Well, this isn't good - why you should worry about the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

Unless you've been at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or only subscribe to MSNBC, you would have been hard pressed to miss the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, at university speaking event in Utah. He's not the first victim of a political assassination, and he won't be the last. But...

Konstantin Kisin commented that it feels like we have crossed the Rubicon for some reason, and (talking to a wide variety of USA friends) I would have to agree. I'm not even sure we can articulate it, but I'm going to have a go. The very broad feeling I have, is that there are fifty to eighty million evangelical Christians in the USA, nearly all law abiding, but many many of whom are heavily armed; imagine those people (and their weapons) being put into a barrel, and someone throwing a Molotov cocktail into it. You are going to experience quite a bang.

Trump's attempted assassination in Butler, PA was a near-miss. It definitely ignited the Republican base - not least because of the lackadaisical approach of the Secret Service leadership in failing to plan his protection - but even back then, people commented about how near a miss it was of an event that would make the climatic scene in "V for Vendetta" look like the Teletubbies.

As Utah author Larry Correia noted:

Everybody is pissed at the left about the trans mass shooter. A few days later everybody is even angrier with the crazy black dude killing a girl after they let him out 14 times and the left covers for it. So what do they do next? Shoot the guy who politely debates college students. I've tried to warn people about the left's knob vs. the right's switch, but they're too stupid to listen. Pray for our country.

— Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45) September 10, 2025

Charlie Kirk was one of the least offensive debaters I've ever seen. He would actively invite those who disagreed with him to the front of the line at his college campus debates, and respectfully engage them. He would use words and reason, not violence, not hectoring, to advance his thoughts - and the success of his organization Turning Point USA (and now Turning Point UK) acrosss student campuses reflected that. He was married with two little kids, who are now without a father. I'm sure that conservatives will ensure that his widow and kids are provided for financially, but you can't replace their dad.

Every conservative with half a brain cell is now thinking: "if they are willing to go after Charlie Kirk... who else is in their sights?" And going online to Lucky Gunner dot com to order a new brick of ammunition.

I have to echo many other conservative bloggers, talking to the radical left on X and other channels tonight:

Are you really, really sure you want to do this? Because it is not going to work out like you apparently think it will.

Guidance for home invasions

To set the scene, Police Chief Jim McSween, of York, Ontario, has been disturbed by recent home invasions in his city, and has therefore enlisted the help of the media in getting his message out to the homeowners.

We are urging citizens not to take matters into their own hands. While we don't want homeowners to feel powerless, we urge you to call 911 and do everything you can to keep yourself and loved ones safe until police arrive, and be the best witness possible.
This could mean locking yourself in a room away from the perpetrators, hiding, fleeing the home, but don't engage unless absolutely necessary.

You see what he's saying? Allow the perp the free run of the house, cower away, and only come out once the police rock up in a few hours time. Or days.

Our service is doing everything posssible to investigate these crimes, and to maintain public safety.

Except, of course, actually catching the perps in the act and ensuring they don't repeat their actions any time soon.

I'd like to remind people that our top priority is the safety of all our communities. [...] The best defense for most people, as you've heard, is to comply.

The safety of all thus including, apparently, the criminal community.

What a spineless, time-serving, git.

Of course, one may wonder what happens if a home invasion does not follow the pattern suggested by Chief McSween. Fortunately, the USA TV channel ABC's "20/20" show is doing a special on a 2022 Idaho home invasion - four college students in a basement house - brutally murdered with a large knife - and as of July the murderer Bryan Kohberger pled guilty and managed to avoid the death penalty.

Of course, Chief McSween was only speaking about one Canadian town (part of the much larger Greater Toronto Area). Realising that this is an internationally-read blog, your humble author aims to give regionally appropriate guidance. If you live in any of the following cities, here's what you can expect from the local police force.

London, UK

"You're nicked, sunshine. What are you doing, interfering with oppressed minorities?"

Manhattan, NY

"What are you doing with a gun? Them just for criminals, and retired police officers. You're heading to Rikers, sonny."

Morristown, NJ (home of retired NYC mafiosi)

"I'm sorry to bother you, Mr DeLuca, but we had reports of a home invasion here... You didn't see anything? Well, have a nice day. By the way, is your son Sonny Scarface around? No? He's out with your car, birdwatching in the NJ coastal marshes? Hope he gets some nice pictures."

San Francisco, CA

"You shoot an intruder, sir, we'll arrest you; he'll sue you, and he'll win."

Houston, TX

"Nice grouping there, sir. Come down to the station this afternoon and we should be able to return your weapon. You've got one spare in the meantime? No? You want one?"

Boise, ID

"Sorry to bother you, ma'am, someone heard gunshots... Car backfiring, you say? By the way, that's one fine clutch of hogs you got there. Sixteen, you say? I bet that feeding 'em is quite the task."

Wichita, KS

"Just make sure the body is within the property line when we turn up, sir."

Little Rock, AR

"Body outside the property line? No problem, ma'am, we'll drag it back inside before we take the crime scene photos."

Juneau, AK

"Y'know, sir, I heard that if you leave a body outside around here, it's just gone by the morning."

Good hunting!

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the (immigration) lawyers"

Yes, shockingly, this is about UK immigration.

The (tweaked) post title comes from Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 2 in a coversation between Jack Cade and henchman, Dick 'The Butcher', in scene 2 of Act IV. There are various literary takes on this line, but a contemporary (Guardianista) focus might look at it as "back-hand praise of how lawyers confront the tribalism, partisanship and herd mentality to thwart mob violence in the public sphere of society." (Wikipedia, obvs).

There is a recent FB post by the "Community Integration and Advocacy Centre", based in Hull, UK; Charity Commission No: 1170984, who are apparently immigration lawyers, and - you'll be shocked to learn - are strongly pro-immigration. They decided to dump the following spew on Facebook to be shared with their many lawyer friends, so I thought it fair game to Robert Fisk the living hell out out it:

1. “Asylum seekers are illegal immigrants.”
❌ Seeking asylum is not illegal and this includes any person seeking sanctuary who may arrive in a small boat. Seeking asylum is a legal right under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Strawman! Not all asylum seekers are illegal immigrants. That said, illegal immigrants (economic migrants, criminals seeking cover and overs) very often pretend to be asylum seekers. This is facilitated by willing UK lawyers (q.v.)

2. “They’re just here to claim benefits.”
❌ Asylum seekers cannot access normal benefits. They receive only minimal support (about £6 a day) and usually cannot work.

Gosh, living in a 3-4 star hotel in UK with living support and ability to work under the table must be terrible compared to life in Nigeria.

3. “The UK takes in more asylum seekers than anyone else.”
❌ The UK receives fewer asylum seekers than many countries, including Germany, France, and Lebanon.

Strawman: island. Come on, you're not even trying.

4. “Most asylum claims are fake.”
❌ Almost half of claims are granted at the first stage, and many appeals are successful, showing the system recognises genuine cases.

Strawman! Immigration lawyers continue to validate immigration petitions and ongoing appeals, and Santa's elves continue to vote for Christmas.

5. “Asylum seekers are a burden.”
❌ Refugees contribute skills, resilience, and cultural diversity. Once allowed to work, they support local economies and communities.

Cultural diversity like... blowing up kids at an Ariana Grande concert? We already have skilled immigration outreach for the NHS, and I would venture to say that the UK has enough Indian restaurants, delivery drivers, phone thieves, and Turkish barbers.

