prepared to host anyone who agrees that they will not violate U.S. law in the use of our service.

We can no longer afford to give any power whatsoever to petty tyrants who think themselves to be god-kings. This is the outcome when emasculated emotional losers “lead” our society: chaos, hypocrisy, destruction, and censorship.

Twitter is a big corporation and it has big corporate baggage. It needs huge quantities of advertising dollars from all over the world, including the most censorial European countries, just to survive. When EU bureaucrats tell him to censor Americans he has to obey. Last week the EU asked us to censor some Americans – citing no law that had been broken, simply saying that certain users were posting “propaganda” – and we told them to pound sand. No US court will ever enforce an unconstitutional European rule. If we never sell a dollar of ads in the European Union, that’s perfectly fine with us.

The reason I run Gab because I believe that protecting freedom of speech is a divine command. We must refuse to be “led” by anyone who is not themselves led by Jesus Christ. We deserve strong God-fearing Christian leaders in media, business, technology, culture, education, and government.

I may not agree with your beliefs. You may not agree with mine. You may think my belief in God is a backward superstition. I may think your atheism is corrosive. None of that matters. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I, and this company, will defend your right to speak freely on the Internet as long as we are able to do so.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus Christ is King of kings

https://news.gab.com/2022/12/musk-is-in-over-his-head/

Personally, I've watched the Twitter circus, and wondered what Elon was trying to do. He confuses me, TBH. I think maybe Torba has drilled to the root of the problem. Emotions. Emotional decisions aren't going to be money making decisions, or sound business decisions. Emotional Elon. Or, Emo Elon.

I was hoping he could make something of Twitter.

It starts with gasoline. Various guests seem to believe that I run a gas station. I buy 5 gallons of gasoline for lawn mowers, chain saws, or whatever, and it "evaporates" quickly. I need to lock it up.

However, most padlocks (in the USA) are really easy to pick. Master, American, or whatever, you just rake most of them, and they open. If you get one that won't rake, it's usually easy to pick them one pin at a time. I've routinely bypassed padlocks, most of my life.

Unfortunately, my kids have learned from me, so there's absolutely no point in buying a $10 Master lock, or even a $75 Master lock. Videos on Youtube will convince you that you can open the best of them in just a minute or two. OK, if you're not used to doing it, it might take you 30 minutes, but the point is, they are easy to open.

Ordered an Abus 83/45, with an RX1 restricted keyway, with serrated pins and spool pins in the cylinder. It's a seven pin cylinder, as opposed to the standard four pin cheap lock. Again, on Youtube, the better locksmiths can open them, but, it takes them more than a few seconds.

I guess I'm about to find out how skilled my sons are at picking locks. Or, I'll learn how fast they can learn to defeat a better lock!

If the gasoline evaporates behind this padlock, I'll up the ante with a more expensive, higher security lock, with an even better cylinder in it!

Someone asks, "What does that have to do with a tech site?"

The answer is, "Security is a process." You have to adapt to the threats that you are facing.

So, a used Lenovo ThinkCentre was brought into the house. No operating system, no video card. The machine is a small form factor, there's not much room in there to do anything. First order of business, install a video card - except, my choices are a GT 730 which is ancient, or a RTX 1650, which is a couple millimeters too long to fit. Yeah, it's low profile, it fits fine that way, but the hard drive mount folds down on top of the end of the card. Bleahhhh! I diddle around for a couple hours, finally decide I'm going to modify that fold-down thing. Get out a pair of cutters, and start snipping - finally, I have the card mounted.

Power up - I only get the left half of the screen. It's hard to install any operating system, if you can't see anything. Even a text install would be difficult! I boot into every operating system on my Ventoy USB stick, with the same results.

I guess something is wrong with the video card? I stick the other 1650 in there. No joy. Try the 730 just to be sure. Same thing.

Scroll through the BIOS setup a dozen times or more, changing settings, and it's STILL the same! I put a 1650 back in there, then I go into the monitor's settings, searching for something to adjust so I can see the entire screen. Even in BIOS setup, I can't see all of the screen. Weird!

After nearing exhaustion, searching for that magic setting, I go back into BIOS one more time. Scroll, scroll, scroll, oh - what's THIS? "Force specific OS settings for compatibility" or words to that effect. I turn it off, save, and reboot. AWESOME!! I get the whole screen now! Or, very nearly so. There seem to be a couple pixels missing on all four sides. Screw it, I'm installing Windows, I can search for those pixels later.

Win 11 Pro, local install, local logon, no attachment to any online accounts anywhere. Microsoft has sure screwed things up by insisting on a cloud logon to a local machine!!

Windows installed, update, update, update, update some more. Did I mention that I've used a custom install media? There is no Edge browser. No Cortana. A bunch of stuff was carved out before I ever stuck the USB in the drive. Install Nvidia driver, install Firefox, install Iridium browser, install Folding@Home, install Qbittorrent because I KNOW they're going to be torrenting, then install the VPN to avoid copyright trolls.

Everything is looking pretty good, except those missing pixels. I call up Nvidia control center, try one setting after another, with no luck. Ahhh, what's this? "Help". I click on it. YAY! Nvidia's help menu tells me to go into the monitor settings, and search for anything like "overscan". Yep, there it is. Turn off that overscan, and now I can see all those missing pixels.

What should have taken an hour or two, turned into about 10 hours of messing around. I mostly blame Lenovo. WTF, optimized OS defaults? Really? They don't work, not even for the OS that was apparently targeted by those defaults!!

And, why, oh why, did they make that case just about 3 mm too small for a more-or-less standard sized low profile video card? Nothing worthwhile is going to fit in there, without modification!

I'll share a bit of the blame. I probably should have caught that optimized defaults much sooner, and turned it off. But, I was tired when I started, then worked into the wee hours of the night trying to finish up.

Maybe I learned something from my mistakes. Like, don't start a project late in the day.

Then again, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I'll probably do things the same way next time!

Oh yeah. Folding at home? That Ryzen 7 promises to crank out ~85k points per day. And, the 1650 is showing ~450k. Production should pick up over the next few days! I'll take another 1/2 million PPD, give or take a little.

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.

The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!

The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is
completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.

On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools.

In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms and corporate boards--
understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and nonjudgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Bitch. And take some of these other senile sons of bitches with you!

She finally got one thing right, if inadvertantly.

a citizen of the greatest Republic in the history of the world.

The Republic should revoke her citizenship.

https://babylonbee.com/news/war-solved-united-states-puts-up-gun-free-zone-sign-in-ukraine