Douglas Burger

loves wife, hates strife, writes software, reads books, shoots cameras, shoots guns

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

Thought 96.01 - Thoughts? Well, yes. I have them. Sometimes, I don’t have them. Other times, I feel like they use me to get had. @SSalviander had some too. https://t.co/cdMdIBz6uJ

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@guns_ny @GuntherEagleman Boil the water faster so the frog can tell what's going on.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@guns_ny @tuuu28283 Almost the same for me. My dad let me shoot his bolt-action .22LR at soda cans on a camping trip. It was fun accomplishing something. Having guns was nothing special. It was like seeing a screwdriver in a tool drawer; a piece of machinery designed for a task.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@ShamashAran @Kronykal So, about that. I did really go out to my truck recently and thought, "Do I have a 10mm socket?" Because of all the 10mm talk in here.
I do. I really did. The tow truck driver earned his money,
https://t.co/X0tva9M2WZ

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@nogooddeed2 So on that. I had a 200 pc kit in clamshell like that in truck box.
My wife/I was in rollover crash, shred the box off the truck, hour for FD to cut me out, off the interstate.
Tow truck driver walked site and picked up what he saw.
I counted 198 pieces bagging it back.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@MikeyDiMercurio @KathleenWinche3 Neal Boortz liked to say a tattoo is a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@MikeyDiMercurio @hatemytimeline I'm going to crack up randomly for the next few {time periods} over "do the needful"

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@X search has been sucking for quite a few days now ...
Can't be loaded right now... 😠

[Robb Allen @ItsRobbAllen]

"I have no idea about what I'm wanting to ban, I just know I want to ban it. I can't define it nor can I be bothered to learn. Demanding a ban is easy, learning is difficult" https://t.co/s0eXEBMqPF

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@SSalviander @LUFC1992_v2 Easy. South is to the west and north is to the east. And the other north goes to the right.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

> And the time I should’ve died

To which I instantly mentally added "(Totally not my fault)"
ht @MikeyDiMercurio

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

Another flying story. (And the time I should’ve died). 😳

When I was the Operations Officer for a USAF C-141 squadron at Travis AFB, CA, we had an “Island Run” where we flew to Hawaii, Johnston Atoll, Kwajalein, Midway Island, and into crew rest. The next day, back to Honolulu. Long first day and mostly in the middle of the night.

On approach to Midway one midnight we hit severe turbulence on at about 500 feet and ingested birds into two engines. Lost one and the other was degraded but still operating at about 50%. I initiated a go around, climbed out, and entering holding to run checklists and access our damage. The weather folks in Midway radioed that it was only going to get worse. We couldn’t get in and our divert base was Honolulu.

Thankfully, I’d “tankered” some fuel. For the wife and the kids, we used to say.

Unfortunately, because of the severe turbulence, we lost our dual navigation systems (INS) and diverting back to Honolulu was our only option.

Initially, I asked for a “DF steer” on the HF radios. Pilots will get how nits that is. Basically, a WWII means of picking up a radio signal and flying to it for about 3 hours. It’s an emergency situation, definitely.

To compound matters, my copilot was so freaked out she became “inoperable.” She couldn’t talk. So, now I’m soloing.

In what I can only surmise was a God thing, my flight engineer “Smitty” happened to be an avid fisherman and just happened to have an original Garmin GPS in his helmet bag.

This was our conversation exactly. He pulls out something I‘ve never seen. He says, “hey, will this work boss?” I said, “fuck yeah, plug in HNL and give me a heading!” It worked. We taped Smitty’s little GPS to the cockpit dash so I could see the course and navigate accordingly. I flew that frikking line like it was life, because it was life.

Approximately 3 hours later, we picked up the lights of the islands. Honolulu picked us up on radio and put us on vectors. We and landed safely in Honolulu. Sometimes you feel God’s hand on your shoulder.

I made my copilot fly the approach to bring her around. Much like driving a car after an accident. She wasn’t happy about it but she cowboyed up.

The night I probably should’ve died.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@guns_ny More embarrassing than the judge would be a state Judicial Council that thought written letters of apology and secret reprimand were appropriate corrections.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@guns_ny @DocStrangelove2 Thief: “Well. It SAID ‘Come and take it’ right there on the truck!”