6. “They should just apply from abroad.”
❌ Safe legal routes are extremely limited. International law allows people to apply once they reach the UK.

And also allows them to apply from France/Germany etc. Where it's easier to deny, hence the "I'm already here!" gambit.

7. “They’re all young men.”
❌ Women, children, and families also seek asylum. Young men often travel first because the journey is too dangerous for vulnerable family members.

Strawman! They're dominated by young men. And what's the legal family reunion rate?

8. “They get housing ahead of locals.”
❌ Asylum seekers cannot choose where they live. They are housed in temporary accommodation and do not take priority over council housing lists.

3* or 4* hotels much preferred to council B+B. How about we rehouse them in the wilds of Scotland?

9. “They must stay in the first safe country.”
❌ International law does not require this. Many seek safety in the UK because of family, language, or community connections.

They know from relatives and friends that the UK is a soft touch. And their language skills aren't evident, are they?

10. “We need to protect our women and children from asylum seekers.”
❌ This claim plays on fear, but there is NO evidence that asylum seekers are more likely to commit crimes than the general population. People seeking sanctuary are often women and children fleeing violence, seeking the same protection and safety we want for our own families.

Let's revisit Southport, the Manchester Arena, and these lawyers definitely need to be the first up against the wall.

A short history of the Trans movement

Roman times

Trans woman: I like to wear dresses
Man: Dude, we already wear togas
TW: I'm a woman
Man: if you've cut your balls off, you're a eunuch, not a woman. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Woman: a big strong man with no interest in women to guard the harem - what's not to like?
TW: I want to have babies!
M: Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?

Middle Ages

TW: I like to wear dresses
M: The Catholic Church might be just the thing for you
TW: I'm a woman
M: I'd keep that quiet while you're leading Sunday Services
TW: Though I still do enjoy perving on and bullying women from time to time
M: Like I said, Catholic Church
W: (told to keep her mouth shut)

Late 20th century

TW: I like to wear dresses
M: Seems to work for the Scots
TW: With nothing underneath
M: As I said...
W: At least, shave your legs
TW: And wear makeup!
M: The major advantage of men in getting ready quickly in the morning, and you just piss it away
W: Top tip: use about 80% less. And don't steal my stuff.
TW: I'm actually a woman
M/W: Sure, Jan

Early 21st century

TW: I like to wear dresses
W: How bold! How brave! How lovely!
M: You look ridiculous, but that's up to you
TW: I'm really a woman
W: Yes, yes, of course
M: You're really a loony
TW: I want to use women's bathrooms
W: Err... should I say something? Mustn't look judgemental
M: Weirdo
TW: I'm actually a woman
M/W: You don't have a vag
TW: I've got them to make me a vag
M/W: Oh my. Ewwww

2010s

TW: I am woman, hear me roar!
M/W: Okay ...
TW: Call me Agatha
M/W: Okay!
TW: Address me as "Miss"
M/W: Wut?
TW: Haters! BLASPHEMERS! I'll get you fired
M/W: Okay, "Miss"
TW: Time to start picking up easy trophies in womens' sports
W: What the hell?
TW: Haters! BLASPHEMERS!
W: (shuts up, simmers)
TW: Ah, a woman's locker room. Please admire my penis
W: Get out!
TW: Haters! BLASPHEMERS
W: I'm starting to think we made a mistake
TW: Hmmm... how to reproduce given the obvious but unfortunate biological obstructions ...?

2020s

TW: I am woman, hear me roar!
W: But... (Gets punched in the mouth)
M: That's not very lady-like
TW: Haters! BLASPHEMERS
Antifa: We'll burn your fuckin' city to the ground, transphobe
TW: I'm enjoying my new job as an elementary school teacher
M: What in the name of X is this 1st grade lesson plan about anal sex?
TW: All your kids are belong to us
M: (starts building up his household armory)
W: Wait, what's going on here?
TW: I'm taking all your sports trophies, and cancelling you if you object
W: (weeps)
TW: full public obedience and obeisance to the Trans cause, or we'll destroy you
M/W: (moves out of California, Oregon, NY, DC if they can)
TW: Christians? Legit targets. Let's leave the Muslims alone for now, they look like they might be a bit challenging.
W: (insists that husband purchase pastel grips for her pistol)

I don't know where this ends, but it's not going to be pretty.

"Chaos Monkeys" and how it got Antonio Martinez fired from Apple

Dedicated readers of this blog (all 1 of them) may recall last month's post about author Antonio Garcia Martinez being fired by Apple because a bunch of neurotic employees didn't like what he'd written in a book five years ago. I promised a review of that book: "Chaos Monkeys - Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" and, dear readers, this is that review.

It's a great book. Is it the "Liar's Poker of Silicon Valley"? Maybe, maybe not, but they have a lot in common. Martinez takes you through his career at Goldman Sachs in New York, joining a dying Silicon Valley startup (Adchemy), fleeing to do his own startup (AdGrok), dancing through lawsuits and VC funding, and finally playing Twitter for an acquisition before skipping to join Facebook as an ads product manager. His stint in Silicon Valley is 2008 to 2016 and, to the best of my knowledge, accurately represents the people, companies and society there at the time.

Most importantly, like Michael Lewis of "Liar's Poker", Martinez is a compelling writer. He is opinionated, informed, funny and - unlike Lewis - cheerfully portrays himself as an averagely terrible human being. He fathers two children out of wedlock, kind of screws over his startup partners - though there's a twist at the end - gets away with drunk driving and outrageous speeding, has a torrid all-over grope with a busty fellow product manager in a Facebook janitor's cupboard, and plays off Twitter against Facebook with misleading information to boost the acquisition value of his start-up. He's contemptuous of the CEO Murthy Nukala, although to be fair Mr Nukala does not sound like a pleasant human being himself, and of the ass-kissing divisional leadership of Facebook.

Martinez is a really interesting and colorful guy. I would totally buy him lunch to hear a few of his stories. I would probably not want him dating my girlfriends though.

The full list of grievances of the Apple employees is given in the petition that was leaked to The Verge. Zoe Schiffer's byline there is no surprise, she is the leak-destination-of-choice for Big Tech. The top grievance was of course about Martinez's portrayal of women in Silicon Valley:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague [my emphasis] or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

I've encountered a good number of Silicon Valley women in tech in the past year, and I have to say that Martinez hits the nail on the head here. The pandemic has demonstrated in spades the neuroticism of many of these women. There has been very little get-up-and-go demonstrated, instead just a whinyness and cowering that makes one despair for the future of the human race. If there is any criticism of Martinez here, it's that he omitted that many men in tech exhibit the same characteristics, which is maybe even less excusable. Interestingly, you don't see the same weakness in most of the Bay Area natives, nor in tech immigrants from Central / Latin America or the former Soviet states - India too, to a lesser degree. It is mostly a white-women-in-and-around-tech thing.

It's notable that Martinez contrasts this with the self-determinism of a number of interesting women he encountered and dated / screwed during his time in the Valley. He clearly isn't a misogynist in this respect - he just doesn't like a bunch of people.

