ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2hr ago
The 32-page legal decision
Court documents, including the full text of the judge's opinion
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
19hr ago
Grok tells me
Wikipedia, citing a paywalled scientific study from year 2019:
| Category | Proportion of Jews in Israel (%) |
|---|---|
| Mizrahi | 45 |
| Ashkenazi | 32 |
| Soviet | 12 |
| Beta Israel | 3 |
| Mix/other | 8 |
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
This fanfic was written and uploaded on the traditional homeland of the Anishinabe people.
This is cheating, though. Front matter (such as the copyright information, the dedication, or the summary on the front flap of the dust cover) is not part of the novel proper.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Well, why didn't you say so in the first place? Now you can just tell this person: "Sorry, this is a based and redpilled roleplaying group. Very stable geniuses only—no mentally-ill people allowed." Problem solved. (This specific wording is a joke, but the underlying meaning is not. However, I don't know whether the other members of your group would agree with this meaning.)
the question is how to handle it in such a way as to not scar this already likely friendless young adult
There's no saving that, and I'm not inclined to try.
These two statements seem contradictory. If the person is already scarred, why do you care so much?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Source? I see a 2026 poll saying that people think cloning is immoral (64 percent for animals and 86 percent for humans), and a 2002 poll saying that people think cloning humans is possible (76 percent), but no poll saying that people think cloning is impossible or impractical due to accelerated aging.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
If she dislikes crude jokes, she can leave on her own, without needing others to remove her.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
You could always hand her a stack of printed booklets warning her about the dangers of technically-legal-but-practically-danger-fraught romances with large age gaps. (This is approximately one-third a joke.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
the suspect uses his left hand to grab the Taser from the officer
No, he uses his left hand to push back one of the first three officers. The fourth officer keeps hold of the Taser, and continues to point it at the suspect (though she presumably has emptied it of ammunition at this point with her two shots) even while the three gunshots are being fired.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
The video isn't playing for me in the UK
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
The Maryland autopsy's toxicology test found "a small amount" of alcohol but no drugs.
Another possibility is that Branning had a heart attack or otherwise dropped dead
The Maryland autopsy actually noted that his coronary artery had 50-percent occlusion, which was unlikely to be the cause of death.
Is stealing a corpse kidnapping?
Abuse of corpse (which he was charged with and convicted of; I just omitted it from my summary in light of the more major charges)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
The actual statute says the same thing (16, or 14 with a Romeo-and-Juliet span of three years).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Manufacturers' manuals (1 2) indicate that reverse-osmosis systems can make water acidic enough to corrode copper pipes. But water softening is not reverse osmosis.
This document from a (biased) trade association cites studies conducted by the US EPA and the UK Water Treatment Association for the conclusion that water softeners do not increase corrosion in copper and steel pipes. It also says that lime scale does not protect against corrosion.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
The US Supreme Court says otherwise.
1989:
The "reasonableness" of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. The Fourth Amendment is not violated by an arrest based on probable cause, even though the wrong person is arrested, nor by the mistaken execution of a valid search warrant on the wrong premises. With respect to a claim of excessive force, the same standard of reasonableness at the moment applies: "Not every push or shove, even if it may later seem unnecessary in the peace of a judge's chambers [or a Redditor's bedroom]", violates the Fourth Amendment. The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.
2025:
That inquiry into the reasonableness of police force requires analyzing the “totality of the circumstances”. There is no “easy-to-apply legal test” or “on/off switch” in this context. Rather, the Fourth Amendment requires, as we once put it, that a court “slosh [its] way through” a “factbound morass”. Or said more prosaically, deciding whether a use of force was objectively reasonable demands “careful attention to the facts and circumstances” relating to the incident, as then known to the officer. For example, the “severity of the crime” prompting the stop can carry weight in the analysis. So too can actions the officer took during the stop, such as giving warnings or otherwise trying to control the encounter. And the stopped person’s conduct is always relevant because it indicates the nature and level of the threat he poses, either to the officer or to others.
It is well known that drugged-up suspects sometimes shrug off Taser applications and continue to pose a threat to officers. It seems from this Redditor's bedroom that this particular suspect did not shrug off the Taser application, so the officer was overzealous in shooting. But the prosecutor or the jury may think otherwise.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
A bystander video is available here.
