A couple of good US court rulings

There is no doubt that the news out of the US Supreme Court has been abyssal this year, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the rest of the US courts, where there have been a number of good rulings.

Among these are the nearly $1.5 billion rulings against Alex Jones, the sanctions against Trump lawyers, and a course a number of cases involving Trump, where the judges have allowed the cases to go forward.

Now, a couple of new pieces of good news can be added:

Jacob Wohl, Jack Burkman must spend 500 hours registering voters as penance for phony robocalls targeting Black voters in Cleveland

A judge on Tuesday ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two right-wing conspiracy theorists behind robocalls that sought to intimidate Black voters here out of casting mail-in ballots in the 2020 presidential election, to spend 500 hours registering voters in low-income neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C., area.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge John Sutula placed each on two years of probation, fined each $2,500 and ordered them to wear GPS ankle monitors with home confinement beginning at 8 p.m. each day for the first six months of their probation.

Sutula, 71, said that most of the civil rights advances in the United States have occurred in his lifetime. He compared the men’s effort to those who used violence to suppress southern Black voters in the 1960s.
Jacob Wohl is scum, and it is good that there are real consequences for his actions.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia, has been found guilty of seditious conspiracy, a charge arising from the attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.

Rhodes and co-defendant Kelly Meggs are the first people in nearly three decades to be found guilty of the rarely used civil war-era charge at trial. The trial was the biggest test yet for the US justice department in its efforts to hold accountable those responsible for the attack that shook the foundations of US democracy.

This appears to be a clear cut case of justice prevailing – if this wasn’t a case of seditious conspiracy, what is? But some times these things are harder to prove in court than would appear logical, so we should be glad that the US justice department managed to get the convictions.

New Rammstein music video

There is a new Rammstein music video out

Content warning: violence, religious imagery

Usually I have some understanding of the underlying messages of Rammstein videos, but in this case, I am at a loss.

Fred Brooks (1931-2022)

I just learned that Fred Brooks has passed away.

If you are outside software development, it is unlikely that you have ever heard about him, but inside the field, he was a giant. He is not known as much for his technical achievements, though they were impressive, as his seminal work “The Mythical Man-Month“, first published in 1975, in which he made remarkable claims like “[a]dding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. It is also famous for expressing the concept that if it takes a pregnant person 9 months to give birth to a baby, adding 8 more people, won’t change the period of time to one month – thus addressing the concept of man-months as a concept, showing why it is nonsense in some situations.

The Mythical Man-Month is still a book that I recommend to people working in software development (I’d suggest getting the 20 year edition from 1995, which has 4 extra chapters).