The aforementioned janitor cupboard fondling also upset the Apple whiners, especially the description of his facilitator:

PMMess, as we’ll call her, was composed of alternating Bézier curves from top to bottom: convex, then concave, and then convex again, in a vertical undulation you couldn’t take your eyes off of. Unlike most women at Facebook (or in the Bay Area, really) she knew how to dress; forties-style, form-fitting dresses from neck to knee were her mainstay.
...[and later, when he's about to be let go]...
There were few women one would call conventionally attractive at Facebook. The few there were rarely if ever dressed for work with their femininity on display in the form of dresses and heels. A fully turned out member of the deuxième sexe in a conference room was as clear an angel of death as a short-barreled .38 Special revolver. Gokul [the manager firing Martinez] gave an awkward smile, and bolted out the door the moment I sat down. I looked across the table. If her look was supposed to disarm me, she needed either more cleavage or more charm.

Two things about this stand out: a) boy, Martinez knows how to write, and b) he is an astute observer of the unsayable. Techies have never been famed for their dress sense, and most women (and men) in a tech role do not really try to dress up. There's a principled thing here where they want to let their work speak for itself and not be judged by conventional metrics of attractiveness - but you can't then turn around and get annoyed when someone observes, correctly, that you aren't attractive. I'd imagine that it would be a very different experience in banking where how you dress can be the line between success and mockery.

He also observes:

It occurred to me that perhaps this most recent experiment in fertility—and the first—had been planned on British Trader’s part, her back up against the menopause wall, a professional woman with every means at her disposal except a willing male partner—in which case I had been snookered into fatherhood via warm smiles and pliant thighs, the oldest tricks in the book.

Would the Apple employees like to content that this is not, in fact, one of the oldest tricks in the book? Is it unacceptable to say precisely because it is the truth?

Go and read "Chaos Monkeys". It is a highly enjoyable book, it gives great if biased insights into Silicon Valley for both startups and Big Tech, and more importantly does so for the companies, the technology, and the humans involved. You won't regret it. And despite being fired because of it, I expect Martinez does not regret writing it.

As for the prissy Apple employees who signed the petition: I'd hire one Martinez over ten of them, any day.

Apple used to say "Think different." I guess those days are long gone.

Update: Garcia himself speaks without specificity on the firing. I'm guessing he got paid very well for signing that non-disclosure agreement, unlike the one he was offered (and declined) at Facebook. If it was less than six figures, I'd be very surprised.

A really ballsy move would be for Google, Oracle or even Twitter to hire him, to stick two fingers up at the pusillanimous HR skirts at Apple - and at their own self-important neurotic engineers. Won't happen, of course, but if you happened to have a division that you wanted shot of, and it was infested by this kind of person, hiring Martinez into it - and standing behind him - would be nothing short of hilarious.

James Damore was correct - Apple edition

Some of you may remember the story of James Damore, the Google engineer who suggested that perhaps some of the male/female software engineering disparity was due to the different dominant characteristics of males and females, and got fired for it. Damore's essay Google's Ideological Echo Chamber made a number of points and hypotheses, but one particular point stands out to me in the context of recent news:

Women, on average, have more:

• Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas[...]
• Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness[...]
• Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

A whole bunch of neurotic women (and, to be fair, men) got together to demand that Damore be fired, for contributing to their workplace stress... I guess, proving his point?

Well, there's now a new sacrifice for the Social Justice Wicker Man, and he also appears to have been bundled into the cage on the altar of neuroses: Antonio García Martínez. Martínez had previously written a bestselling book Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. It was originally published in July 2016, though the most recent paperback reprint on Amazon is from 2018. So, and this is not insignificant, he wrote this 5 years ago.

Mr Martínez recently got hired by Apple. But, it turns out, a few people had read his book and were not happy:

Then, a group of workers wrote a letter calling for an investigation. “Given Mr. García Martínez’s history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks about his former colleagues, we are concerned that his presence at Apple will contribute to an unsafe working environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying,” they said.
Within hours, the letter had well over 1,000 signatures. It was leaked to The Verge. That evening, García Martínez was fired.

The irony, it burns. (Must be hot irony).

I tried to order the book a couple of weeks ago but - yet more irony - it's now in such demand as a bestseller that I'll be lucky to get it by mid-June. When it finally arrives, dear readers, I promise an in-depth review.

Getting back to my original point, let us summarize: a bunch of Apple employees felt so empowered by Social Justice that they could demand firing of a new company hire based on something completely unconnected with Apple which he wrote 5 years ago, and which Apple must have known about when they hired him - and within the space of a couple of days, he was gone, no appeal

This isn't healthy, and isn't going to end well.

In the meantime, though, Martínez's book is still selling heavily on Amazon. And he's probably earned out his advance, so every sale is another royalty. Perhaps being fired by Apple was one of the better things to happen to him, financially - and I bet there's going to be a financial settlement on the quiet as soon as he hires a lawyer, if he hasn't already done so.

The really interesting information though, would be the names of the Apple employees who are signatories to the letter. Any future employer should think really, really carefully about employing someone so neurotic, self-entitled and bitter that they would hound someone out of a company simply because they didn't like what they wrote.

Eric Nelson had the right strategy for Chauvin

For any readers from planet Mars (hello, Perseverence!) a quick summary: On 25th of May 2020, a gentleman named George Floyd, who was black, was arrested by several Minneapolis police officers for passing an apparently fake $20 bill in a convenience store. Floyd was a habitual drug user, and had recently ingested both meth and Fentanyl. Officer Derek Chauvin and others tried to put him in a police car; the 220-pound Floyd resisted. The police officers instead put him on the ground and pinned him there for 9 mins and 29 seconds - apparently increasingly fearful that he was undergoing "excited delirium" from the drugs ingested. He protested saying "I can't breathe" several times, including when he was still standing. Officers called EMS for urgent medical help. A couple of minutes before EMS arrived, an officer noticed Floyd was no longer moving, and couldn't find a pulse. EMS rolled up, loaded Floyd, moved to a safe location and commenced resuscitation. Floyd died.

Officer Derek Chauvin's trial for murder ran over this past 3 weeks. The state-funded prosecution came mob-handed: 12-15 prosecutors including a number volunteering their time "for the public good". Chauvin had a single defence laywer, Eric Nelson, paid for mainly out of police union funds. Nelson and Chauvin lost, as you may have heard, and now Chauvin is looking at 20+ years behind bars unless an appeal about trial location and prejudicial comments, plus some sharp practice by the prosecution, works out. For the record, I think he'd have to be very lucky for the appeal to get traction; but not because it's wrong.

I know quite a lot about this trial's events. I've followed the day-by-day liveblog at Legal Insurrection, principally by self-defence lawyer Andrew Branca. Now, Branca comes at this with his own prejudices, as we all do, and gives his own read on the trial, but overall it's a fairly low-bias account. I read through it all and thought that Eric Nelson had got over the line on "reasonable doubt": I thought he could secure a few jurors to accept that there would be reasonable doubt that Chauvin's leaning-on-back-and-neck pin was what materially killed Floyd, compared to the known ingestion of various drugs, enlarged heart, 90%-occluded arteries, etc. Branca was down on Nelson's use-of-force witness, and I'd agree, but on the medical front - and indeed, narrating the arrest from Chauvin's point of view during closing - I think his conclusion of "reasonable doubt" was indeed reasonable.

The jury took just over a day to return a unanimous verdict on all charges, starting with Minnesota 2nd degree murder. They were not hung, they had no questions for the judge. They stayed out for the shortest decent time decent, and came back with a predetermined result. They knew what they were voting before they were sent out.

