E-Discovery Strikes Again (Sandy Hook and January 6th)! AND A DANCING CROW (Crow Report)
E-Discovery Strikes Again (Sandy Hook and January 6th)! AND A DANCING CROW (Crow Report)
Plus, Do You Support Autocracy? Handy Flowchart Included!
In this Issue:
Paranoiac entrepreneur, Alex Jones, has cell phone data ‘inadvertently’ given to opposing counsel in defamation lawsuit, which may be relevant to January 6th Committee investigations.
Autocratic Flow-Chart
CROWS THAT I KNOW (with pictures)
Poem
Out-And-About Photo
Legal Discovery Mishaps and January 6th Committee
It is hard to imagine a client more destructive to their own case than Alex Jones. Jones runs a paranoid fantasy website that sells supplements and other prepper consumeables. That website promoted the belief that child massacres were really a hoax, which caused his followers to harrass the bereived parents who then sued him for defamation. One of Jones’s Sandy Hook defamation lawsuits, Heslin v. Jones, had been decided against Jones with a default judgment because of his discovery noncompliance shenanigans. This week was the damages award phase.
The footage below shows the moment when plaintiff’s attorney revealed that Jones’s defense attorney sent a “copy” of Jones’s cell phone to them. Plaintiff’s attorney informed Jones’s attorneys that they received this data, and after a statutory time period with no clawbacks requested, two years of Alex Jones’s phone data was now in the clear for the plaintiffs to search.
One point the plaintiff’s attorney is impressing upon Mr. Jones in the clip is that Jones had testified prior that he himself had performed discovery on his own phone and found nothing mentioning “Sandy Hook.” The discovery method Jones claims to have engaged in for his text messages was to apparently use his i-phone’s text message “search” feature. Jones further testified that he also gave it to his defense attorneys to search as well. Plaintiff’s discovery methods were much more successful, and they were able to find at least one mention of “Sandy Hook”:
At about the 6:45 mark, Jones says he is “not a tech guy”:
Plaintiff’s Attorney: You testified under oath previously that you personally searched your phone for the phrase “Sandy Hook” and there were no messages. You said that under oath.
Alex Jones: Yes.
Not a tech guy, yet felt he was competent enough to search through years of his i-phone’s data, and confident enough to testify to the soundness of his efforts. It is unknown to me at this point how such a decision was seen by his legal team, and how/when the copy of the phone was not only made, but then uploaded to a Drop Box folder accessible to plaintiff’s attorneys. None of this is exactly e-discovery best practices or standard attorney communication behavior. Was the release simply inadvertent/incompetence, or was it intentional?
The jury gave back their damages decision on Thursday, and Jones is to be out at least $4.1 million dollars. Additionally, Rolling Stone is reporting that due to Alex Jones’s involvement in January 6th events, the January 6th Committee is looking to subpoena that copy of Alex Jones’s phone data. It is worth noting that for the Committee’s work there has been a theme of missing records and data during that time period, as well as interesting people like Mike Flynn and Jeff Clark pleading their fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.
Preference for Autocratic Form of Government Flowchart
I realize that some of the topics covered here can be complex, so I created a flowchart to help people identify if they have a preference for an autocratic form of government based on the Trump-Eastman plot:
In spite of some troubling trends on this topic, I am cautiously optimistic for the country as a whole on this front. I think Republican Lisa Simpson, Liz Cheney, put it well in her July 21st closing remarks:
@4:38: “Here's the worst part: Donald Trump knows that millions of Americans who supported him would stand up and defend our nation were it threatened. They would put their lives and their freedom at stake to protect her, and he is preying on their patriotism. He is preying on their sense of Justice. And on January 6th, Donald Trump turned their love of country into a weapon against our Capitol and our Constitution.”
CROWS!!!
Within a three-mile radius of where I grew up in the Great State of Washington there were a couple of elementary schools and a middle school. During lunch and recess we would see crows along the edge of rooftops looking for an opportunity to get food. In a tall mostly dead tree along the neighborhood greenbelt, tens if not hundreds of those same crows would gather. It was very loud at times, and eventually my neighbor took that tree down.
I did not pay crows very much mind after that until I was living in the London suburb of Harrow in 2006. The main transit stop Harrow-On-The-Hill, had a nearby park on a slope that I liked to visit. I would watch as the crows formed a line and methodically sweep the park from the top down of seagulls and claim the ‘rubbish bins’ and benches for themselves. The picture below shows them in a line formation that is close to pushing the seagulls into oncoming traffic.
