Don’t let the ACLU write your op-eds and other lessons from the Amber Heard libel trial

by philg

“Legal victory for Johnny Depp after he and Amber Heard found liable for defamation” (CNN, today):

Depp sued Heard, his ex-wife, for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Though Depp was not named in the article, he claims it cost him lucrative acting roles.

The jury awarded Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million dollars in punitive damages.

It seems that the CNN reporters did not do a lot of research. In fact, Amber Heard did not write the op-ed that proved expensive. “The ACLU Says It Wrote Amber Heard’s Domestic Violence Op-Ed and Timed It to Her Film Release” (Jezebel, April 28):

ACLU staffers actually ghost-wrote The Washington Post op-ed at the center of the trial, in which Heard claimed to be a survivor of domestic violence, and they pitched on her behalf, timed to the release of Heard’s then-upcoming film, Aquaman.

Lesson 1 is therefore “Don’t let the ACLU write your op-eds”? (Lesson 1a is “Don’t believe CNN”? They don’t even mention the ACLU, whose role was apparently central.)

What other lessons can we take away from this tawdry spectacle? Also from Jezebel:

Today, on Day 11 of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial, the American Civil Liberties Union revealed in damning testimony that Amber Heard has given just $1.3 million to the organization after promising in 2016 to give $3.5 million of her divorce settlement to the organization—and her ex Elon Musk donated nearly half of that money ($500,000, to be exact).

Could Lesson 2 be “Don’t rely on the promises of a family court plaintiff”?

Separately, why is the ACLU involved in domestic violence? Here’s a list of civil liberties:

freedom of conscience, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the right to security and liberty, freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the right to equal treatment under the law and due process, the right to a fair trial, and the right to life. Other civil liberties include the right to own property, the right to defend oneself, and the right to bodily integrity.

Maybe it is the “right to security”? But the typical domestic violence plaintiff (as distinct from domestic violence victim), like Amber Heard, is seeking cash, not security.

Also, is “right to life” a civil liberty? That sounds like “pro-life” and the ACLU is on the opposite side (see the abortion section of ACLU.org, which we learn that “the burden [of abortion restrictions] falls hardest on … LGBTQ+ people” (maybe Ketanji’s panel of biologists can explain that!)). How about “right to bodily integrity”? Is the ACLU opposed to forcing experimental injections on people? Far from it! “Civil Liberties and Vaccine Mandates: Here’s Our Take”:

Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them.

Circling back to Amber Heard, a domestic violence victim turned philanthropist, could the ACLU pay for the mess that they got her into? Their 2021 annual report lists assets of $748 million.

Related (very loosely):

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King George III and the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community

by philg

Happy Pride Month! Let’s look back at an early champion of Pride.

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (Andrew Roberts):

In September 1772, John Wilkes joined other important City figures in criticizing the King’s commutation of capital punishment for Captain Robert Jones, who had been sentenced to hang for sodomizing a thirteen-year-old boy (although surprisingly the victim’s age did not seem to have played a part in Jones’ conviction). Friends of Jones – a fireworks expert who had also popularized the sport of figure skating – produced female prostitutes who attested to his bisexuality, as though that would alleviate the seriousness of the crime. Jones (who was in fact an artillery lieutenant) was due to hang until, on the day of the execution, George commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, and then a month later allowed him to go into lifelong exile in the South of France.

Nor was it the only time that George defied the vicious prejudices of the day against homosexuality and bisexuality. In June 1766, as a favour to his theatre-loving brother Prince Edward, the King signed a document making the Little Theatre in Haymarket into the Theatre Royal, which stated that it was ‘Our will and pleasure’ that Samuel Foote, the flamboyant impresario, should have ‘a company of comedians’ act there every summer, and authorized him to charge the sums necessary to offset ‘the great expense of scenes, music and new decorations’.

A footnote showing how much we’ve been enriched by the work of Gender Studies faculty:

These labels of sexual identity were not recognized in the eighteenth century, when people thought and spoke in terms of actual sexual practices, such as sodomy, onanism and so on.

Imagine if elementary school kids, instead of being taught 2SLGBTQQIA+ vocabulary, received an education regarding “actual sexual practices”!

Related:

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What’s a good PoE security camera?

by philg

We are soon to have an exciting power-over-Ethernet (PoE) switch. I need to run a Cat 5e wire (the punchdown block is Cat 5e so we’re sticking with old tech) out to the edge of the back yard to support a TP-Link Omada outdoor wireless access point (example). We have a Synology NAS, which can support IP cameras. I was thinking that it would make sense to run a second Cat 5e wire to support an IP camera to keep watch over the back yard.