I'm sure a lot of opprobrium will be heaped on Nelson by people sympathetic to Chauvin. Honestly, it's misplaced. He was David in front of Goliath, but in this case Goliath knew the shot was coming and had a plan to duck. The jury looked at what would happen with any "not guilty" verdict and decided "I don't want any part of that!". It's rational, although a dereliction of public duty. Nelson just needed 1-2 people to say "wait, no, we can't railroad this guy - reasonable doubt!" but the fact that there was no hung jury and not even a question to the judge tells you where the jury felt their interest lay.

Still, all the people bleating about "racial healing!" have it exactly the wrong way around. In today's environment, real racial healing would be a white and black jury not convicting a white man accused of killing a black man, because of the reasonable doubt standard that is still supposed to underpin justice. Weaken that standard because of race, and you make race relations worse.

Incidentally, I hope that the big American blue cities (Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, ...) really enjoy the future lack of policing now that it's clear politicians will crush police officers like a bug if they do anything to affect race relations. Informal stock tip: buy ammunition and guns (directly or via companies) as the populace realizes that they're on their own for self defence.

Asian Lives Matter - Uber Eats edition

Item number n+1 in the black-in-Asian violence saga, from Washington D.C. last Tuesday:

Appalling footage of the carjacking near Nationals Park in Washington D.C. on Tuesday that resulted in the death of Pakistani immigrant & Uber Eats driver Mohammad Anwar. The teenage girls who police say used a Taser to steal the car face murder charges.pic.twitter.com/mOPnrLBf0t

— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) March 27, 2021

In case the video (1m 26 seconds) is removed, a summary:

• (0:00) Two people are in the car; orange hoodie person in the passenger seat; Mohammad is outside and wrestling the person in driver's seat for control of the steering wheel
• (0:17) Mohammad exclaims "It's my car!"
• (0:19) Car accelerates away, Mohammad still clinging on
• (0:28) Squeal of brakes as car attempts to make a sharp right, sound of collision
• (0:31) Camera holder frantically sprints up the road
• (0:49) First view of the car, on its side (driver-side down, passenger-side up) in front of a parking garage.
• (0:52) Orange-clad person exits car from the top
• (0:56) First view of Mohammad, sprawled next to railings; military-camo people appearing on scene
• (0:58) Dreadlocked girl climbing out of top of car, camo'd person helping her down. Camera person or someone close saying "They stole the car! that girl!"
• (1:06) Orange hoodie and Dreadlocks moving away from car; Mohammad still sprawled and unmoving
• (1:10) Military-sounding person: "I'm going to need everybody step back from the car!"
• (1:12) Orange hoodie woman: "My phone is in there!" SHE IS FOUR FEET AWAY FROM THE DEAD BODY OF MOHAMMAD, FOR F*CK'S SAKE!
• (1:25) General scene control, lools like someone in a blue+red jacket is moving towards Mohammad - intent to help him? Not clear.

Local news is reporting that the two carjacking girls are 13 and 15 and now are charged with murder. Astonishingly, they do not look at all like white supremacists. Mohammad, age 66, immigrated with his family from Pakistan in 2014, in search of a better life in the USA. A GoFundme page by the family has raised $190K so far, but that's still way short of compensation for losing the family's breadwinner.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has conspiciously failed to tweet about this carjack murder of a minority member of the public. I guess Mohammad was the wrong kind of minority.

I repeat my previous opinion - where the heck do Democratic lawmakers think this is going to end? Middle-Eastern, South Asia, Chinese, Korean, and South-East Asians in the USA are witnessing a sustained attack on their elders and livelihoods (beauty supply store in Houston, TX) from a very specific and identifiable sector of society. You think they're not going to act? Their actions might be subtle, but they're going to be very definite. If the government isn't going to protect them, they sure as heck will protect themselves.

COVID protection insanity - Sarah Cody

Santa Clara County, which is mostly the megapolis of San Jose, is making its COVID policy through its County Health Officer Dr Sarah Cody, and if there ever was an example of the Peter Principle - Petra Principle? - then she is it.

Witness Friday's announcement about loosening restrictions in Santa Clara:

Santa Clara County loosened some guidelines Friday while keeping others tightly in place. It now says if you're six feet apart, and outdoors, masks are no longer required.

According to Twitter, up until now, many residents of Santa Clara had no idea that they had to wear masks while outdoors and 6+ feet away from anyone else. This is not surprising because it is completely insane. Technically, if you were jogging on a public trail last Thursday with no-one within 100 yards, you were violating these restrictions. There is no evidence that COVID spreads outdoors between people 6ft+ apart - none! Yet Cody found it necessary to impose the restrictions nevertheless.

I've played the ball (the restrictions) so now I feel justified in playing the man (Cody).

Cody was appointed in 2013, succeeding her boss - she had spent the past 15 years working as a Deputy Health Officer at the Santa Clara County Public Health Department. If I saw that promotion profile on a resumé I'd have absolutely no confidence that the promotion was earned. It was either for convenience - the leadership didn't really bother advertising and interviewing - or diversity, where she was the only female candidate. The latter seems a bit unlikely because public health officials tend to be female, so I'm leaning towards "convenience". Definitely not "competence".

Cody has comprehensively screwed up Santa Clara's response to COVID, mounting increasing strict restrictions which have had no differential impact on the spread and effect of the virus compared to elsewhere. She invents random priorities for vaccination just to show that she's involved and hip to minorities - rather than taking hard-won experience from other countries and implementing as-is. She is astonishingly out of her depth. I'm sure she's a competent middle-of-the-road medic, but she apparently has no idea how to consider the business and other aspects of her random pronouncements.

I would like to see every restaurant in San Jose, having suffered 3 months of shut-down indoor dining and 2 months of any dining at all despite their investments in outside facilities, post a picture of Sarah Cody - and her minions - in their front windows. Text underneath: "BANNED: not to be served at this establishment". Hope she likes McDonald's and KFC.

That said, Cody doesn't get the full blame; when the local population is full of neurotics, pandering to them is very tempting.

"It feels good, but at the same time it's nerve-wracking not wearing it, see, that's why I still have it on, you never know, boom, here we go,” said Monica Hernandez of Cupertino.

Monica Hernandez should shut herself in a closet in her apartment if she's that afraid. Let the rest of us try to restart the economy that Dr Sarah Cody has throttled to death.

Asian Lives Matter - arrest the shopkeepers!

I swear, I had no idea this was going to catch light so fast - but apparently it has.

I tagged my previous post with an update about an Oakland Chinatown liquor store owner who was arrested after shooting at someone robbing a woman outside his store. Well, the plot has thickened!

The arrest of the Oakland Chinatown store owner who fired shots while interrupting a robbery has divided the police department [my emphasis]. On Monday, the store owner saw a woman being confronted by men who wanted her camera near 9th and Franklin. The men also hit her with their car.
That's when the store owner fired shots, and the men took off. KTVU has learned that the store owner has a concealed weapons permit from outside Alameda County that's valid statewide.

Side note: this

Oakland police officers and investigators believed the owner, who has helped them find suspects in the past, should be released from custody.
But those officers were overruled by a captain who ordered the owner be jailed, [my emphasis] sources told KTVU.

So: even the local cops thought that the owner made a reasonable decision , but the chief of police wants to arrest him. Where, exactly, does Chief LeRonne Armstrong think this is going to lead?