In 2019, I found myself with the good fortune of living in a home built in 1906 with some very tall trees. One day that year, I was in my bedroom when I heard the sound tapping at the edge of the roof followed by the sound of things falling onto the back deck. When I looked to see what was happening I found a crow clearing out my gutters. These gutters are very high, and so I gave a reward of unsalted nuts to the bird.
I have some experience with animals, in that I worked at a vet in high school, know how to ride horses, and have seen various critters in the wilderness. I wanted to thank the crows at various times for what they do around the house (from pest control to alarm system), but I also did not want where I lived to become a feeding frenzy destination. Thus began my establishing of baselines with the crows. I do not respond to caws or requests for food when I am upstairs or in other parts of the house that are not my office (they can be nosey and will look around for you). When I do give them a treat it is at a designated spot, which I call the Crowbar, and I try not to give more food than the birds present can eat on the spot.
2020 came, and like many others due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself working mostly from home. With businesses, restaurants, and local schools shuttered, I think there was a food disruption for the crow population. My home office desk sits next to a mostly glass door, and I started seeing the crows hanging around a lot more in the backyard. Our relationship prior to the pandemic had been more sporadic, related more to when I would work around the yard and turn up things they liked to eat, but during the pandemic it became a near daily occurrence that two would come near the glass door with one as lookout in a tree.
Then something happened in the summer of 2021: crow babies. First, I encountered the two in the picture below. A third came slightly later, it is still comparatively smaller, and has maintained a more standoffish/cautious personality. Coming down somehow from the tall trees above, they could not yet fly, however, they could hop and climb around.
During this time period the young crows frequently came up to my glass door, and I would find them peering in, like this one:
The picture below shows one of the little crows meeting our little human at the glass door.
The crows also go out in larger groups, and the next photo shows the tail-end of crows flying directly overhead the backyard. When I can see them approach like this from the south they either go straight north over the property or veer east. Either way, they are likely headed to roost in Bothell. There are ancient methods of divination regarding birds in flight like this, and though my understanding of ornithomancy is limited, from what I have read, the directional choices the birds make from the point-of-view of the observer roughly correlate to yes or no. Crows and ravens are otherwise mentioned throughout human mythologies, and often take on motifs related to their observation of humans (Hugin and Munin), scavenging behavior and death (Morrigan), and apparent intelligence.
During our recent heatwave we put out a small pool (you know crows are hot when they perch with their beaks open). The first picture below is a still from a video of that pool, and the second was taken after the more mature crow came and perched next to me.
I do not know what capacities these creatures truly possess, but as we watched the juvenile splash in the water, I think I got it that there was some relief not just from the heat, but also the seemingly constant cawing for food the growing juveniles engage in. Whether ape or avian, at least in that moment, I think we understood each other.
Less perceptible is crow society’s flapping chaos that can erupt between themselves in the air and treetops above a nearby park:
Hearing their sounds has led me to try verbal communication by way of mimicking some of their noises. Soft cawing, light brief cluck sounds, as well as tongue clicking. I typically get no audible response if they were silent first, at best they tilt their head at me.
Hand-arm signals seems to have had more consistent responses, especially when signaling the direction of food. The signal I try to use each time I give a treat at the designated spot (Crowbar) is to raise one hand and move it like the Queen waves, and then to move it in a diagonal downward direction towards the treat (or area I want them to check out). It seems to have also partially conditioned them to wait to fly to the treat until I give the signal. I wonder what other impact this may have had, as this past week while sitting in the garden I was visited by a crow walking along the top of the fence. It stopped on a post and looked at me expectantly and scraped its beak. The beak scraping tends to be grown-up crow for food please. I decided to gray-rock the beak scrape. The crow responded with a lateral head-move and a display that I was able to record. I turned the video into a photo showing its main movements below.
In the last frame the crow was getting a bit puffy, and at my first movement it flew over to the Crowbar. I thought the ‘dance’ was cool and decided to give the crow a few nuts in appreciation.
One book that I highly recommend if you are interested in learning more about crows is In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell.
John M. Marzluff is Denman Professor of Sustainable Resource Sciences and professor of wildlife science, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington. Tony Angell is an artist and writer living in Seattle, Washington. Together the authors combine more than sixty years of scientific and artistic fascination with crows and their bird relatives.
Poem for 2022.08.05
Concrete heat mirage
Small pink petals bunch on stems
Bees waltz quietly
Out-And-About Photo for 2022.08.05
Photo taken around noon on the hottest day of the year so far. Even the lens flares have lens flares.
