Assuming the US military is even deployed to Gaza, they generally don’t want people pressed into service.

The requirement isn’t that people serve in the military – it’s community service, not military service. I’m just using the military as an example of a situation where Congress can compel people to go abroad (albeit not as a punishment).

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-drug-tests-smoking-weed-joe-rogan-marijuana-cannabis-2022-8

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, said the federal government required him to undergo random drug testing for a year after he smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018, adding that the “whole of SpaceX” was impacted.

During an appearance on the “Full Send podcast,” released Thursday night, Musk said that he got “a lot of backlash,” including from SpaceX competitors, because weed isn’t legal on a federal level and SpaceX has federal-government contracts.

“The consequences for me and for SpaceX were actually not good,” the tech billionaire said on “Full Send,” adding that he hadn’t expected so much criticism. The 2018 interview with Rogan — which went viral at the time — took place in California, where marijuana is legal for both medical and recreational use.

“I had to have like random drug tests and stuff after that, to prove that I’m not like a drug addict,” Musk said, adding that the tests were required by the federal government. “They drug tested me for everything, and randomly. It wasn’t like ‘pick a day.’ I had like a whole year of random drug tests.”

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t just me but the whole company, the whole of SpaceX had to have random drug tests,” Musk continued. It’s unclear exactly how many workers this affected, but SpaceX had around 6,000 employees in early 2019.

Under the Drug-free Workplace Act of 1988, workers at any company that receives a federal contract of $100,000 or more are prohibited from using or distributing drugs in the workplace, and the firm must have a drug-free workplace policy.

Huh.

I’d encourage people to actually read the article. I know that the title kind of inspires a kneejerk reaction, but legally, this is kind of interesting and I believe has broad implications.

So, basically, there’s a company, Bright Data, scraping X comments for stuff like training AI.

X went after them because X wanted to (and does) sell those comments.

But while I think that it’s fine for X to attempt to disrupt Bright Data’s scraping attempts using technical means, they can’t use the law to restrict them on copyright grounds.

That might have implications for all sorts of things. Reddit’s legal position, as Reddit likes selling access to Reddit comments. Training AI on discussion in general. The ability of organizations like archive.org to archive publicly-available comments. Maybe it’ll make social media companies have their content not-publicly-accessible, if creating a closed club gives X more control over selling that content.

So, I think that this is just political showboating (though I don’t approve of legislators doing this, normalizes it), but to take it more seriously…

My kneejerk reaction is that it’d be unconstitutional, but I’m not sure, upon further thought.

So, there are a couple isssues that I see.

Can you send an American citizen abroad as a form of punishment?

There’s the question of whether this violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

So, exile is definitely unconstitutional. You can’t simply kick an American citizen out of the US and keep them out, and there’s case law supporting that. You can’t take their citizenship away as punishment; that’s an Eighth Amendment violation.

But…you can draft people to the military, and compel people to go abroad. Sentencing someone to six months of service is sort of like that. I don’t know whether there’s case law as to whether that can constitutionally be used as a punishment, however. And I don’t know whether it’s constitutional to compel someone to enter a non-US legal jurisdiction as a punishment, because I can imagine a lot of ways in which one could avoid constitutional restrictions if one could, as part of a sentence, just move someone out of the legal jurisdictions where those restrictions apply.

My guess is that this might be permissible, but I can’t think of actual examples where something like this was done.

Ex post facto laws

The second is whether it amounts to an ex post facto law. Generally-speaking, you cannot make something retroactively-illegal, nor make the sentence more-severe.

I’m pretty confident that this would violate the ex post facto restriction, as it specifically applies to past actions as well as future. It might be possible to provide for making doing community service in Palestine as an alternative sentence for someone convicted of a crime that occurred in the past, to let someone convicted opt in to a new form of punishment rather than the one that existed at the time that they committed the crime. But this is a mandatory punishment being added. Note that this is specific to the portion making it retroactive. Generally, if a law is severable – that is, the remainder of it can reasonably stand on its own – part of it being invalid doesn’t make the whole invalid. My guess is that the retroactive portion of such a law would fail the ex-post-facto restriction, but due to severability, it could still be applied to people who commit a crime moving forward, so would remain partially enforceable.