-
Three officers struggle to subdue the kneeling suspect. It looks like they've got his legs and his left arm. From the camera's perspective, his right arm is hidden behind his body, and whether it is restrained is not clear.
-
Multiple officers shout, "He's got a knife" (presumably in his right hand).
-
The first three officers back off, making room for a fourth officer to arrive and use a Taser. The suspect has risen to his feet with the weight of the first three officers removed, but now stumbles back to the ground (lying on his side).
-
Of the first three officers, two get back on top of the suspect, but the third instead pulls out his gun and fires three shots.
So it's not totally unreasonable to question whether the gunshots were necessary when the Taser already seemed effective in taking the suspect to the ground.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
he has to be able to explain the car
Two guys go missing at the same time, their positions are plotted on the same route, one ends up dead? You can't just waltz away with "nothing to do with me, no sir!"
Not under the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. If Branning's estate were to sue Stark for wrongful death, maybe it would be able to collect under the "preponderance of evidence" standard. But that's civil, not criminal.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
She's ugly.
Who would ever go to war for that creature?
There's no need to exaggerate. Lupita Nyong'o is not Leslie Jones.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
I think I read somewhere that "residential VPNs" get phone IP addresses by tricking people into installing on their phones apps that relay VPN traffic. Maybe the administrator has decided to just block all IP addresses from the mobile network that you use because residential VPNs like to use that particular network (akin to rangebans on 4chan).
Why does it seem to be ground zero for every creeper in the entire world?
Allegedly, it has extremely lax moderation, despite constantly being caught up in child-molestation scandals.
Roblox's moderation team has put forth a disgustingly lazy effort to solve this problem. The current state of affairs has galvanized many users, including myself [Ruben Sim], to invent DIY moderation tools that uncover troves of these accounts. Lists of ERP [erotic-roleplay] accounts several thousands of lines long have been put together and sent to moderation, only to be completely ignored. My safety advocacy group, Moderation For Dummies, conducted an experiment that found out of 100 obvious ERP accounts reported to Roblox, ZERO were removed as a result of our reports. The platform could easily rid themselves of this problem by hiring a single employee to go through and clear these accounts every day, but Roblox is too defiant to even acknowledge it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
I don't see why Item 1 would cause anyone to question his faith in the justice system.
My wording was too broad. I meant to point specifically at the jury rather than at the justice system as a whole. Quote from Ozy's article:
I was also impressed by the professionalism of the jury. My fellow jury members were thoughtful, intelligent, morally serious people who were conscious of their responsibility as jurors.⁎ Even given how frustrating the experience was, I was impressed by their rationality, how closely they stuck to the evidence, and their determination to follow the norms of good discourse. Sometimes I see people say online “you elites in your epistemic bubbles have no idea how stupid normal people are”. But, judging from my jury-trial experience, normal people are actually pretty smart! At least in Alameda County.
⁎With one exception, whom I haven’t talked about because I don’t like saying mean things about private figures on a blog this big.
Yet the jurors in this case seem to have delivered unanimous convictions on evidence that fell far short of "beyond a reasonable doubt", even with the prior-bad-acts evidence.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
You replied to the wrong comment. (Though now that you've gotten a response on the merits from someone else it's too late to delete and repost in the correct location.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Item 1 of 7
The arguably-illustrious Ozy semi-recently penned an article on the internal workings of a jury trial, which reaffirmed that person's faith in the justice system. Here we find a detective story that may push opinions in the opposite direction.
-
Branning and Stark are two workers at a manufacturing business in Pennsylvania. They are on non-overlapping shifts, and rarely interact. On October 15, Stark switches to a different shift that overlaps with Branning's. Neither of them returns from work, and their families report both of them missing within a few days. An investigation determines that, after work, (1) Branning and an unknown person (possibly, but not definitely, Stark) drove Branning's car to an ATM and withdrew 500 dollars from Branning's bank account, and (2) Branning's car, Branning's and Stark's cell phones, and Stark (no direct sighting of Branning) moved from east-central Pennsylvania 120 miles to southern New Jersey and then 90 miles to Philadelphia before dropping off the radar. The police eventually find Stark 600 miles away in Detroit as of October 27.
-
In December, Branning's car is found abandoned in Virginia. The steering wheel bears DNA from Stark and an unknown man, but not from Branning. At this point, Stark is arrested and presented to a grand jury, which indicts him on a plethora of crimes—robbery, kidnapping, murder, et cetera.
