Better late than never.
I was exhausted yesterday from my trip and forgot to schedule an open thread. So here it is.
Dancing and singing and drumming and bass playing in the rain: Part II
[nOTE: Part I can be found here.]
Singing while doing much dancing is rare for several reasons. The first is that unless the dance is very simple and slow, the dancer gets out of breath (that also can be a problem for drummers, by the way, according to what I’ve read). In a dance you can hide being out of breath somewhat, but if you have to sing you can’t hide it. What’s more, though, there is a similar problem to that which some drummers face, especially when learning: it can be hard to do both simultaneously. You won’t see it much except for very simple dancing.
As far as Gene Kelly and “Dancin’ in the Rain” goes, his singing occurs when he is basically walking slowly down the street. There’s a little singing as the dance picks up, and then there’s a long pure dance part with no singing at all, which constitutes the bulk of the number. A person’s memory – and the lyrics “I’m singin and dancin in the rain” – might make it seem as though he’s doing both quite furiously at the same time, but he is not.
Plus I’m almost positive that at that point musical numbers like that were pre-recorded and lip-synced.
Astaire used to sing – and then he would dance. He could do both, but I don’t recall him doing them together. Here’s a typical dance number. Fred starts singing while they dance very very slowly and sedately (akin to Gene Kelly’s walking at the beginning of “Dancin’ in the Rain”). Then he stops and then they really start to dance. But no more singing.
Cagney could sing and dance, too. But again, not much together. Watch him in “Yankee Doodle Dandy”:
So much fun.
But Astaire could dance and drum at the same time. And what he does with both here doesn’t seem very simple to me at all. But hey, he’s not singing at the same time:
Remarkable.
Rittenhouse verdict watch
I’m going to be traveling most of today, and if a verdict comes down there’s a good chance I may be out of computer coverage. So I’m putting up this thread just in case.
Nick Sandmann reaches out to Kyle Rittenhouse
And as so often is the case with news of special interest to the US right, it’s a British paper that publishes it.
Sandmann has learned more in a few years through the crucible of his personal experience than most people learn in a lifetime. He writes:
Kyle was 17-years-old when he became a household name after that terrible tragedy in Kenosha.
I was 16-years-old when I was catapulted into the national conversation by video of an encounter with a Native American activist on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
In only hours a CNN host tweeted an image of me, writing: ‘Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?’.
Kyle wasn’t given his day in court by his critics.
And neither was I.
The attacks on Kyle came from the national news media, just as they came for me.
They came quickly, without hesitation, because Kyle was an easy target that they could paint in the way they wanted to.
This is the problem with liberal media outlets in the United States. They want to get the story first, get the most views, make the most money, and advance the agenda from liberal patrons.
Absolutely true. And almost every word from the MSM was a lie in both cases, meant to defame and set the narrative at the outset:
Taking a life, for any reason, sticks with someone forever and yet the liberal elites would rather turn it into a joke for likes.
Not only does Kyle have to deal with that, but it is compounded with the overwhelming stress and trauma of the character assassination taking place against him.
From my own experience, the death threats, feeling of no future ahead, and that millions of people hate you, is enough to alter you in many concrete ways and permanently.
Make no mistake: even the strongest of people cannot resist the mental impact when the media war machine targets you.
There’s much more at the link, including a discussion of whether Rittenhouse could sue and what might happen if he does. Sandmann adds that he is still involved in six suits against the media for the defamation he suffered.
He adds:
One of the saddening parts of this media onslaught is that it has taken young people like Kyle and myself to expose how corrupt the media really is…
At this time I would like to use my platform to let Kyle know that I am here for you and if you ever would like to reach out to me, I am about the only person our age to have an idea of how the media is treating you. The way the media has treated you is terrible, and you don’t have to face it alone.
[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]
Open thread 11/17/21
Did you ever wonder how they do it?
The Rittenhouse jury has gone home for the evening
They’re not sequestered, so “going home” for the evening means going home-home.