In the unusual event that an actual bad person shows up (not to say “bad guy” because criminals may come in a rainbow of gender IDs), a camera that moves to follow them and turns on some little spotlights might scare them away. The Reolink RCL-823A seems to do all of this and Reolink cameras are purportedly compatible with Synology. The Amazon reviews are mixed, especially with respect to the auto tracking.

What else is there that might work, other than leaving a ferocious golden retriever to patrol the yard at night?

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Harvard hosts an unmasked mass gathering

by philg

Science (it’s actually in the URL: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/community-levels.html) says that Middlesex County, Maskachusetts, where the main Harvard campus is located, currently has a “High” level of COVID-19.

How do the geniuses graduating from Harvard respond to this information? By gathering en masse with no masks (source):

Photos on the page show hundreds of Harvard affiliates and just a handful with masks (including in a tent that is mostly enclosed (i.e., indoors but without the benefit of a standard indoor ventilation system)).

Merrick Garland showed up and gave a talk about the January 6 insurrection:

Now that land war is upon us. Russia’s unprovoked and unjust invasion of Ukraine this February has been accompanied by heart-breaking atrocities: murders of civilians, the shelling of hospitals, the bombing of a theater in Mariupol where hundreds had sought shelter, the demolished residential apartment buildings of Bucha and other cities.

At home, we are also facing threats to democracy – different in kind, but threats, nonetheless.

We see them in efforts to undermine the right to vote.

We see them in the violence and threats of violence that are directed at people because of who they are or how they serve the public.

We saw them when a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Members of Congress had to be evacuated.

And proceedings were disrupted for hours — interfering with a fundamental element of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.

Like the threat to voting rights, this kind of direct attack on an American institution is something I never worried about as I was graduating from college. There had been such attacks on foreign capitals in foreign lands. But a storming of the U.S. Capitol itself had not taken place since the War of 1812.

Finally, the preservation of democracy requires our willingness to tell the truth. Together, we must ensure that the magnitude of an event like January 6th is not downplayed or understated. The commitment to the peaceful transfer of power must be respected by every American. Our democracy depends upon it. (Applause.)

You are the next generation that must devote yourselves to preserving our democracy and helping others protect theirs.

And although what I am asking of you is daunting, I know that you are the next generation that will fulfill the promise this country represents.

In other words, the 20-year-olds who meekly cowered at home for two years to avoid becoming infected with a virus that kills 80-year-olds will bravely defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic.

(Separately, my mom was walking around Harvard Yard a few decades ago as the workers were setting up chairs for commencement. Potential rain was in the forecast. Mom overhead one of the workers say to another “I hope it rains like hell on those Harvard sons of bitches.”)

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Americans were too busy in lockdown to breastfeed

by philg

One reason for the baby formula shortage is that the FDA protects American infants from being poisoned by Swiss-made baby formula from Nestlé, the company that invented baby formula. What flies off a French hypermarché shelf is strictly illegal here. (Let’s hope that it continues to be illegal to import Nestlé’s noxious formula and that, instead, we will import their Swiss-made chocolate and consume it to maintain our robust Covid-fighting BMIs.)

Another reason for the shortage turns out to be that American fathers, mothers, and formerly pregnant people of other gender IDs were too busy at home in lockdown to breastfeed. “Baby-Formula Shortage Worsened by Drop in Breast-Feeding Rates” (WSJ, May 29):

One of the contributing factors in the U.S. baby-formula shortage is a significant shift in the way parents feed their babies: Breast-feeding declined during the pandemic, reversing a decadeslong trend, health practitioners say.

Since 2020, the share of breast-fed one-year-olds has plummeted from an estimated 34% to an estimated 14% this year, according to surveys conducted by Demographic Intelligence, a forecasting firm that specializes in births and works with formula manufacturers including Abbott Laboratories and Nestlé. Because of the small sample size, the firm’s 2022 estimate has a range of error of plus or minus 6 percentage points.

After Covid-19 restrictions were introduced in March 2020, many new mothers had shorter hospital stays and were discharged before their milk had come in or their baby had latched successfully to their breast, breast-feeding experts say. Some infants weren’t given skin-to-skin contact with their mothers after birth because of concerns about Covid-19 transmission.

Some lactation consultants were furloughed, redeployed or designated nonessential personnel; others offered only virtual appointments. Parents had less access to in-person assistance from doulas and peer-support groups. They also had less help from family and friends, who stayed away to avoid exposing newborns to the coronavirus.