-
More than a year later, a nonprofit organization dedicated to identifying unidentified corpses identifies a corpse found in a Maryland drainage ditch on November 2 as Branning's. When the corpse was discovered, the Maryland investigators found time of death to be October 29 or later, and could not determine the cause or manner of death (due to decomposition). However, the Pennsylvania investigators reassess the Maryland autopsy records and decide that the time of death could have been as early as October 11 (before Branning actually disappeared, but the "forensic anthropologist" told to do the analysis doesn't know that).
-
At trial, the prosecutor introduces evidence of three robberies that Stark committed 25 years ago. In those crimes, he brandished a gun and demanded money from a business, but did not harm the employees. The jury convicts Stark on all charges.
-
The appeals panel vacates and remands in a very angry opinion. (1) "There are absolutely no commonalities between Stark's 1990s robbery convictions and the instant events." So introducing them in this trial did nothing but prejudice the jury against Stark. (2) "None of the experts can say how Branning died. Not only can none of the experts explain how Branning died, but the investigators also never located a murder weapon or evidence of one. Finally, none of the experts could even conclude that there was a homicide in this case. Because we cannot say with any degree of certainty that there was even a homicide, let alone that the other offenses were committed, we conclude that there is not overwhelming evidence to sustain Stark's convictions. Accordingly, the trial court's error cannot be and is not harmless, and we are compelled to vacate Stark's convictions and remand for a new trial consistent with this opinion." (Emphasis in original.)
-
Remember, the jury convicted Stark of a zillion crimes under the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard! But the appeals panel points out that there was a whole two weeks between Branning's disappearance on October 15 (assuming he made it to Philadelphia alive) and his original estimated death date on October 29, and what happened in that period may or may not have involved Stark at all. Obviously, it seems a bit far-fetched that Branning would randomly skip town with Stark of his own volition. But is the idea that he was kidnapped and killed by Stark (and not by the unknown third person whose DNA was also found in the car) the only reasonable explanation? According to the appeals panel, no.
Item 2 of 7
-
Year 1993: A 51-year-old divorced immigrant from Japan works as an interpreter (and later the general manager) at a golf club. She enters into a close friendship with a 25-year-old chef at the same club.
-
Year 2003: The golf club is sold to a new owner (and eventually is redeveloped as housing). The woman (age 61) retires. Her friendship with the man (age 35) continues.
-
Year 2023: The woman (age 81) suffers from delusions and temporarily is committed to a mental clinic. The man (age 55) visits her while she is committed, and after she is released she begins to rely on him more. He hires housekeepers for her, finds lawyers for her, drives her to medical and legal appointments, et cetera.
-
Year 2024: The woman gives to the man power of attorney, transfers ownership of her house to him, and writes a new will giving 60 percent of her estate to him and 20 percent to each of her two sisters (who still live in Japan).
-
Year 2024, later: The woman's sister and niece come from Japan to visit her for the first time in years. Upon discovering the situation, they try to persuade her to return to Japan, but she refuses. They file a lawsuit, (1) accusing the man of exerting undue influence over the woman, and (2) seeking guardianship over her.
-
Year 2026: The trial judge finds that the woman now is incapacitated, but also finds that the man did not exert undue influence over her, and awards to him guardianship over her, rejecting the claims of her Japanese relatives. In particular, when the woman visited several lawyers in year 2024, they all were suspicious of the man, but after interrogating the woman they all were convinced that she was not incapacitated or unduly influenced at that time.
I'm sure that this website's resident weeaboos can imagine a cute (or sexy) visual (or kinetic) novel inspired by these events.
Item 3 of 7
-
A municipal govt. on the Jersey Shore™ claims that, "for many decades, it has experienced substantial numbers of unsupervised minors who rent rooms during the months of April, May, and June to celebrate high-school proms and graduations", and these crowds of minors are responsible for "unlawful and unsafe conditions". On that basis, it passes ordinances increasing the minimum age for renting a hotel room during those months, first to 18 in year 2018, and then to 21 in year 2023. In response, two hotels sue under a litany of theories.