I can’t predict what juries will do, ever. And in fact, I’m often wrong when I even try. I cannot figure out, however, why any thinking sentient being wouldn’t have returned a verdict of “not guilty” almost instantaneously. There is no credible evidence of guilt, must less guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In fact, there’s hardly any evidence of guilt at all, credible or incredible.
But apparently there’s a lack of unanimity which could mean almost anything, but it certainly means that the jury isn’t composed entirely of people who think like me.
As for the fact that the jury has not been sequestered, I was listening to Robert Barnes talk with Frei about that. He said that most lawyers don’t ask for it because it’s been found that being sequestered makes jurors tense and stressed and prone to rushed decisions just to be able to finally go home. As for reading about the case or talking to people about it while they’re home, they’re told not to do it but of course some do. I think that in a case such as this, with so much prejudicial publicity having gone on for well over a year, the damage is pretty much already done and so it hardly matters what might happen now in that regard.
I’ve been extremely tense all day, for obvious reasons.
Why did the Zimmerman jury find him not guilty?
In watching the Rittenhouse trial, I have sometimes thought of George Zimmerman. The fact situation in Zimmerman’s case was hardly the same, but it was at least somewhat similar in that each defendant was in a generally protective mode, and each one shot and killed an assailant (or in Rittenhouse’s case, several assailants) who were unarmed but were hurting them and might be intent on killing them.
There were a lot of differences. For example, Rittenhouse was set on by a mob in a riot situation, and his encounters were very comprehensively recorded by video cameras. For Zimmerman this was not the case. Rittenhouse and all his victims were white, but somehow the left has made racial claims about him and his motives. Zimmerman was Hispanic (or part-Hispanic) and the man he killed was black.
Both defendants were widely defamed and lied about, both by the general left, the MSM, the prosecutors, and other public officials. Therefore both jury pools almost certainly were tainted and compromised by this negative propaganda against the defendants.
The Zimmerman trial occurred in Florida, however, a somewhat more conservative state than Wisconsin (although Kenosha, where Rittenhouse’s trial is occurring, is purple as far as I can tell). And Zimmerman was tried in 2013, which seems like ancient times compared to now, because the atmosphere of the country has changed so much in the eight years since then. In fact, Black Lives Matter was formed as a reaction to the Zimmerman case, and Black Lives Matter was certainly a big part of the riots that led to the situation Rittenhouse faced in Kenosha in August of 2020. So the two trials are linked in that way, as well.
Despite the widespread hatred of Zimmerman and belief that he had murdered Trayvon Martin, the facts that emerged in the trial were very different than the left and the MSM had portrayed. This was true despite the fact that most of the actual facts were easily discovered prior to that trial, if a person read sources on the right. The same is true of Rittenhouse; most of us were not surprised by the trial because we had learned the facts long ago. It’s people who relied on the MSM for their information who were surprised.
I had expected Zimmerman to be convicted because of the widespread defamation mounted against him. I was relieved at the verdict but I don’t recall too much about what was said about the process by which it occurred, so I looked it up just now and found out a few things.
The first – and I think this is important – is that in Florida juries are composed of six people rather than twelve. It seems to me that that would mean it’s easier to get a unanimous verdict. That goes both ways, of course, because either “not guilty” or “guilty” must both be unanimous (otherwise the jury is hung and the person can be retried if the prosecutor so desires). But it does explain, at least to me, how it might be that Zimmerman could be found not guilty, if only six people had to agree.
The deliberations took sixteen hours and the verdict was returned on the second day, however, because initially the jury was hung [emphasis mine]:
Two days following the conclusion of the trial, one of the jurors (Juror B37) spoke with Anderson Cooper of CNN about her experience as a member of the jury. She said that in an initial vote, three of the jurors had voted to find Zimmerman not guilty, but two had voted to find him guilty of manslaughter and one had voted to find him guilty of second-degree murder: “there was a couple of them in there that wanted to find him guilty of something and after hours and hours and hours of deliberating over the law, and reading it over and over and over again, we decided there’s just no way, other place to go.”…
Juror B37 told Cooper that she believed “It pretty much happened the way George said it happened.”…
Four of the other jurors released a statement saying that Juror B37’s views should not be regarded as representative of their views on the trial.