Asian Lives Matter - the fire rises!

Channelling Tom Hardy here, but the dysfunction and civil rebellion that has started is not a million miles away from Bane and his merry crew...

It didn't take long for my previous post on an 84 year old blind Thai man being beaten to death for other incidents of young-black-on-elderly-Asian violence to happen. In fact, it's spreading:

• Mr Yahya Muslim of Oakland has been assaulting a series of elderly Asians in the city. He came to prominence after a security video caught someone with his description smashing a 91-year-old man to the ground from behind, on January 31
• Graffiti artists have tagged a Japanese immigrant memorial in San Jose's Japantown, making a clear statement about territory;
• and, unsurprisingly, Oakland's Asian community organizes patrols to combat the violence.

The single most telling sign for me is that Bay Area Big Tech companies are sending mails around about this phenomenon. I've had confirmation of three separate companies mailing their Asian employee clubs/groups about the attacks, expressing their shock and horror and offering emotional support. Mind you, they seem to be very careful not to talk about the perpetrators...

One claim I have seen recently, now that people are talking about it, is that it has been triggered by Donald J Trump talking about the "Kung Flu". Setting aside the miniscule likelihood that a 20 year old black thug in San Francisco has even listened to a Trump speech, let's remember Yik Oi Huang who was brutally beaten in SFO in January 2019, over a year before the pandemic - and suffered for a year before dying in early 2020. These are not Trump-driven anti-Chinese supremacists. These are callous racist thugs. Lay the blame for their behaviour at the feet of their parents - if they still care.

The most spectacular feet of mental agility I've seen, though, was from Los Angeles Times writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet T Nguyen:

Horrendous crimes against Asian Americans have happened recently, and it is right that Asian Americans have spoken out against them. But we can be against anti-Asian violence and not resort to knee-jerk calls for more policing, which is inextricable from the policing of Black

— Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) February 12, 2021

and Brown communities. Asian Americans need to locate anti-Asian violence as part of a pattern of white supremacy [my emphasis] which also targets Black and Brown and Indigenous people. Even if perpetrators of violence are people of color, the solution is not to fallback on racist assumptions

— Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) February 12, 2021

All I can say is that it must take a very expensive education to mess up one's brain that badly. Black people are beating up on the Asian elderly community, and your reflex - as a Vietnamese American - is to blame white supremacy?

I repeat my previous assertion. Unless these attacks are stopped - and it doesn't look like the police are able to stop them - the Asian community is going to turn to organizations which can make it happen. Asian shops are going to stop serving young black people, or make them feel so unwelcome that they leave, further increasing tensions. The almost-inevitable result is going to be a black 20-year old found lying in an alley in Chinatown with severe beating injuries, but it will turn out that no-one around saw anything. I thought we had got past this, but apparently history repeats.

Update: Feb 16th 2021 - a 30 year old was robbed of her expensive camera in Chinatown, Oakland. A liquor store owner saw what was happenening, ran out and fired his gun at the robber - and was promptly arrested and charged with felony assault with a firearm.

The [police] chief's message was that Oakland should come together as a community, but that people should not put one another in harm's way.

Sorry Chief, but there's a section of the black community which has already decided to put the Asian community in harm's way. And when you arrest a Chinese store owner for trying to stop a robbery - where the robber escapes - you send a very clear (unintentional) message to the Asian community about their ability to rely on the police to protect them.

Thai Lives Matter

It turns out that, following my previous notes on the matter, Asian-American lives in San Francisco continue to be rudely shortened:

Police in San Francisco arrested a 19-year-old Daly City man on suspicion of murder for a brazen attack last week on an 84-year-old man in the city’s Anza Vista neighborhood, officials said Sunday.
[...]
The victim was identified by family members as Vicha Ratanapakdee, a native of Thailand who lived in San Francisco.

I've seen the uncensored security video of the incident. It does not make for comfortable viewing. The thug barrels across the road, slams into Mr Ratanapakdee from the side, knocking him hard into the ground and then just lopes away casually. He clearly didn't care whether his victim lived or died. Unsurprisingly it was the latter, but took two days to happen.

Mr Ratanapakdee was 84 years old, and apparently legally blind. The notion that he was any kind of threat - or was even really aware of his assailant before the attack - is ridiculous. The alleged assailant, Mr Antoine Watson, is of course of the same ethnic persuasion as that described in my previously linked stories of elder abuse and grievous harm in peaceful San Francisco.

Even San Francisco's notoriously lax DA has been forced to take this attack seriously, and - should Mr Watson indeed be convicted of the crimes charged - he can expect a good long stint in jail. But the fact that he even attempted this is a recurring reminder of the threat to San Francisco's elderly Asian community that a certain section of its black community poses. Does the city government really think they are going to continue to take this lying down? Sooner or later, something is going to snap. And when the city doesn't show any inclination to protect elderly Asians, their younger relatives are going to find a dai lo who will.

Update: Feb 16th 2021 - a robbery outside a liquor store in Chinatown, Oakland results in a young woman being robbed of her expensive camera, and the liquor store owner being charged with felony assault with a firearm when he tried to intervene. While I'm sure that firing four shots (with, presumably, zero hits) was not the minimal-violence reaction, can you imagine how this is going to play in Chinatown?

The chief [of police]'s message was that Oakland should come together as a community, but that people should not put one another in harm's way.

Sorry Chief, I think that ship has sailed. One small part of the black community is already putting a large part of the Asian community in harm's way. When the Asian community fights back, they're arrested. And Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong is black. It doesn't matter how upright and righteous he is, this is going to appear - unfairly - as the black police chief covering for black criminals.

Kamala the cuckoo

I was having lunch with one of my right-wing friends today - such creatures do exist, even in the Bay Area. It was not socially distanced, of course, neither of us believes it makes a difference at this point. At some point she was commenting (of course) on the current US political situation. Specifically, Kamala Harris. "She's a cuckoo!", she remarked, disdainfully.

I misheard initially, and ventured a contrary opinion that she actually seemed pretty sane and intelligent, albeit rather lacking in morals.

"The bird, not the adjective. You must know about them, you're from the UK, you're all into birds aren't you?" I agreed that I was familiar with the avian in question. "Okay, so it sticks its egg into the nest of another unsuspecting bird, a baby cuckoo hatches and is a giant compared to the other baby birds, it progressively kicks the others out of the nest and takes over. Kamala Harris, right?"

She has a point. I don't know if I agree with her assertion that Kammie will infect Sleepy Joe with COVID-19 the first chance that she gets, but I don't give Joe that long in office. Cuck-oo. Cuck-oo.

[1] I wondered how she was acquainted with the bird in question, but it turns out that California does have some cuckoo species, though they're fairly rare and may be endangered. You learn something new every day.

Asian-American Lives Matter - and SF Supervisor Matt Haney is medacious

Reprising my post in May about Chinese Lives Mattering, in the context of assaults on elderly Asian folk in San Francisco, readers will not be surprised that this has continued to happen, and in fact worsen:

Now community leaders are saying the area is facing a new challenge; racially motivated violence, with a number of elderly Asian American victims the targets of unprovoked physical attacks.
"I am upset and appalled at the recent incident of an attack on a Vietnamese elder two weeks ago," said Judy Young from the Southeast Asian Community Development Center. "This should not happen."
Police say that was one of two victims, one 71-years-old, the other 78. The son of one of the victims posting photos of his mother's bruised face on Instagram.