-
The trial judge rejects all of the hotels' arguments (including the idea that the ordinance discriminates against Hispanics who celebrate Cinco de Mayo and blacks who celebrate Juneteenth—the hotels offered no evidence to support this assertion). However, the appeals panel reinstates two claims (equal protection and due process) that obviously fail under the federal constitution's rational-basis review but under the state constitution's balancing test have a chance of success.
Item 4 of 7
Ugly custom house update: More delay. The contractor claims that ordering the countertop was not possible before the cabinets were installed, and the countertop manufacturer has an unexpected backlog. But I guess I'm not actually suffering any damages.
Item 5 of 7
The parties have a long and contentious history of dysfunction. Mother and Father were previously married but had an acrimonious separation, which included the filing of three separate petitions pursuant to the PFA (Protection From Abuse) Act, the final petition of which resulted in a no-contact order that expired in July 2025. Father is a recovering alcoholic and has been diagnosed with Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Mother is engaged again, although there are safety concerns regarding her fiancé. Father lives with Paternal Grandmother.
On June 24, 2024, Mother initiated this action by custody complaint. Subsequently, the parties commenced voluminous and protracted litigation, which included numerous emergency motions, petitions for contempt, and other requests prior to the final trial. Among other incidents, the following notable events occurred: (1) Child's finding a firearm under a pillow on Paternal Grandmother's bed; (2) Father's declining to return Child after a period of partial custody and absconding for 10 days; (3) Mother's fiancé's kicking in a window on Father's car in an attempt to extract Child from the vehicle; and (4) Paternal Grandmother's forcing Child to urinate in a cup, either because she suspected Mother was overmedicating Child, or because she wished to use the urine in her other son's custody and criminal cases, which required drug testing.
On January 8, 2025, Paternal Grandmother filed a petition to intervene, which the court granted on February 6, 2025. On October 30, 2025, the court convened for a custody trial.
On November 24, 2025, the court entered an order granting shared legal custody to Mother and Father, primary physical custody to Mother, partial physical custody to Father, and no separate period of partial custody to Paternal Grandmother. Since Father was living with Paternal Grandmother, Father could determine how much time Paternal Grandmother spent with Child. Additionally, the court issued a thoughtful, thorough, and lengthy recitation of the history of the matter and explanation for its decisions.
On December 19, 2025, Paternal Grandmother timely filed a pro se notice of appeal.
Paternal Grandmother's brief on appeal is woefully deficient. These substantial defects preclude meaningful review, warranting suppression of Paternal Grandmother's brief and dismissal of the appeal. Accordingly, we suppress Paternal Grandmother's brief and dismiss her appeal.
Item 6 of 7
Apparently, recently-deceased low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines was infamous for the low quality of its passengers. Here we see one in the wild.
-
A woman is sitting in a wheelchair, waiting to board a Spirit Airlines flight. Upon being told by an employee that she will not be permitted to board due to intoxication, she stands up from the wheelchair and starts screaming profanities. Four police officers escort her out, and she continues to curse at them. Upon being warned that further outbursts will result in arrest, she continues to shout. She resists the officers' subsequent attempts to handcuff her and to put her in a police car.
-
The woman is acquitted of public drunkenness, but is convicted of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and is sentenced to six months of probation and 125 hours of community service. The appeals panel affirms.
Item 7 of 7
-
In year 1989, husband (age 34) and wife (age 49) get married. Just seven years later, they separate, but don't bother to get a divorce. The husband voluntarily continues to provide financial support to the wife—500 k$ over 28 years.
-
In year 2024, a house owned jointly by the husband (age 69 and apparently still working) and the wife (age 84, incapacitated, and living in a nursing home) is sold. The husband gives the entire 300 k$ of proceeds to the wife, and in exchange stops sending support payments to her. The wife (through her daughter as guardian) sues, alleging that she never agreed to this exchange and she's still entitled to spousal support under the law. (The 300 k$ of house money that she got apparently already "has been depleted" in the space of a year.)
-
The trial judge rejects the wife's arguments, and the appeals panel affirms. Setting the husband's spousal-support obligation to zero is not unreasonable when he already has given such a huge amount of money to the wife for a separation period that was far longer than the marriage.
A slightly more solid number (Ctrl-F "commercial value"): As of year 1998, only two percent of copyrights with age of 55–75 years retained any commercial value. That is, after 55 years, 98 percent of copyrighted works are forgotten and worthless.
More options
Context Copy link