Safety

Gaza probably isn’t all that safe, and some of the issue with being sent to Gaza might be physical risk. That might run afoul of the Eighth Amendment as well.

So, we do have the death penalty – someone can explicitly be condemned to death. But aside from that, going from memory, there are some constitutional requirements for the conditions in which prisoners may be kept. You can’t just say “you’re going to prison for an N year sentence” and make the prison environment have a 50% mortality rate.

googles

Yeah, there’s Eighth Amendment criteria on prison conditions:

https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/165

The Eighth Amendment imposes certain duties on prison officials: (1) to provide humane conditions of confinement; (2) to ensure that inmates receive adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical care; and (3) to “take reasonable measures to guarantee the safety of the inmates.” Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 832 (1994) (citing Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 526-27 (1984)).

I’m not sure exactly the legal rationale there. It may just be that you cannot have the executive treat a sentence of prison as something akin to a death sentence, can’t basically “upgrade” the severity of a law. It might be okay to do if the legislature’s intent is for the sentence to be dangerous. Could be an issue or not.

Restriction on speech

The First Amendment generally does not let the government criminalize speech. It’s possible to a very limited degree, but compared to virtually all other countries, the US Constitution has a very low tolerance for this.

So, I thought “okay, that’s a sentence for a non-content-neutral speech restriction”, so it’d violate the First Amendment. But…I’m not totally sure about that. Because in this case – and I haven’t looked at the bill text – they aren’t actually criminalizing anything new. The only association with content is the time, that there are currently protests on a particular topic happening. Like, if you were convicted for something unrelated to Israel-Palestine, it’d still apply (and in fact, the article authors complain about this). So I don’t think that it raises First Amendment issues.

That being said, my guess is that there’s some level of sufficiently-close association where linking a crime or punishment to speech even if the link isn’t explicit probably does violate the content-neutral restriction. Like, you can’t go out and come up with criteria that just happens to only punish the people involved in certain speech. But my guess is that this wouldn’t reach that level, given how broad it is.

Overall

My guess is that the ex post facto portion would be struck down as unconstitutional. But I’m not at all sure that the remainder wouldn’t stand, were we to hypothetically assume that it actually were passed and signed into law.

considers

I think that mount the mount(1) command is probably calling the mount(2) system call, and it’s returning ENOENT, error 2. The mount(2) man page says “ENOENT A pathname was empty or had a nonexistent component.”.

Hmm. So, I expect from the cyan color there that that “luks-d8…” thing is a symlink that points at some device file that LUKS creates when that luksOpen command runs.

Maybe ls -l /dev/mapper/luks-d8... and see what it points at and whether that exists as a first step? It’s probably gonna be some device file somewhere in /dev.

Well, if people don’t like inflation – a source of major popular complaint – paying down the national debt will tend to tamp down on it, I suppose.

considers

Were they going to stock it in all stores to begin with?

Like, I assume that they don’t just use a fixed strategy to stock stores across the country. Even aside from regional fashion preferences, you’ve got varying climate as an input. Part of what they do as a retailer is gonna be recording what people buy and making optimal use of advertising and stocking space to sell to people, and in a computer era, I’d think that they’d be doing that at a more-fine-grained level than nationwide.

googles

It looks like Target pulled Confederate flag gear from their stores in the past too. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that they probably weren’t selling them in, say, their San Francisco locations, even prior to that. Similarly, I’m also guessing that they probably aren’t selling “pridewear” in rural Mississippi or whatnot. That isn’t even to deal with people getting grouchy about it being there…just that those items aren’t gonna sell well.

That’s a thought.

checks

I mean, same general region, northern Virginia, but not really his place of birth. Something like a hundred miles away.

It sounds like he was one of a number of people who got appointed via political connections.

I’d think that if one wanted to choose a Confederate military leader who did well, there’d be a lot of better choices. Like, the North-South division ran right next to Washington, DC, due to the Maryland/Virginia split, Richmond wasn’t that far away, and so northern Virginia was the location of a lot of important Civil War stuff and my impression is that generally, Confederate forces in the east performed better than those in the west. So one would think that the northern Virginia region would have a lot of prominent options.