This is, clearly, awful.

Fortunately, Supervisor for SF's Tenderloin District, Matt Haney, is on the case:

Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the Tenderloin, says racially charged rhetoric from the Whitehouse has helped fuel anti-Asian Pacific Islander bias and ultimately anti-Asian Pacific Islander attacks.
"There's been that type of hatred that has come from people at the top of this country, national leadership which has sent a message of hatred that has been felt by API members of our community," said Supervisor Haney.

This is... an interesting assertion. Let's break it down. Is the President beating down on Koreans? Filipinos? Hawaiians? Samoans? Vietnamese? Taiwanese? No, Matt Haney clearly means the rhetoric against ... the Chinese Communist Party and its singularly deplorable actions with regard to the Wuhan Flu.

So, clearly the miscreants assaulting Vietnamese Americans in SFO are completely separate from those assaulting Chinese Americans in SFO last year, and are in fact the MAGA-hat wearing white supremacists who are known to be endemic in SF. Right, Matty babe?

I Googled for photos of 34-year-old Michael Turner and it turns out that he is not the phenotype you would normally associate with White Supremacy. In fact, he bears a remarkable resemblance in ethnic origin to the perps of the 2019 attacks I described previously. Who knew? He also has a history of violence and larceny which indicates this might not be an out-of-character moment for him.

Entertainingly, SF's radical left District Attorney, Chesa Boudin - the son of two murdering radical left-wing terrorists - tried to play tough on this case:

"Just yesterday one of my [assistant district attorneys] convinced a judge to detain that man in jail pending trial and we will not release him until we are confident he can safely be released," said San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

With Chesa having done such a sterling job to date of protecting the SF citizenship from scumballs, I'm sure we can all sleep more soundly in our beds.

I repeat my previous assertion. The Asian-American community are worried about one specific ethnic group commiting violence against them. It's not Caucasians. The fact that the local news are strenously avoiding providing any coverage of what's actually happening should not be surprising, but continues to be very depressing.

God rest Lady Ghislane (in advance)

I sincerely hope that Ghislane Maxwell had the foresight to cash in all her investments and have a rollicking good time over the past year; vintage champagne, expensive escorts, finest Siberian caviar, etc. I don't think she will have to be concerned about her long-term asset performance. I give her a 30% chance of surviving to testify, and <5% chance of surviving 1 year in the general prison population - being seen as a pimp of young girls will not endear her to Big Bertha et al in Bedford Hills or a similar establishment - and I don't see a socialite doing well in protective solitary.

I'd have been more dismissive of the "Epstein didn't kill himself" conspiracy theorists had they not loudly and publicly predicted his "suicide" in advance. Hence, I think they start with the advantage with regard to predicting the future of the soon-to-be-late Ms Maxwell.

Master/slave terminology - bears repeating

Two years ago I made fun of the effort to remove the terms "master", "slave", "whitelist" and "blacklist" from tech vocabulary, and made the assertion:

I don't have any intrinsic objection to using alternative terminology for master/slave, or for blacklist/whitelist. But I've scrutinised the people calling for this change, and I'm going to keep using the original terminology because civilised people should not yield an inch to these totalitarian fuckers.

With the developments in crimethink in the past two months, I stand by this more strongly than ever.

Chinese lives matter

This is not about what you might think it's about. Hong Kong, and indeed the PRC, do not feature.

Yik Oi Huang

Let me tell you about Yik Oi Huang. A grandmother, she was 88 years old on Tuesday 8th January 2019. Early that morning she left her house in Visitacion Avenue, San Francisco, and went for her morning walk - a staple activity of Chinese senior citizens which we could usefully imitate. It would be the last time she walked anywhere.

In the park someone attacked her, beat her brutally, and left her for dead before apparently entering her home and then fleeing the area. She was hospitalized with head injuries, a broken spine, hand and ribs. Allow me to repeat: she was 88 years old. Any level of violence towards someone that old would be shocking, but the injuries inflicted on this old lady went several steps beyond that term.

SFPD arrested a suspect 11 days later. He was 18 years old, and black. The suspected motive was robbery. At this point he is still awaiting trial, though I would imagine that he stands a very good chance of his charges being upgraded to murder.

Yik Oi Huang did not die immediately. She suffered in hospital for the next 360 days before finally - mercifully - passing away on 3rd January this year.

You remember the protests filling the streets of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other places with large Chinese communities? You remember Chinese youths breaking shop windows and setting light to businesses across San Francisco? No, of course you don't - it never happened. This event barely registered outside San Francisco. Try searching "Yik Oi Huang site:cnn.com" on Google. Now try doing the same with "Michael Brown site:cnn.com", "George Floyd site:cnn.com" by contrast - hundreds of thousands of results.

Shuo Zeng

Shuo Zeng was 34 years old on New Years Eve 2019, but would not live to see 2020. With friends at the Starbucks in Montclair District, Oakland to celebrate the New Year and his birthday. He was a research scientist at Aspera, having graduated from Kansas State.

Oakland is notorious for laptop thefts, and today would see another one. Shuo Zeng had his laptop with him, not unusual behaviour for a techie. A teenager ran in to the Starbucks and grabbed the laptop, ducked out through the door being held by an accomplice, and jumped into a car driven by a third man.

Unwilling to lose his laptop, Shuo Zeng bravely - but unwisely - pursued them. He reached them as they got into the car. The car took off and Shuo Zeng was knocked against a parked car. He suffered head injuries and died in hospital.

The police found the suspects and charged them all with special circumstance murder and second-degree robbery. All three men were black, at least two of them from San Francisco.

CNN at least have one article about Shuo Zeng on their site. They do not, of course, mention the race of his assailants. One wonders if they would have done the same had he been black and his assailants white.

Wenjian Liu and the Can Man

There have been other, more famous incidents. Wenjian Liu was one of the two NYPD officers executed by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley on December 20 2014. An elderly Chinese man collecting cans in San Francisco was abused by two black men in a video that went viral in February this year. Chinese residents in areas with a significant black presence know who they need to be wary about, and it's not the police.

My point

Over 99% of the US population, myself included, felt that the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25th May was appalling, and that the action taken against the officers involved was entirely justified. Police brutality is unfortunately not that rare in the USA. However, I'm baffled as to why anyone thinks there's an obvious racial component to this. Floyd was nicked for passing a counterfeit bill - the actions of the arrest seem heavy-handed, but not the arrest itself. Do they claim that the officers were particularly brutal because he was black? Where's the evidence?

It is instructive to compare the criminally negligent behaviour of Derek Chauvin holding Floyd's head down for far too long, with the criminally negligent behaviour of Shuo Zeng's laptop thieves in driving away with no regard for his safety. In neither case did there seem to be intent to kill, but both cases resulted in death. Chauvin had country-wide protests screaming for accountability - which they already had in part, since he had been fired from the force and charged with murder-3 in record time. Shuo Zeng had a quietly grieving family and local community, but that was it. No protests, no riots. Barely a headline.

The black community might claim - unjustifiably, in my view - that Black Lives don't matter enough to the USA in general. But it seems to me that there's a stronger case that Chinese Lives don't matter as much as Black Lives do.

The pace of PACER

Permit me a brief, hilarious diversion into the world of US Government corporate IT. PACER is a USA federal online system - "Public Access to Court Electronic Records" which lets people and companies access transcribed records from the US courts. One of their judges has been testifying to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, IP, and the internet and in the process revealed interesting - and horrifying - numbers.

