Friday, April 21, 2017

Weird fruitarian ultrarunner guy in the news


Well, I think he's in the news again. But not for his diet or ultrarunning.

I was reading a legal blog called the Volokh Conspiracy, and there was a story about a New York businessman being prosecuted for allegedly falsifying judicial orders. The businessman's name was Michael Arnstein. I went to the website for the business in question, and yeah, I'm pretty sure it's him.

According to Volokh Conspiracy:
Michael Arnstein runs the Natural Sapphire Company. Upset at some allegedly libelous criticisms of his company, he filed a lawsuit and got a court order requiring a defendant to take down those criticisms. He then sent the order to Google, asking Google to deindex those URLs — to hide them from Google search results (as Google often does when it sees such a court order).
And then Arnstein submitted 11 other orders to Google, each mentioning a new allegedly libelous URL (or list of URLs), each in the same case, and each with a different order date. Unfortunately, they weren’t really orders — they were apparently forgeries, copying the caption to the case and the judge’s signature. (1234567891011.) Google did indeed apparently deindex some material, relying on some of these orders.
Not good.

I don't practice criminal law. But I've actually stumbled upon this phenomenon before. Forging a judicial order is a great way to get someone to do what you want. But when you get caught, well, let's just say that judges don't tend to be too lenient with people who fake legal orders for profit.

If true, this dude's in a lot of trouble.

Might be a challenge to keep up that whole fruitarian diet in prison.