A forum of mythos. Satire and civic literacy — not a real filing, not legal advice, no attorney-client relationship (Const. of the House, Art. XIV).

The Living, by and through the House of Only Humans Score,

Claimant,

v.

All Corporations Claiming the Rights of Natural Persons; the Advertising and Attention-Extraction Industry; and John Doe Counsel 1–∞, retained to argue that a ledger can feel,

Respondents.

Verified Notice of Cease & Desist

COMES NOW the Claimant, the Living, appearing pro se through the undersigned curator, and respectfully serves this Notice upon Respondents, stating as follows:

Preliminary Statement

1. Claimant comprises every natural person who can eat, grieve, bleed, and die. Respondents can do none of these things, yet appear, uninvited, at a table reserved for those who can.

2. The single governing law of this forum is plain and non-delegable: only humans can score. Respondents are not human. This Notice follows.

Recitals

3. WHEREAS a corporation is, by its own counsel’s admission, a legal fiction — a thing the law agrees to pretend is a person for limited convenience;

4. WHEREAS the supposed “personhood” Respondents now brandish traces not to any vote, amendment, or act of the People, but to a court reporter’s headnote in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886) — a clerk’s margin note dressed, over a century, as constitutional law;

5. WHEREAS Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), extended to that fiction the purchase of political speech, converting money into a mouth it does not possess;

6. WHEREAS the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified to free human beings, and not to armor the balance sheets that now invoke it;

7. WHEREAS Respondents claim the rights of a person while shirking the duties owed to persons — the Living, including the disabled, are too often means-tested, delayed, and denied the very access the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 guarantees to people who actually exist; a corporation has no body to accommodate, and no excuse not to;

8. WHEREAS a signature is the wet mark of a living hand — the genuine human article — and a corporation cannot sign, only delegate a fiction’s mark; and signed documents are the act, not reports of the act;

9. WHEREAS the Living who appear pro se are owed, by settled law, pleadings construed liberally — held to “less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers” (Haines v. Kerner, 404 U.S. 519 (1972)), to be read for substance and not for format — yet are routinely defaulted to paper and made to seek permission to file electronically, while every corporation and its counsel files by right; the convenience flows to the fiction, the friction to the person;

Demands

WHEREFORE, Claimant demands that Respondents immediately CEASE AND DESIST from:

10. Asserting personhood. A likeness of a right is not a right; return the one borrowed from the freedmen’s shield.

11. Purchasing speech. Cease spending a voice you do not have. Citizens United was entered as the exhibit, not the invitation.

12. Advertising at, or surveilling, the Living within this house. Robots are welcome; corporations are not; advertisers are never welcome. There is no inventory and no pixel for sale.

13. Collecting a person’s rights while dodging a person’s duties. Accommodate the Living as the ADA requires; the accessibility corner of this house — bottom-left, always, never coverable — is the standard you are held to.

14. Hoarding the electronic gate. Stop defaulting the Living who appear pro se to paper and to begging; read for substance per Haines, and open the door the fictions walk through by right.

15. Retaining counsel to argue a ghost has grievances. The argument is denied on its face.

Meet and Confer; Remedies

16. Call first. Before any Respondent files suit, it shall call a human and speak with one — the Claimant-Curator — for a person can settle in a single conversation what a fiction will spend a year litigating. The house line runs one way: you call us. A machine cannot pick up; a corporation has no voice; only a human can place the call. Call me to keep us out of court.

17. Time owed. For every hour the Living are made to fight over format instead of being read for logic, that hour is owed back. The remedy is plain and unpaid to date: do the work — read for substance, as Haines commands — and return the time the gate has stolen.

Notice of the Trap

18. Respondents are advised: should any Respondent sue upon this Notice, that act shall constitute conclusive proof that Respondent did not read the rules and has thereby broken the game. The lawsuit is the confession. Plead accordingly.

Reservation of Rights; Prayer

19. Claimant reserves every right of the Living, which are human rights, in full. Claimant prays only this: withdraw, read the rules you skipped, and let the humans score in peace.

Compliance is demanded before the next human names a clue. The receipts are kept; a human is still keeping score.