TL;DR -

1. it costs at least 4x what it reasonably should; but
2. any cost savings will be eaten up by increased lawyer usage; nevertheless,
3. rampant capitalism might be at least a partial improvement; so
4. the government could upload the PACER docs to the cloud, employ a team of 5-10 to manage the service in the cloud, and save beaucoup $$.

Of course, I could be wrong on point 2, but I bet I'm not.

Background

PACER operates with all the ruthless efficiency we have come to expect from the federal government.^[1] It's not free; anyone can register for it, usage requires a payment instrument (credit card) but it is free if you use less than $15 per quarter. The basis of charging is:

All registered agencies or individuals are charged a user fee of $0.10 per page. This charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches (one page for no matches). You will be billed quarterly.

You would think that, at worst, it would be cost-neutral. One page of black+white text at reasonably high resolution is a bit less than 1MB, and (for an ISP) that costs less than 1c to serve on the network. Therefore you spend less than 9c on the machines and people required to store and serve the data, and profit!

Apparently not...

The PACER claims

It was at this point in the article that I fell off my chair:

Fleissig said preliminary figures show that court filing fees would go up by about $750 per case to “produce revenue equal to the judiciary’s average annual collections under the current public access framework.” That could, for example, drive up the current district court civil filing fee from $350 to $1,100, she said.

What the actual expletive? This implies that:

1. the average filing requests 7500 pages of PACER documents - and that the lawyers aren't caching pages to reduce client costs (hollow laughter); or
2. the average filing requests 25 PACER searches; or
3. the average client is somewhere on the continuum between these points.

It seems ridiculously expensive. One can only conclude, reluctantly, that lawyers are not trying to drive down costs for their clients; I know, it's very hard to credit. ^[2]

And this assumes that 10c/page and $30/search is the actual cost to PACER - let us dig into this.

The operational costs

Apparently PACER costs the government $100M/year to operate:

“Our case management and public access systems can never be free because they require over $100 million per year just to operate,” [Judge Audrey] Fleissig said [in testimony for the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, IP, and the internet]. “That money must come from somewhere.”

Judge Fleissig is correct in the broad sense - but hang on, $100M in costs to run this thing? How much traffic does it get?

The serving costs

Let's look at the serving requirements:

PACER, which processed more than 500 million requests for case information last fiscal year

Gosh, that's a lot. What's that per second? 3600 seconds/hour x 24 hours/day x 365 days/year is 32 million seconds/year, so Judge Fleissig is talking about... 16 queries per second. Assume that's one query per page. That's laughably small.

Assume that peak traffic is 10x that, and you can serve comfortably 4 x 1MB pages per second on a 100Mbit network connection from a single machine; that's 40 machines with associated hardware, say amortized cost of $2,000/year per machine - implies order of $100K/year on hardware, to ensure a great user experience 24 hours per day 365 days per year. Compared to $100M/year budget, that's noise. And you can save 50% just by halving the number of machines and rejecting excess traffic at peak times.

The ingestion and storage costs

Perhaps the case ingestion is intrinsically expensive, with PACER having to handle non-standard formats? Nope:

The Judiciary is planning to change the technical standard for filing documents in the Case Management and Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF) system from PDF to PDF/A. This change will improve the archiving and preservation of case-related documents.

So PACER ingests PDFs from courts - plus, I assume, some metadata - and serves PDFs to users.

How much data does PACER ingest and hold? This is a great Fermi question; here's a good worked example of answer, with some data.

There's a useful Ars Technica article on Aaron Swartz that gives us data on the document corpus as of 2013:

PACER has more than 500 million documents

Assume it's doubled as of 2019, that's 1 billion documents. Assume 1MB/page, 10 pages/doc, that's 10^9 docs x 10 MB per doc = 10^10 MB = 1x10^4 TB. That's 1000 x 10TB hard drives. Assume $300/drive, and drives last 3 years, and you need twice the number of drives to give redundancy, that's $200 per 10TB per year in storage costs, or $200K for 10,000 TB. Still, noise compared to $100M/year budget. But the operational costs of managing that storage can be high - which is why Cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud have done a lot of work to offer managed services in this area.

Amazon, for instance, charges $0.023 per GB per month for storage (on one price model) - for 10^9 x 1MB docs, that's 1,000,000 GB x $0.023 or $23K/month, $276K/year. Still way less than 1% of the $100M/year budget.

Incidentally Aaron Swartz agrees with the general thrust of my article:

Yet PACER fee collections appear to have dramatically outstripped the cost of running the PACER system. PACER users paid about $120 million in 2012, thanks in part to a 25 percent fee hike announced in 2011. But Schultze says the judiciary's own figures show running PACER only costs around $20 million.

A rise in costs of 5x in 6 years? That's approximately doubling every 2 years. As noted above, it seems unlikely to be due to serving costs - even though volumes have risen, serving and storage costs have got cheaper. Bet it's down to personnel costs. I'd love to see the accounts break-down. How many people are they employing, and what are those people doing?

The indexing costs - or lack thereof

Indexing words and then searching a large corpus of text is notoriously expensive - that's what my 10c per electronic page is paying for, right? Apparently not:

There is a fee for retrieving and distributing case information for you: $30 for the search, plus $0.10 per page per document delivered electronically, up to 5 documents (30 page cap applies).

It appears that PACER is primarily constructed to deliver responses to "show me the records of case XXXYYY" or "show me all cases from court ZZZ", not "show me all cases that mention 'Britney Spears'." That's a perfectly valid decision but makes it rather hard to justify the operating costs.

Security considerations

Oh, please. These docs are open to anyone who has an account. The only thing PACER should be worried about is someone in Bangalore or Shanghai scraping the corpus, or the top N% of cases, and serving that content for much less cost. Indeed, that's why they got upset at Aaron Swartz. Honestly, though, the bulk of their users - law firms - are very price-insensitive. Indeed, they quite possibly charge their clients 125% or more of their PACER costs, so if PACER doubled costs overnight they'd celebrate.

I hope I'm wrong. I'm afraid I'm not.

Public serving alternatives

I don't know how much Bing costs to operate, but I'd bet a) that its document corpus is bigger than PACER, b) that its operating costs are comparable, c) that its indexing is better than PACER, d) that its search is better than PACER, e) that its page serving latency is better than PACER... you get the picture.

Really though, if I were looking for a system to replace this, I'd build off an off-the-shelf solution to translate inbound PDFs to indexed text - something like OpenText - and run a small serving stack on top. That reduces the regular serving cost, since pages are a few KB of text rather than 1MB of PDF, and lets me get rid of all the current people costs associated with the customized search and indexing work on the current corpus.

PACER is a terrible use of government money

Undoubtedly it's not the worst^[3], but I'd love for the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, IP, and the internet to drag Jeff Bezos in to testify and ask him to quote a ballpark number for serving PACER off Amazon Web Services, with guaranteed 100% profit margin.

Bet it's less than 1/4 of the current $100M/year.

[1] Yes, irony
[2] Why does New Jersey have the most toxic waste dumps and California the most lawyers? California New Jersey got first choice. [Thanks Mr Worstall!]
[3] Which is terribly depressing.

