Splendid Isolation

No Right At All

Here’s a story which is guaranteed to get me going, and it’s a topic I’ve discussed before.  Seems as though this Old Phartte popped his clogs at age 91, and decided that because his grandchildren had never bothered to visit him while he was in hospital, that they weren’t worthy of getting any of his loot once he was gone.  So instead of cutting them out of his will, he left them each only a few bucks.

Needless to say, the grandchildren sued the estate, claiming that they were “entitled” to a third, rather than the 0.0001% thereof specified in his will.

Where do these people get the idea that they should be entitled to anything?  FFS, his estate, lest we all forget, is his own property — something that people (and governments, a rant for another time) seem to forget.

So if Grandpappy wants to leave his dough to Someone Not His Foul Grandchildren because they ignored him while he was alive, he’s perfectly within his rights to do so — just as if he were to give a birthday present to one person and not another.

This business of heredity “entitling” someone something is all well and good when it is, ahem, an actual title (e.g. royalty / nobility), but in the cold hard world of law and finance, descendants are entitled to nothing, if the owner of said estate says so.

Anyway, this group of ingrates lost their case, and a damn good thing it is too.  And for the record, they’re as ugly as they are greedy.

Gun? What Gun?

From his lair deep in the Soviet Republic of Taxachusetts, Reader Mike L. sends me this report:

Christina Sumner of Roanoke said she was shocked and concerned there was a loaded gun left in her rental car.
Sumner rented a car from Enterprise in Roanoke on Feb. 2, and everything seemed normal at first. Then Enterprise called her a day later, telling her there may be a gun in her car.

Well now, this is an interesting situation.  Note the qualifier “may be” in the last sentence;   in other words, Enterprise didn’t actually know there was a gun in the car — or perhaps they did, but wanted to cover their corporate asses.

However, this poses an interesting situation.  What if you’d already found the gun in the car, but told Enterprise that there had to be some mistake:  you could find no gun nor indeed any evidence of a gun in the car? 

Of course, I would be deeply conflicted.  On the one hand:  a “free” gun.  On the other hand, it was just some Europellet delivery vehicle, and therefore of little interest to me, so I wouldn’t mind handing it over.  Also, it being a 9mm means that the erstwhile owner may have been a state or federal official — especially if it was a Glock — and given the latter’s reputation of losing guns, or leaving them in public toilets etc., it wouldn’t surprise me at all that this might be the case.  That might certainly influence any decision between “Oh yeah, here it is, come and collect it”, or “What gun? / Finders keepers, numbnuts”.

But it’s a damn good thing the “missing” gun wasn’t a Les Baer or Kimber 1911 .45ACP…

Talk about temptation.

Discuss, in Comments.

Mixed Feelings

Here’s a story that gets me all philosophical:

A child psychiatrist in Charlotte, North Carolina, used artificial intelligence (AI) to make child porn, and he is now facing the consequences.

In a press release Wednesday, the United States Attorney’s Office Western District of North Carolina announced 41-year-old David Tatum will spend the next 40 years behind bars, then 30 years of supervised release for the sexual exploitation of a minor and the AI-generated child porn.

I’ll get to the philosophical bit in a moment because emotionally, of course, I want this perverted bastard to be burned at the stake and his ashes scattered far away from any children’s playground, never mind imprisoned forever.

However.

Did not some Supreme Court, in its Supreme Wisdom, decree a while ago that making cartoon-based child pornography did not constitute a crime?  Why yes, yes it did.  (The whole story, country by country, can be found here.)

I myself once looked at 3D-printed sex dolls, with the logical extension thereof as it pertained to creating sex dolls of children (FFS).

So ‘splain this to me Simon:  if it’s okay (perhaps) to create sex dolls of children, why not AI-generated images or even movies?  Remember:  no actual person is being harmed by this activity.

This is but my philosophical musing, of course — see my “burned at the stake” suggestion above.

And boy, have we created an Alps-sized slippery slope with this one.

Provocation

I know that most university students have brains like rice pudding, unencumbered as they are by any experiences with actual reality in their scholastic years — K-12 and whatever college years they’ve completed to date.

One would think that law students would be a little brighter than, say, the average Female Studies major, but that really doesn’t seem to be the case, what with law students coming out against Israel / Jews and supporting — publicly! — the amoral assholes known collectively as “Hamas”.

Let’s also keep in mind that in American law firms there is a very real chance that Jews are going to be, shall we say, very well represented as a proportion of the staffs thereof — despite the WASPy-sounding names of the firms.  In other words, if a freshly-minted lawyer from, oh, Cornell or Yale is going to begin his career at, say, Debevoise & Plimpton, Kirkland & Ellis or Winston, Strawn — to name but some notables — there is a real chance that his manager is going to be someone named Hyman Goldstein, Avi Cohen or Rachel Nathan.

How is said manager going to act towards a junior associate who once went public and signed a letter / marched in a protest which supported the genocidal “From The River To The Sea” slogan?  With compassion, kindness and forgiveness?

I’ll take “none of the above” for $400, Alex.

The pink-cheeked junior is going to be given megatons of overtime shitwork, the results of which will be mercilessly picked apart not only by the manager but also by partners (e.g. David Rosenblum or Myra Feldstein), resulting in terrible performance reviews and eventual termination.  And their next job is going to be even worse because — incredibly — senior lawyers at different law firms know each other and often talk amongst themselves about their employees at their weekly klabejas games or golf outings.

One may say that this is unjust or whatever, but it’s what’s known as “reality” — the thing from which these precious snowflakes have been sheltered by parents and teachers for over a dozen years of their lives to date — and it’s going to bite them in the ass, painfully and repeatedly.

So then, I think these idiot students can be grateful for this development (no link because NYT fucking paywall):

Law Firms Warn Universities About Antisemitism on Campus

Two dozen major Wall Street firms sent a letter to top law schools to crack down on discrimination and harassment amid an escalation in incidents targeting Jewish students.

With universities across the United States grappling with a rise in antisemitism since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, elite law firms are putting schools on notice. In a letter to some of the nation’s top law schools obtained by DealBook, about two dozen major Wall Street firms warned that what happens on campus could have corporate consequences.

…nipping the careers of this little bunch of starry-eyed young idiots in the bud, so to speak.

The Gods Of The Copybook Headings say:  “Actions have consequences, and often those consequences are unpleasant.”

As these pro-Hamas-terrorist ingenues are finding out.

Not Here, It Ain’t

Here’s one from Britishland that’s guaranteed to make yer blood boil:

Shoppers trying to arrest shoplifters could expose themselves to legal action and even imprisonment for assault, a lawyer has said.

Chris Philp told a fringe event at last week’s Tory Party conference that members of the public should make citizen’s arrests on thieves and called on security guards to step in where it is safe to do so.

But Ed Smyth, partner at Kingsley Napley, said that the law generally only permits citizen’s arrests for serious cases that could be tried in a crown court. They could also be used for low value shoplifting cases, but the force used must always be reasonable in the circumstances.

And guess what?  You don’t get to decide what’s “reasonable”.

No wonder that law-abiding Brits just cower in the face of villainy.  The law is not on their side.