If you wanted to pick a Confederate cavalry commander, I’d think that I’d pick someone like J. E. B. Stuart, who really did outperform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._E._B._Stuart

Like his intimate friend, Stonewall Jackson, General J. E. B. Stuart was a legendary figure and is considered one of the greatest cavalry commanders in American history. His friend from his federal army days, Union Major General John Sedgwick, said that Stuart was “the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America.”[83]

Jackson and Lee were prominent, competent military leaders. Who is Ashby, though?

googles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Ashby

Some cavalry commander under Jackson. He doesn’t sound like that big a deal.

The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Niño climate event, which has now waned

One can maybe alter emissions, but not much that one can do about El Niño.

Apparently Vermont technically still has electrocution on the books for treason.

All 26 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution. As of 2021, South Carolina is the only autonomous region in the United States of America to authorize its 1912 Electric Chair as the primary method of execution, citing inability to procure the drugs necessary for lethal injection. Vermont’s remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution.

However, given that very few people in the US have ever been convicted of treason at all – despite people liking to claim that something is “treason”, it’s actually an extremely narrowly-defined crime – much less under Vermont state law, that’s probably largely academic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason_laws_in_the_United_States

Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as “only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Most state constitutions include similar definitions of treason, specifically limited to levying war against the state, “adhering to the enemies” of the state, or aiding the enemies of the state, and requiring two witnesses or a confession in open court. Fewer than 30 people have ever been charged with treason under these laws.

Death sentences for treason under the Constitution have been carried out in only two instances: the executions of Taos Revolt insurgents in 1847, and that of William Bruce Mumford during the Civil War.

Constitutionally, U.S. citizens who live in a state owe allegiance to at least two government entities: the United States of America and their state of legal residence. They can therefore potentially commit treason against either, or against both. At least 14 people have been charged with treason against various states; at least six were convicted, five of whom were executed. Only two prosecutions for treason against a state were ever carried out in the U.S.: one against Thomas Dorr and the other after John Brown’s conspiracy. It has often been discussed, both legally and in matter of policy, if states should punish treason.

Neither of those was in Vermont – one was in Rhode Island and the other Virginia, and the only instance of the two in which a death sentence was applied was in Virginia, after the John Brown uprising.

There are a few states that differ. Last time I looked it up, one state still permitted the condemned to request hanging, but it looks like they stopped that, probably because it was a pain to do. I recall reading that the last one that was done, the state had to dig around in old records to figure out how the heck you compute drop length for a given weight and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States

Offender-selected methods

In the following states, death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by:

• Lethal injection in all states as primary method, in South Carolina as secondary method or unless the drugs to use it are unavailable

• Nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama

• Electrocution in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina (primary method)

• Gas chamber in California and Missouri

In four states an alternate method (firing squad in Utah, gas chamber in Arizona, and electrocution in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee) is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date (usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection). The alternate method will be used for all inmates if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional.

In five states, an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional (electrocution in Arkansas; nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma; firing squad in Utah; gas chamber in Wyoming).

The norm in the US – lethal injection – is apparently to essentially knock someone out, then stop their heart. I don’t imagine that one feels anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_injection

In most states, the intravenous injection is a series of drugs given in a set sequence, designed to first induce unconsciousness followed by death through paralysis of respiratory muscles and/or by cardiac arrest through depolarization of cardiac muscle cells. The execution of the condemned in most states involves three separate injections (in sequential order):

• Sodium thiopental or pentobarbital: ultra-short-action barbiturate, an anesthetic agent used at a high dose that renders the person unconscious in less than 30 seconds. Depression of respiratory activity is one of the characteristic actions of this drug. Consequently, the lethal-injection doses, as described in the Sodium Thiopental section below, will—even in the absence of the following two drugs—cause death due to lack of breathing, as happens with overdoses of opioids.

• Pancuronium bromide: non-depolarizing muscle relaxant, which causes complete, fast, and sustained paralysis of the striated skeletal muscles, including the diaphragm and the rest of the respiratory muscles; this would eventually cause death by asphyxiation.

• Potassium chloride: a potassium salt, which increases the blood and cardiac concentration of potassium to stop the heart via an abnormal heartbeat and thus cause death by cardiac arrest.