Juror B29, a 36-year-old Puerto Rican mother of eight children…was interviewed about the trial on July 25. She said, “George Zimmerman got away with murder, but you can’t get away from God. And at the end of the day, he’s going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with.” She said that as the jury began deliberations, she wanted to convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder, and she held to her position that Zimmerman should be found guilty even after all the other jurors had decided to find him not guilty. However, she said that after nine hours of deliberations, she realized that there was not enough evidence to convict Zimmerman under Florida law: “As the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty….you can’t put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty.” The juror said that she felt like she owed Martin’s parents an apology because she felt she had let them down.
That gives us some insight into the winding ways in which juries arrive at decisions, even a jury so small as six people. Zimmerman’s future hung in the balance among people who strongly disagreed on his guilt vs. innocence (despite what I think was overwhelming evidence of his innocence). He was fortunate that Juror B29 actually understood – and applied – the doctrine of presumed innocence of the defendant and the prosecution’s burden of proof.
I fervently hope that sort of approach hasn’t fallen by the wayside in the eight intervening years. I fear it has.
Paralyzed mice walk again
[Hat tip: Instapundit.]
Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University in Chicago and his colleagues created a material made of protein units, called monomers, that self-assemble into long chains, called supramolecular fibrils, in water.
When they were injected into the spinal cords of mice that were paralysed in the hind legs, these fibrils formed a gel at the injury site.
The researchers injected 76 paralysed mice with either the fibrils or a sham treatment made of salt solution, a day after the initial injury. They found that the gel enabled paralysed mice to walk by four weeks after the injection, whereas mice given the placebo didn’t regain the ability to walk.
The team found that the gel helped regenerate the severed ends of neurons and reduced the amount of scar tissue at the injury site, which usually forms a barrier to regeneration. The gel also enhanced blood vessel growth, which provided more nutrients to the spinal cord cells.
The article cautions that what works in mice may be difficult to scale upwards for humans. But I’ve never read anything about the treatment of paralysis that sounds as promising as this.
Also, as a person who has had a number of nerve injuries (one at the lumbar spinal level, and a couple that are more peripheral), I wonder if this might also be a treatment for that sort of thing, since it helps nerves heal and regenerate.
Reflections on the larger anti-self-defense goals of the left in bringing Rittenhouse to trial
It’s waiting time, and I’ve been reflecting on the big picture of where we are right now. I don’t think there’s any way the Rittenhouse trial would have occurred ten years ago and certainly not twenty years ago, and the fact that it’s occurring at all is a bad sign.
Not that we need any more bad signs. But this trial is a reflection of the ways in which the left has gained power lately, despite the fact that there’s been a backlash against it.
The left wants power to be invested in the state and they intend to control the state – and by “state” I obviously don’t just mean an individual state such as Wisconsin, although there’s that too. The preferred repository of power is the federal government and the tentacles with which it grasps the states. That means that the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense must be quashed or at least greatly weakened, and that only certain people will be allowed to have that right.
Someone like Kyle Rittenhouse – a young white man of conservative leanings – is not allowed to have that right. But this trial isn’t even about him primarily; he’s just the vehicle for delivering the message, which has several parts:
(1) Rioters in causes that the left deems righteous are allowed to destroy cities and ordinary citizens must lay low and take it. They may not defend property or even person. The most they can do if attacked is take a beating and hope to not be killed, throwing themselves on the mercy of the mob.
(2) It’s not part of the trial of Rittenhouse, but my guess is that if he had fallen into a protected minority ethnic group or persuasion, he might have been spared the wrath of the prosecutors. Then again, maybe not – ask “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman.