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@guns_ny @HouseGOP Yes, it is.
No, it’s not.
How can we tell?

[alexandriabrown @alexthechick]

(long tweet warning)

In which I explain why there is absolutely no excuse for a legal brief to be filed with a hallucinated case citation and why I think harsh sanctions, including disbarment, are warranted if a lawyer does so.

Let me explain briefly (heh) what a brief is. For the normies, a legal brief is the term paper where you explain your position to the judge/judges who will be deciding your case. It's the document you file to persuade the court to rule in your client's favor. Briefs are important because that is where you make your case. Briefs matter, a lot.

I use the term paper analogy because briefs are full of citations. Since the US is an English common law system, the way you make your case is to cite to prior precedent and then explain how the facts of your case fit or are different from the cases you are citing. Thus, citing cases accurately is very important.

How you draft a brief is you do your legal research, in whatever search provider you have, you make sure the case you want to cite is still good law and hasn't been overturned, then you, well, cite it. You write "In A vs B, the Supreme Court of Whatever State held that my client wins because of these reasons. See 123 Citator2d 101, 105 (1937)."

The citation tells the court, and the other side, exactly where you got that position and that said position did not come from your buttocks.

So. When you are drafting the brief and doing the research, you have to, and I'll type this really slowly so everyone understands, read the case that you are citing.

Now. This seems like an obvious point, doesn't it? If you are citing a case, you are first going to read the case. How do you know that the case doesn't turn around and say something in the very next paragraph that destroys the position you are taking unless you have read the case first.

Reading the cases you are citing is the barest minimum of professional responsibility possible. Sure, every firm has a brief bank where you pull up, say, the paragraph for the standard for grant of motion for summary judgment. Even then, someone, at some point, read those cases.

Again, I cannot stress how basic a professional responsibility this is. If you cite a case, read it first should not be something a professional should be told must be done.

It is common practice in every firm (all three of them) I've worked at that when you show up for oral argument, you show up with a packet of the cases cited for the judge and the other attorney. This is just polite as it means everyone has them to hand to fight about.

The ONLY way a hallucinated case can get into a brief is if no one read the case. That's it. The only way a hallucinated case ends up in a brief is if no one ever tried to look up or print out the case. After all, if someone did, then it would be apparently immediately that the case doesn't exist.

When a hallucinated case shows up in a brief, that means the person who used the AI just trusted what the AI said without checking it. It means the reviewing attorney didn't ask hey, where's this case, I want to read it. It means people were so lazy that they never bothered to read what they claimed supported their position.

This isn't just negligence. It is pure abrogation of one of the most basic tenets of professionalism, namely, making sure the case cited supports the position advocated.

I believe disbarment is warranted because there is no excuse for failing to read the case. This isn't someone accidentally forgetting to calendar a statute of limitations. This is outright refusing to do the very bare minimum of seeing if the case exists. It is insulting to the client to be so careless.

There is no excuse for failing to see if the case exists. None. If a lawyer refuses to do the most basic task possible, that person should not be a lawyer any longer.

/fin

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@SKcalledtohope @ItsRobbAllen Seconding the Wesleyan. The one near me very much has more of Wesley’s original fundamentals

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

One of the worst things the progressive movement has done for society is convince large numbers of people that the success of others necessarily came at their expense. It’s bred so much resentment. And it simply isn’t true.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.

SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.

SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.

Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.

The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.

Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.

Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.

Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.

Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.

We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@davepl1968 I had 32” model. I can’t believe I carried it down the stairs to get rid of it. I coulda killed myself.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

@SSalviander My high school electronics class had a motto: If we can’t fix it, nobody can.

Because after we tried, we screwed it up too much to fix.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

🥺
DuMont Television Network (a major early network, 1940s–1950s): Produced roughly 20,000 episodes. Only about 350 survive—mostly because the network made kinescopes but later faced financial woes and even melted down film copies for silver recovery.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

Searching for my tweets and finding deleted 🥺 what I participated in or replied to reminds me of this passage in The Fourth Part of the World.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

The world do be palimpsesting.

[Douglas Burger @cdburgerjr]

People always eager to be erasing. Video tapes were the modern palimpsest