Squatter’s rights wouldn’t be applicable here, time aside.

The point of squatter’s rights isn’t to try to generate more housing in random nooks, but to force regularization of the situation – like to encourage property owners to act to eject people now rather than waiting fifty years and then, surprise, enforcing submarine legal rights.

Using squatter’s rights requires that possession be adverse and open. Like, you can’t secretly hole up in a corner somewhere, as the person in the article did. You have to be very clear, have everyone know that you’re living there. The property owner also has to be making no efforts to remove the person. Those restrictions aren’t just arbitrary – they’re to limit it to situations where is a long-running divergence between legality and the situation in place and where nobody is attempting to rectify the situation themselves (either via selling rights to live there or ejecting a person or whatever).

Setting aside whether they want her living in their sign, if they know that she’s there and let her stay, I’m pretty sure that they have liability if there are problems. She was living on the roof of a building, no obvious way up or down, and if they say “sure, go ahead and stay” and she is climbing off the roof one night and falls, that’s on them. Not to mention that I am pretty confident that a store-roof-sign is gonna violate a long list of code requirements for legal housing, from insulation to having a bathroom.

And even if you’re gung-ho on the concept of relaxing liability and code for property owners who don’t charge or something like that because you want a lower bar for homeless shelters or something, I am almost certain that the kind of place that they’re gonna aim to permit isn’t gonna be people living on a roof in a sign.

EDIT: Also, while I don’t know the specifics of this store, it’s apparently in a shopping center (and the article referenced that she may have climbed up from other commercial buildings, so they’re probably adjoining). I think that the way those work is that the stores don’t normally own their individual properties, but that they lease from a property owner who owns the strip mall or shopping center, and it’s not like the store can just go start treating the property as residential even if it wants to, even aside from zoning restrictions from the municipality.

Lemme check Google Maps.

Yeah, it’s the “Northwest Plaza” shopping center. Looks like they share a building with a pet food store and a UPS store and such, and there are other buildings in the shopping center.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Family+Fare+Supermarket/@43.6425233,-84.2512005,215m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x8823d55dddb15c93:0xaf14d039d2268031!8m2!3d43.6427161!4d-84.2508454!16s%2Fg%2F11cky3vyyq?entry=ttu

Yeah, and at Street View level, you can see that there are more businesses in the same building. Like, a buffet restaurant, a pharmacy, etc.

Like, setting aside the whole question of whether society should subsidize more housing, this just isn’t somewhere that it makes a lot of sense to put someone, even if that’s the aim.

A 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said.

The computer I get. The coffee maker…okay, for some people I get. I dunno if a printer is at the top of my priority list but, hey, I dunno, maybe she needed it for work.

But:

A Keurig coffee maker.

Man, if I were squatting in a store sign, I think that I would be using a Mr. Coffee and Folgers ground coffee, not a razor-and-blades-model coffee maker.

Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F)

I’m not saying that everyone bothers in comments, but I’d have thought that as a major news publication, The Guardian would bother to use the degree symbol:

Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5°C (4.5°F)

GOP disapproval: When she introduced the motion, lawmakers on both sides booed Greene.

If I remember correctly, that’s a violation of House procedure – that’s actually a big difference between the House of Representatives in the US (a lot of decorum restrictions) and the House of Commons in the UK, where this is permitted and common.

Those rules can change, but I’d be surprised if they had.

googles

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/HMAN-112/pdf/HMAN-112-pg741.pdf

Hissing and jeering is not proper decorum in the House (May 21, 1998, p. 10282).

Yeah, but he doesn’t do that. Like, his use isn’t even restricted to nouns.

There’s also a rare use in English where someone treats a non-proper noun as a proper noun to imply that they have entity-like status. I don’t know if there’s a term for that. Like, oh…

“Jim made sure to leave the toilet seat down. He knew that for Anne, this was one of the Important Marriage Obligations that he had.”

But he’s not doing that either, though that’s the closest thing I can think of.

At one point, he stated on Twitter that he did it for emphasis.

He also does all-caps words, as well as capitalized words. The former is a conventional way of showing emphasis.

“Ruin” or “perfect”?