(3) The MSM and the left will mount a defamatory campaign against their designated enemies (in this case Rittenhouse, but it could be anyone who meets their criteria). That will taint jury pools so badly that a lack of evidence to bolster the prosecution’s case (in Rittenhouse’s case, a complete lack of evidence favoring the prosecution) won’t matter. This is especially true if the goal isn’t necessarily conviction, because a hung jury will do. The principle is that the process is the punishment, and the state will not relent in its pursuit of its quarry – multiple trials if necessary.
These messages are for the general public and don’t really have much to do with Rittenhouse himself.
Do the prosecutors realize Rittenhouse is not guilty and is in fact innocent? I think they do and simply don’t care about his actual innocence because he is guilty of being who he is, and that’s enough. Plus, he’s useful to them as an object against which to stir up hate and to deter self-defense, which is their larger goal. And they care about usefulness rather than the individual.
Open thread 11/16/21
The law according to ADA Binger
(1) If you carry a gun you have no right to self-defense against an unarmed man, even if that person is trying to grab your gun. You have to take your chances that he won’t successfully grab it and use it to kill you.
(2) A bigger gun always beats a smaller gun, and so if someone points a gun at your head that’s smaller than your gun, you have no right to shoot in self-defense.
(3) The best thing to do in a gunfight is to put your weapon on the ground and put your hands up to show how friendly you are.
(4) Rioting mobs are heroic.
(5) Guns are useless as defensive weapons for the aforementioned reasons, but probably the best use of a gun is to point it at the jury with your finger on the trigger. That way they know from personal experience how very scary guns are.
(6) Lie about anything and everything. That way you can hope there are some jurors (or many jurors, or all jurors) who forget what the judge stated as the law, or who already hate the defendant and are just looking for any excuse, however flimsy, to find him guilty.
Binger is the type of lawyer who makes people detest and despise lawyers. Lawyers aren’t all like that. But when they’re bad, they’re pernicious. Prosecutors have extraordinary power to harm someone if they wish to do so.
Prosecutor Kraus wasn’t far behind Binger in the outrageous-statement category. In fact, he may have edged him out with this remark: “Everybody takes a beating sometimes.”
And this:
Kraus also argued that Rittenhouse was “too cowardly” to fight his way out of the crowd by using his bare fists.
I’d like to remind Kraus of that counsel if he’s ever set upon by a mob shouting “Cranium him!”
ADDENDUM:
If you want to hear a lot of detail from Frei and Barnes about Monday’s proceedings, see this:
Andrew Sullivan, the human hyperbola
Not hyperbole; hyperbola.
I used to follow Sullivan quite closely, even before I became a blogger. However, he really went off the deep end some time during the candidacy of Sarah Palin and developed a very singular theory about her faking her pregnancy with her last child. I won’t bother to go into it here, except to say it was incredibly bizarre, and he seemed quite obsessed with it.
Since then, I’ve paid attention to him only very sporadically, but this article of his from three days ago caught my attention, and that’s the subject of this post.
Why do I refer to Sullivan as a human hyperbola? This is why:
The graph approaches the asymptotes but never actually touches them.
In much of Sullivan’s work, he keeps coming tantalizingly close to seeing the truth but he never quite gets the whole picture; he backs away instead.
You might point out that a hyperbola doesn’t back away. It keeps getting closer but never gets there. Well, metaphors aren’t always perfect. Some are hyperbole.
But I digress.
Why does Sullivan interest me at all? I think he represents a certain percentage of people – I don’t know how large it is, but it includes quite a few people I know – who can concede that the right is correct on certain points but cannot or will not fundamentally change their politics and who continue to look at actual conservatives (or Trump supporters, which isn’t exactly the same thing) with disdain.
And don’t be misled by the fact that many MSM outlets refer to Sullivan himself as a conservative. He may agree with conservatives on some points, and he may even hold himself out to be a conservative, but in my humble opinion he definitely is not.