(I’m not sure why the article refers to “mothers” given that “fathers” can also breastfeed.)

Hillary Clinton’s wisdom remains important even as the torch of wise Science-informed leadership has been passed to Joe Biden:

“It takes a village,” Dr. Spatz said. During the pandemic, she said, “all the in-person, peer-to-peer support went away.”

Science is fickle:

Breast-feeding rates in the U.S. reached a low point in the 1970s, when many doctors told parents that formula was the best food for babies. Then a movement to promote breast-feeding, and growing research showing the benefits of breast-feeding over formula, led to a decadeslong increase in breast-feeding.

The share of one-year-olds who are fed with at least some breast milk climbed from 16% in 2001 to 36% in 2017, then plateaued in 2018 and 2019, according to latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Skin color matters:

The recent drop in breast-feeding has been particularly steep among lower-income families and people of color, Dr. Spatz said.

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Memorial Day reading: The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by philg

For Memorial Day, let me recommend The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, a book about the Battle off Samar, in which puny destroyer-escorts and destroyers charged heavy Japanese cruisers and battleships in an attempt to prevent destruction by surface fire of American escort carriers (cargo ships with a flight deck, essentially).

The situation was the opposite of the typical American military engagement, in which we enjoy an overwhelming advantage in numbers and equipment. Most of the American fleet had steamed far away, distracted by a Japanese decoy force.

The book is also timely because the events are the opposite of what happened in Uvalde, Texas. There, the heavily armed, full armored, and numerous police were so intimidated by a single teenager that they took no action. Off Samar, however, captains of absurdly small vessels steamed forward into what they expected to be near-certain death in order to protect the escort carriers and their crews.

Here’s the Samuel B. Roberts, at 1350 tons:

She was sunk by the Kongō, 36,600 tons.

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The amazing survival story of an immigrant from Tijuana

by philg

The previous owners of our house didn’t want to bother taking the TVs off the walls so they left us with 6 TVs, one of which is actually outdoors under an overhang. It is a Samsung UN55D6000 made in Tijuana, Mexico in March 2011. Someone had cut a hole in the exterior concrete wall and wired a $5 extension cord down to an outlet in the hallway. The TV and cable box were plugged into this extension cord. I had an electrician clean up the situation recently and we found that the following still worked:

  • the TV part of the TV
  • the speakers
  • an HDMI input
  • a USB power output (keeping a Chromecast running)

After 11 years in the Florida heat and humidity and occasionally getting splashed by rain (only in very high winds), the immigrant is apparently thriving!

(It is conceivable that this 1080p soldier did not spent its entire career in the outdoor killing field. Perhaps this TV first served inside the house and was pushed out when the 65-inch 4K TV arrived in the family room.)

Related:

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Audible’s tale of an engineering hero: The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon

by philg

It is rare for engineering to be the subject of literature and entertainment and even rarer for an engineer to be the subject. Audible’s The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon is a welcome outlier. Although I was once a proud Fortran programmer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (the Pioneer Venus project), I hadn’t realized that the original idea for the moon landing was to fly a huge vehicle and enough fuel for the return trip straight to the lunar surface. Audible’s work is about John Houbolt, who fought the conventional thinking and endured all of the bureaucratic infighting to promote the idea of a small vehicle that would land on the moon, thus requiring only a tiny fraction of the fuel to get back to Earth. After escaping the moon’s gravity, the small vehicle would rendezvous with a bigger spacecraft in lunar orbit (“lunar orbit rendezvous” or “LOR”) and then the astronauts could all go home.

Trigger warning: the book implies that members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community, engineers of color, and engineers who identify as “women” played no role in getting astronauts to the moon.

Related:

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Audio Pro, the Swedish alternative to Sonos for whole-house music

by philg

Whole-house music is great. Buying things from our Swedish brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters is great as a way of showing support for their courageous decision not to order lockdowns, masks, etc. These principles intersect in Audio Pro, a well-established Swedish company that transitioned from powered speakers to multi-room music in 2017.

At $129, the Audio Pro no-amp no-speaker Link 1 node is much cheaper than the Sonos Port ($449). Audio Pro seems not to make any direct competitor to the $699 Sonos Amp (the Wi-Fi node plus a 125W/channel stereo power amp to drive speakers; back-ordered until mid-August!). So you couldn’t have quite as clean an installation with Audio Pro because you’d have to add a small Class D amp to get comparable capability. I guess this makes sense because Audio Pro is all about powered speakers. Why would they want to make a box for fools who still own passive speakers?

