fun fact: basically every mod on r/legaladvice is a cop. if you see a bunch of comments in a row that have been deleted for “offering bad advice”, you can replace “reddit” in the url with “ceddit” to see the same page with all the deleted comments still there, and roughly half the time the “"bad advice”“ is literally anything that suggests that maybe OP shouldn’t trust the cops
in this thread, the OP talks about how a local cop in their small town in Ohio is stalking him and, in particular, his fiancée, to the point that they’re afraid to leave their home.
A lot of the deleted comments are recommending cameras on the house and the cars
a lot more of them are recommending OP file a complaint, and refuse to leave until he gets the forms he needs
and a few are discussing the way small-town cops work with little to no oversight, and that it might be good to talk to someone higher up the chain.
none of these comments needed to be deleted. none of these comments are harmful or malicious in anyway. All of these comments are helping OP learn and exercise his rights as a citizen, and all of them were deleted. What all the comments have in common is that it would cause the cop to face any kind of consequences for behavior that, were a civilian doing it, would be illegal.
The prosecutor-turned-mayor-turned-MAGA lackey had wielded the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to become a famous mob-buster. And now he was being accused of violating a similar law in a bungled attempt to overturn an election.
For nearly four decades, Giuliani has claimed that it was his idea to use RICO to prosecute 11 members of New York’s five crime families in 1985—after crime boss Joe Bonanno published a memoir that described the workings of the Mafia.
“I dreamed up the tactic,” Giuliani wrote in his 2002 book Leadership. “I revealed that Bonanno’s description of how families were organized provided a roadmap to precisely what the RICO statute was designed to combat. As soon as I became the U.S. Attorney, I was able to hoist Bonanno by his literary petard.”
But the legal eminence who actually drafted the RICO statute and a former top New York state organized crime prosecutor tell The Daily Beast that is not how it went down at all.
Their version suggests an added irony to the Georgia indictment: the numerous lies that Giuliani is accused of perpetrating to keep Donald Trump in office were superseded by a bogus origin story.
As described in the book Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, Ron Goldstock of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force maintains he took the idea of using RICO against La Cosa Nostra to Giuliani two months after he became the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. Giuliani has denied that, and the conflicting accounts have stood as a he said-he said situation.
But G. Robert Blakey backs up Goldstock’s version of events.
Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who has also taught at Cornell University, drafted the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 on a yellow legal pad. Title IX of the act was RICO.
“Giuliani falsely says he got the idea of using RICO against the mob himself because he read a biography by the head of one of the crime families,” Blakey, 87, told The Daily Beast this week. “That was his story.”
Blakey said that he has not previously challenged Giuliani’s account because what most mattered to him was that RICO had been used with devastating effect against the Mafia.
“Giuliani used it in the commission case,” Blakey said, referring to Giuliani’s prosecution of members of the ruling commission of the five mob families who ran gangland at the time. “If he says he invented it, fine. I don’t care who invented it. If he wants to take credit for it, let him take credit for it.”
But Blakey’s attitude changed in the wake of the indictment, when he heard that Giuliani had been speaking as if he were the world’s leading expert on the statute.
“When he said, as he’s saying now, as a defendant with Trump, ‘I know more about RICO than anybody,’ I think that stretches the truth,” Blakey told The Daily Beast.
In describing the actual genesis of RICO, Blakey says that his overall legal thinking was influenced by the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. A more direct factor was a law school analysis he edited on the ultimately failed prosecution of the dozens of gangsters who attended what became known as “the Apalachin Meeting” at a mafioso’s home in upstate New York.
Blakey had that case in mind when he wrote out the ninth subsection of the Organized Crime Control Act in an alcove of his living room in the Maryland house where he lived during a sabbatical from Notre Dame.
Oh, goodie! One of my special interests, plus I get to knock the shit out of Rudy, PLUS I get to prove he’s a liar, PLUS I get to roll around in the schadenfreude that he’s being indicted under RICO? IS IT MY BIRTHDAY?
Seriously though, Mafia shit (specifically the Five Families) is my fuckin’ jam, so here. we. go.
some dipshit uploaded my book to an AI site, so suffice to say, I will fucking kill them
emailed my agent cuz our contract states she has to protect me from shit like this, so we’ll see what she says
but I will still kill these ppl
LMFAO THE SITE IS BEING TAKEN DOWN
hey so, just so there’s no ambiguity about what just happened– this was about Prosecraft, a website that would help you compare your writing to your favorite author by analyzing the “vividness” of the words used, passive voice vs active voice and the number of adverbs used in a given section.
unfortunately, the service is dogshit for various reasons but that’s not the issue here.
the issue is that the website had trained an AI on 25,000 books, one of which included mine. and i definitely did not give anyone permission to use my work to train an AI. it’s literally stated in my contract.
and if i didn’t give permission–i can imagine quite a number of authors didn’t give permission either. (oops, i don’t have to imagine–because hundreds of authors came forward and said they didn’t give permission either!)
so i emailed my agent about this. my agent directed me to my publisher which has a legal department that looks into piracy on this scale. all of those authors did the same, emailing their legal team, getting The Authors Guild involved.
EVERY AUTHOR pretty much roasting this guy named Benji Smith on Twitter for claiming to “support authors” yet clearly using pirated work to train an AI.
of course, he decided to take the website down. authors are now talking about getting AI protection clauses in their contracts going forward. i already have one with my agent, but I imagine I will have to get it instated into every publishing contract moving forward.
Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesn’t have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you’re caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???
My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:
-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s been taken from a poached bird
-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching
-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to
@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅
That’s pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.
Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had “found it while exploring an abandoned house.”
The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.
If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.
Im surprised every time people think it’s a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground
Wait, poaching wasn’t about the meat, it was about the feathers?
The collapse of bird populations in the USA in the late 1800s thru early 1900s was very much about feathers.
At its peak the feather trade had feathers that were worth more than gold. Commercial hunters would shoot birds out of the sky and sell feathers by the pound, in literal huge crates. Egrets were especially sought after for their beautiful breeding plumage, which was used in fancy hats and accessories. This wrought havoc on the poor birds because they only ever had this plumage during breeding season, so not only were the breeding birds dying, they were leaving next generation’s chicks and eggs behind to die of neglect.
Beyond hats, the gentleman’s art of fly tying was also a popular art form, more for the sake of showing off one’s rare collection of feathers and art than for actual fishing.
There was some meat hunting as well before the banning of commercial hunting, mostly ducks and geese, which also drifted close to extinction as they were taken to be sold in markets.
Even white tailed deer, the ubiquitous animal that’s found all over north America in truly ridiculous numbers, came dangerously low. But meat wasn’t where the money was when it came to birds. It was feathers.
The Lacey act banned commercial hunting in the United States, putting an end to the constant unregulated commercial killing to fill market stalls with meat (which incidentally is why you don’t see venison in most supermarkets in the states. Only farmed deer is legally allowed to be sold.)
And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it a crime to not only kill a bird, but to even posess a single feather from one. Most people won’t buy a hat that would get them arrested if they wore it outside, so the market for feathers was gutted.
Even though feather hats aren’t popular in this day and age, nobody is in a hurry to amend these laws, as birds in general are well loved and popular animals and still very much threatened by other stressors such as pollution and habitat loss.
