Archive for May 27th, 2014

I don’t like bullies.

Tuesday, May 27th, 2014

I have never met Caleb Giddings. We’ve never had any contact. He almost certainly couldn’t pick me out of a police lineup. I know he’s a somewhat polarizing figure in the gun blogging community; there are people who follow him avidly, and people who he rubs the wrong way.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, other than I don’t like bullies and “…they all believed in justice, and when the line was drawn, there was but one side for them all.”

About a year ago, Caleb reviewed a product called “Instant Accuracy” being sold by a man named Patrick Kilchermann. In his review, clearly marked as an editorial, Caleb expressed the opinion that “Instant Accuracy” is a scam: Kilchermann is charging $97 for what basically amounts to a 15-minute dry fire training program, repeated 4 to 5 times a week for four weeks. As Caleb pointed out, you don’t need to spend $97 for dry fire practice; there are good books on the subject available for a third to a quarter of that price. (You can find specific recommendations in that thread at his site.)

Quoth Caleb:

He went around the internet, copied techniques that professionals, writers, and trainers have posted for free in the public realm, and then is claiming he invented this form of secret dry-fire kung fu that you have to pay him 100 bucks for. To me, that’s a scam. It’s not Ignatius Piazza level of scam, but it’s damn close.

Naturally, Mr. Kilchermann took exception to this, and spent some time in the comments defending himself and “Instant Accuracy”. However, he declined to answer some simple basic questions, like “What are your qualifications?”, and “What three police departments are currently using your program?”. Indeed, Mr. Kilchermann seems to have been silent for the better part of the past year.

Until May 20th, when he contacted Caleb and asked him to either take down the review, or remove the comments about “Instant Accuracy” being a scam. When Caleb refused, Mr. Kilchermann threatened him with a lawsuit.

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me (based on what I’ve read of the law) that Caleb’s statements were clearly labeled as opinion, and that statements of opinion are not actionable in a court of law. I don’t believe Mr. Kilchermann consulted a lawyer before issuing his bumptious legal threat. And if Mr. Kilchermann managed to find a lawyer who is stupid enough to take the case, or if he chooses to proceed pro se? I’m pretty sure Caleb will have no trouble finding pro bono legal representation – he may not even need to ask for a Popehat Signal.

I’m not sure what state Caleb is in, but many jurisdictions have strong anti-SLAPP laws. If Mr. Kilchermann chooses to proceed with legal action, I feel confident in saying that he will end up paying Caleb’s legal fees.

Mr. Kilchermann is apparently concerned about his Google ranking for “Instant Accuracy”. In my opinion, bumptious threats of legal action are an even bigger sign of a scam. Let’s let Mr. Kilchermann’s words and actions be seen by as many people as possible.

Sir, welcome to the Streisand effect.

(Hattip on this one to pdb.)

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Annals of law (#9 in a series)

Tuesday, May 27th, 2014

By way of Overlawyered, I found this ABA Journal article. I note it here because I believe this is, literally, the kind of situation you only see maybe once in a lifetime.

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld was representing a company, LBDS Holding Company, in a lawsuit against another company, ISOL Technology. Details of the suit can be found here, but I’m not sure they’re important. The key point is that Akin Gump won a $25 million judgement for LBDS Holding against ISOL.

ISOL and their legal team filed a motion for sanctions under Rule 11, claiming that “LBDS and its principals manufactured and falsified evidence used in this litigation, testified falsely, and committed a fraud upon this Court.”

Sounds like the kind of routine motion you’d expect the losing party to make, right? Well, Akin Gump had to respond to the motion, of course, so they did their due diligence and spoke with their client.

…when firm partner Sanford Warren discussed the sanctions motion with a client representative on May 15 the rep admitted “that the allegations in the [sanctions] motion were ‘essentially correct,’ ” the Akin Gump motion says. A “Cerner” contract relied upon by the plaintiff at trial “was not authentic,” the motion says, because an actual contract “had been altered and had certain schedules attached to it which were forgeries.”
Additionally, a client representative “said that those on the [conference] call [with Warren] had set up a fictitious domain name and sent emails from that domain name to create the impression that certain emails, introduced into evidence at the trial of this case, were sent by Cerner Corporation, when in fact they were not,” the Akin Gump motion continues.

So let me recap, just to make things clear: the plaintiff knowingly and willfully falsified evidence in their civil suit. That’s not just “case thrown out of court” bad, that’s not just “defendant awarded sanctions” bad; that’s “people are going to prison over this” BAD.

Akin Gump seems to have been unaware of the fraud until the plaintiff’s representatives confessed. At that point, they filed their own motion concurring with the motion by the defendants, providing their own account of what the plaintiff’s reps had said, and withdrawing from further representation. That motion is attached to the ABA Journal article, and makes excellent reading if you (like me) are a connoisseur of legal motions.

I can’t recall ever hearing of another case where the plaintiff committed this kind of serious fraud. (Maybe the Chevron case or the Nicaraguan banana pesticide case, but both of those had elements outside of the United States that influenced events; the LBDS/ISOL case, in contrast, was entirely domestic.) It boggles my mind that they thought they could get away with it. But the scary thing is, they almost did. I do wonder when ISOL found out about the fraud; is it possible that they knew all along, and were just holding back the information? Something like a hidden ace, just in case the verdict didn’t go their way?

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More stabbing hypocrisy… I mean cutting journalism

Tuesday, May 27th, 2014

Great and good friend of the blog RoadRich sent us an email yesterday. I liked it so much, I’m making it the very first guest post here (with RoadRich’s permission).

I saw yet another article on the USC murder spree. And though I’m not prone to rant, it seems this got me in a ranting mood once again. Of course it helps to preach to the choir.

I give the family lots of credit for earlier trying to get someone to take notice of the violent tendencies of their own son… which by itself is monumental… and I credit the family again for rushing to the developing scene (as the news reports indicate). The family of the murderer tried to save lives, weeks before it came to this.

However, the blame that the father of one victim levies on the NRA, and on politicians for not tightening gun laws, aims to hide the elephant in the room, which of course are the first three victims in this killing spree. Long before a person was killed by Elliot Rodger’s gun, two of his roommates plus someone who apparently had been visiting, were felled by Elliot Rodger’s knife.

By itself, the three stabbing victims may well have been called a ‘mass murder’, perhaps. And if the rampage by an overprivileged, self-important madman had stopped there, it would have still shaken Santa Barbara. But because the rampage moved on and changed to the weapon most feared by an uninformed or misinformed public, we are treated to a blind demand for gun laws. This shamefully ignores those who were killed by means other than bullets as somehow less important deaths. What do gun laws protect the stabbing victims from? What would more laws have done to save /anyone/ from someone who is willing to violate the law against murder? Is the loss by the parents of David Wang, James Cheng and George Chen any less important than that felt at the deaths of Veronika Weiss, Katherine Cooper or Christopher Michael-Martinez?

Of course we know what made the madman stop. It was someone who could defend himself, and whose job it was to defend others. It was someone with a gun, who ended a knife killing spree, a gun killing spree, and very nearly a car killing spree.

I feel bad for all the victims’ families. Yes, even the parent of Martinez, who is rightfully outraged. But between you and me, I would hope that someone Farq’s the article with the headline “Parent seeking tighter gun laws ignores stabbing victims” or “Parent doesn’t see stabbing deaths as victims” or something like that.

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