Has anyone tried Audio Pro? The British magazine What HiFi? top-rates Audio Pro among Sonos competitors.

Sonos is winding down support for previous generation gear like what we own and we don’t have quite enough nodes for the current house so we need to eBay all of our Sonos stuff soon. Do we buy the latest Sonos products, showing our support for the Science-followers of Santa Barbara (they also have offices in Science-following Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco)? Or do we buy Audio Pro, saving some $$ and giving money to unmasked Fauci-deniers?

The reviews on Amazon suggest that Audio Pro’s multi-room system got off to a rocky start, but now works for most people. The reviews for Sonos are nearly all five stars.

One thing that is strange about Audio Pro is that the no-amp Link 1 device doesn’t have any inputs. Some of their speakers have RCA and 3.5mm inputs, but if you were trying to pull sound out of a legacy stereo system, there would already be speakers in that room. The Sonos Port is 3X the price, but it does have the line input that you’d expect.

Another area where the Sonos Amp and Port lead: buttons on the device to play/pause and adjust volume. Some of the Audio Pro speakers have a big array of buttons (including presets for radio stations), but the Link 1 lacks the basics that Sonos always includes. I don’t know why Audio Pro can’t just copy Sonos and make a clone of the Sonos Amp. The company knows how to make the streaming hardware and they know how to make power amps (or how to ask people in China to make them!).

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What have we learned about Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde, Texas murderer?

by philg

The shooting in Uvalde, Texas is dominating my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Here’s an example:

(Joe Biden has been in the Senate or the White House since 1973. He didn’t do anything about gun laws, common sense or otherwise, during those 49 years, but “we have to do more” today.)

From an older guy in Maskachusetts on Facebook:

Does anyone really need these kinds of guns. I think if you want to shoot these kind of weapons you can only shoot them and keep them at gun ranges. Other than that, no one, other than law enforcement should have these weapons. I am sorry. There is ZERO need for them out in society.

What has been learned about Salvador Ramos and his motivation for killing elementary school kids?

From skimming the news, it sounds as though Mr. Ramos confirms the findings in The Son Also Rises. His grandfather was unsuccessful (“[grandfather] Rolando Reyes also said he has a criminal background and cannot have a weapon in the home.” (ABC)) and Mr. Ramos was on track to be unsuccessful (“The Robb Elementary School shooter went on the deadly rampage after apparently fighting with his grandmother about his failure to graduate from his Texas high school, according to a report.” (New York Post)).

“Salvador Ramos Was Bullied for Stutter, Wearing Black Eyeliner: Friend” (Newsweek):

“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” Garcia told the Washington Post. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.”

Could this be the motivation? Plenty of teenagers in the 1970s had access to guns. Bullying in the 1970s was far worse than today and physical violence was common, as it was outside of school as well during the high-crime 1970s. In the junior high school that I attended, kids could get bullied for wearing Sears Toughskins rather than Levi’s blue jeans. I don’t think coming out as transgender or gay would have gone over well. On the other hand, 1970s bullies couldn’t follow the weak members of the herd into their own homes via social media.

What about pills? Kids weren’t medicated back in the 1970s. Psychiatrists today poke at random into a complex system that they don’t understand (the brain). Some of the most commonly prescribed medications may push pill-takers toward violence. See “Precursors to suicidality and violence on antidepressants: systematic review of trials in adult healthy volunteers” (2016): “Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.” But there is no evidence that Salvador Ramos was taking any pills.

What has been learned that could explain this terrible crime? (other than, in a country of 330+ million, there are going to be terrible crimes periodically)

Separately… gun nut readers: How are you going to sweep this episode of gun violence under the rug? If Americans were willing to shut down schools for more than a year and be locked down at home in hopes of slightly reducing the COVID-19-tagged death rate, why aren’t these same folks willing to repeal the 2nd Amendment? (China is the dream society, I think, for about half of Americans. China has zero COVID and no private gun ownership.)

Related:

  • the worst trauma is suffered by those who cower on the edge of a battle: “Amid criticism of the police response to the gunman’s hourlong rampage, including outrage among frantic parents who said that heavily armed officers stood outside the school restraining them rather than storming the building themselves, Texas officials on Thursday sought to express the difficulty facing community members and law enforcement responders alike. “It is so hard,” said Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety. “We’re hurting inside. We’re hurting inside for the community members. We’re hurting inside for our local partners.” (NYT)
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