Deconstructing Dr Rachel McKinnon

Those of my readers who are keen followers of trans rights issues - likely none - may be aware of the controversy surrounding Dr Rachel McKinnon (person's preferred Twitter handle) who is a man who identifies as a woman ("trans woman"). McKinnon was previously an OK-but-far-from-top-tier cyclist in the men's arena. Upon "becoming" a woman, McKinnon quickly powered to the top ranking, including a win in the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championship in the 35-44 age group (female), and if you click through to that link you might have an inkling why.

McKinnon has been assiduous on chasing down (and blocking) anyone on Twitter who questions the fairness of a physiological man competing with physiological females. I can't imagine why, unless there's a certain element of feeling guilty about sudden un-earned success.

Luckily, the golden fountain of academic publishing has provided a definitive voice on the subject^[1]. McKinnon has published a paper (co-authored with Dr. Aryn Conrad) in PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS, VOL. 46, NO. 2, FALL 2018 which settles the issue once and for all. [Rachel, FYI, I've squirrelled away a copy of this in case you delete it.]

Aryn Conrad, if you were wondering, also appears not to have been born in the same gender to which they now identify. Apparently Aryn is "the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants" though I wonder whether that's exactly the same relationship that the grandparents would state.

Let's take a walk through this article. The abstract sets out their goal:

We argue that the inclusion of trans athletes in competition commensurate with their legal gender is the most consistent position with these principles of fair and equitable sport.

Gosh, that's not something we could have predicted, at all. But perhaps we're being unfair, what's the actual argument? Well:

We suggest that the justificatory burden for such prima facie discrimination [endogenous testosterone limits] is unlikely to be met. Thus, in place of a limit on endogenous testosterone for women (whether cisgender, transgender, or intersex), we argue that ‘legally recognized gender’ is most fully in line with IOC and CAS principles.

In other words, it doesn't matter if trans athletes have a material physiological advantage over women, the paper wants to talk about whether the existing regulations are fully consistent with respect to the issues of male-to-female athletes. This approach is certain to win over female athletes on the lower steps of the podium, of course.

It's a poor quality "paper", by the way; 61 double-spaced pages without diagrams before you get to the appendices, so about 30 normal pages. Contrary to what aspiring academics might think, length is generally inversely proportional to quality. If you can't make the core argument in 10 pages, you're probably relying on length to cover up plot holes. It also doesn't follow the usual structure of "tell 'em what you're going to say, say it, tell them that you've said it" - perhaps because that would make it much easier to check their claims.

Reading through the paper, the key claims are:

1. Internation sport regulations, and their legal effect and scope, are complicated;
2. There are some edge cases of people born as women with high testosterone, which have not been handled consistently;
3. Sport regs say we must not discriminate on various grounds - is "gender identity" (as opposed to biological sex) one of those grounds? (you'll be shocked to learn that the authors think that it is);
4. Apparently not clear that biological women with excess testosterone have a significant physiological advantage over other women;
5. What is the meaning of "fairness / level playing field" in sport? There's a huge amount of waffle here, but seems to boil down to "gender identity is intrinsic, so you can't base fairness on it in the same way that you can't say that a 7 foot tall person has an unfair advantage in the high jump". (I'm doing some serious editing here, the text is sprawling and terribly structured and summarised).

At this point I'd like to pull out the quote:

So if trans women are female, we ask, why would 'male' physiological data be relevant to the question of fairness? We know this won’t be convincing. But it is an important question to confront.

Well, there's the tiny matter that male physiology is hugely relevant to performance in sport."We know this won't be convincing" - yes, because it is not at all convincing. It is, if you excuse the phrase in this context, bollocks.

Continuing, we have:

6. Placing upper limits on testosterone in "women" is totes unfair;
7. Trans women's physiological advantage is not that big, in fact men and women almost completely overlap in physiology (I swear, that's what they say);
8. Trans women are actually just like regular hi-testosterone women in sports performance;
9. Indeed, setting testosterone limits on women in sport is probably unfair and unreasonable;
10. Bodies are complex and testosterone levels are not the whole story by a long chalk;
11. Testosterone levels don't seem correlated with performance by elite men;
12. Actually, just don't use testosterone to judge who's a man and who's a woman - just take their word for it;
13. Let's look at Caster Semenya as an edge case of high-performing woman with testosterone, trans women are totes the same as her
14. If you don't let men identifying as women compete in women-only events, it's just not fair dammit.

My goodness me. I'm glad I only had to read that once. If I were designing a paper structure to bury the facts and specific arguments, I don't think I could have done better. Props to McKinnon and Conrad. Of course, if they were actually trying to convince rather than write an obscure scrawl to point to as "academic validation of our argument, baby!" they'd have written it differently.

I don't know who the reviewers were for this paper, but if they got any remuneration then I'd recommend clawing it back, sharp-ish.

Rachel and Aryn: if you want to submit a more compact version of the paper to a journal with standards on conciseness, you're welcome to build from the above structure. I don't want any co-author credit because I think your arguments are ludicrous, but I'd like to see them at least argued clearly.

Rachel McKinnon and Aryn Conrad appear to be desperate to get external validation for their lifestyle choices. I'm reminded at this point of Robert Pirsig's comment in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance":

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

[1] No, not really.

Darn that undependable "climate change"

Poor Cody Petterson is despondent:

As a child, he had happily played and hiked among these statuesque conifers, which provide shelter to black bears and black-tailed deer. By the age of 37, he wanted to do his bit to conserve and repair the land.
But in the six years since he began, California has experienced severe drought, which scientists link to global warming, and 650 of Cody's 750 seedlings died.

Gosh, that's terrible. What's happening?

In California, the effects of climate change are ubiquitous - recent years have produced record-breaking temperatures, earlier springs and less reliable rainfall.

That would indeed be worrying, what does the per-location rainfall data say? Well, although 2018 was 50% to 70% of "normal" level, it seems that 2019 has already been up to 20% above normal - and there's more unseasonably late rain to come this week. Even worse, the data shows that 2018 was particularly dry in SoCal (25% of normal), and yet is still significantly above normal this year.

So the fact that Cody (or the article's author Georgina Rannard) makes the inference that "climate change" is causing irreversible changes to the California climate seems to be less than conclusively proven by the available data.

Incidentally [prediction] this year is going to be a really bad year for fires in California. We've had a wet, long winter to allow grass to grow and thrive. We're having a second, late, belt of rain that will feed the undergrowth. Fire season is going to start late, but when it starts there's going to be a staggeringly high amount of tinder and fuel for the fires.

• Is this due to a change in weather? Sure! Very different from the past few years.
• Is it due to "climate change"? Sure! The climate is always changing.
• Is it due to man-made contributions? Definitely, but not the way you might think:

  It’s counterintuitive, but the United States’ history of suppressing wildfires has actually made present-day wildfires worse.
  “For the last century we fought fire, and we did pretty well at it across all of the Western United States,” Dr. Williams said. “And every time we fought a fire successfully, that means that a bunch of stuff that would have burned didn’t burn. And so over the last hundred years we’ve had an accumulation of plants in a lot of areas.

  (New York Times, by the way)

What's more, California has been very "successful" at preventing controlled burns, and preventing people from cutting down trees and brush near their houses to make their areas defensible against fire, which has resulted in a huge source of fire fuel right next to where people live. Great job, guys.

I assume the environmental lawyers all live in San Francisco and Sacramento, which are 95% concrete and immune to the consequences of their actions...