In that recent piece, Sullivan is at approximately the stage I got to around 2002 regarding the MSM, but I don’t think he’ll ever make the transition to the amount of distrust it so richly deserves. For example, he continues to condemn Rittenhouse – although he doesn’t say why. It seems to me that he can’t let go of some of his original MSM-planted assumptions about Rittenhouse, even when faced with the trial, and he doesn’t feel he needs to argue for his point of view because he thinks he is stating self-evident truths.
Why oh why was Sullivan relying on the NY Times for its Rittenhouse reportage in the first place? He’s pretty slow to get it. The facts about the case were out there quite early for all to see. I’m not a journalist with credentials like Sulllivan’s, but I seem to have been far more careful then he about Rittenhouse and did far more research on both sides.
What is it with someone like Sullivan? Is it hubris? Assumptions of which he’s mostly unaware? He doesn’t seem to know what he doesn’t know.
Here’s a section of Sullivan’s essay, to show you the sort of thing I mean about getting close and backing off:
I haven’t watched the whole [Rittenhouse] trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you’ve been led to believe a media narrative that was way off. (Independent journalists last year, like Jesse Singal, were more clear-eyed.) Because of that narrative whiplash, we may have more rioting and violence if he’s acquitted. The judge is already being targeted. I’m not defending Rittenhouse. And I understand news gathering is fallible. But there’s a media pattern here. And it reaches far wider than Rittenhouse.
Why aren’t you defending Rittenhouse, Andrew? Is he not innocent? Was he not there protecting property, helping people, being polite? Did he not fire in self-defense? What’s your problem with him? His age, his Palinesque class qualities, or was it the gun he carried?
Sullivan also writes this in the essay, about the media’s role in Russiagate:
The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.
Fine as far as it goes. And yet he feels he must follow it with this:
This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help.
Actually, Andrew, it means that there is zero evidence that Trump was “eager for Russian help” (not that it matters in terms of the mendacity of the press, anyway). Why does Sullivan cling to this last remnant of fiction? To say to the leftist hordes,, “Don’t be too mean to me; I hate Trump too?”
But then he follows that with this [emphasis mine]:
But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.
It’s like he gets too close to the fire of truth, and has to pull away momentarily to cool down before he burns in it, but is subsequently drawn back to it to warm his hands again. And actually, Trump wasn’t right in the end (what does that even mean in this context)? He was right in the very beginning and he was right in the middle and he was right in the end, if indeed this has even ended.
In other words: Trump was right. It’s not really that hard to say, is it? I didn’t like Trump in 2015-2016, but at some point a few months into his presidency in 2017 I recognized, to my great surprise, that Trump was usually right. What’s Sullivan’s excuse – or that of so many others who see part of the truth – over four years later? It shouldn’t have taken Durham to let anyone know this – although I give Sullivan some credit for being one of the few who are saying it at all.
Here we go with more back and forth from Sullivan – the list of egregious media offenses, and then some minimizing in the last sentence:
Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.
As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.
Minor? Minor? If it had been Trump’s child and if it implicated Trump in massive corruption as it did Biden, Sullivan and others would have been screaming it to the skies. And a great many Biden voters (one in six) have said it was one of eight issues that, had they known about it, would have swayed their vote away from Biden. Not so minor after all.
The ending of Sullivan’s essay is quite fascinating, at least to me (emphasis mine):
I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology . But with this kind of record, how can I not?
We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight. This is humanly understandable. It is professionally unacceptable. And someone has got to stop it.
Give up the Times addiction, Andrew. Or at least, if you must read it every day, read it with a skeptical and judgmental eye and mind. Accept the truth, the truth you yourself have already stated – which is that the MSM lies and lies and lies and then lies some more. And read a lot of coverage from the right, too, and you’ll find over and over that the right is more consistently correct, by far – about the facts. It’s hard to accept, I know, but once seen it cannot be unseen except by a conscious act of self-delusion.
[NOTE: I have a feeling someone will correct me on this hyperbola thing. If so, my excuse? It’s been a long time since I took high school math. A long long time.]