Andrew Sullivan, the human hyperbola

The New Neo Posted on by

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.]

Branca on today’s developments in the Rittenhouse trial: the judge’s jury instructions

The New Neo Posted on by

A very important part of a trial is the judge’s instructions to the jury about the law. Such instructions can really help to shape the verdict – if jurors are paying attention – because they limit or expand the scope of what can be considered and what it might mean.

So today the judge has decided those issues, and Andrew Branca goes into them here. Some of the highlights (although I suggest you read the whole thing; it’s not long):

One win was the dismissal of the gun possession charge—finally!…

A second win, with respect to the State’s argument of provocation, the State will not be permitted to claim as fact that Kyle pointed his rifle at the Ziminski’s. This is important for the defense, because the purported provocation of pointing the rifle at the Ziminski’s, which if believed would strip Kyle of self-defense completely, requires an unlawful act on his part that provoked the Rosenbaum attack.

The State wants to claim that unlawful act was Kyle pointing the gun at the Ziminski’s—but there’s no actual evidence of this. There’s no photo or testimony that Kyle pointed his rifle at the Ziminski’s. Even the “enhanced” drone video left for the prosecution by the evidence fairy does not have the Ziminski’s in frame when Kyle is supposedly pointing his rifle.

So, the State will only be permitted to argue that Kyle pointed his rifle in some general direction, that different video shows the Ziminski’s in that general area, and therefore the jury should infer that Kyle was pointing his rifle at the Ziminski’s.

If the jury disbelieves any part of that, there was no unlawful act that provoked the Rosenbaum charge, and therefore no provocation that strips Kyle of self-defense.

A third win, with respect to Count 2, the reckless endangerment of McGinnis, the judge agreed to the suggestion by defense attorney Chirafisi that he would instruct the jury that if Kyle’s use of force with respect to Rosenbaum was lawful self-defense, then it was not conduct that was reckless with respect to McGinnis…

These discussions were followed by the actual instruction of the jury in the courtroom, and this was among the most confusing and disjointed instructions of a jury I’ve ever seen…

Ultimately, Judge Schroeder decided that he would essentially just tell the jury that if they believed the defendant’s conduct was self-defense, they were done—that was a not guilty verdict on that charge, and they need not consider either the primary charge nor any lesser included charges in that count.

That last bit sheds interesting light on the lesser included charges and why they may have been allowed to be inserted so late in the game.

If you watch just one discussion about the Rittenhouse trial so far,…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I suggest this one. I’ve cued it up to start around the time I think it gets interesting, and I’ve stopped it at the point where they change topics from the Rittenhouse trial. It’s long, so it you’re pressed for time, I suggest (a) going to settings for the video and running it at 125% speed; and (b) watching as much as you have time for, preferably at least a half hour. I think it’s the most lucid discussion I’ve seen or read so far about what has been going on in the trial up until yesterday, when it was posted on YouTube.

Robert Barnes does most of the talking. He’s earned his bona fides, as far as I’m concerned, with previous videos in which he’s been right about many things that other people were wrong about (such as, for instance, what was going to happen with Sidney Powell and Dominion). In the video that follows here, he confidently predicts that the judge is about to throw out the gun charges – and sure enough, that prediction came true. But that’s a minor point compared to the insight Barnes offers on just how incompetent the defense is and in what specific ways they are incompetent, as well as what a slime ADA Binger is.

I will add that Barnes was briefly on the Rittenhouse team as a consultant in jury selection, and then he was let go, so he’s not exactly without a personal bone to pick with the defense lawyers. Nevertheless I can find no fault with what he says about them or about the prosecution (or, for that matter, about Kyle Rittenhouse), which dovetails with my own observations except that Barnes is far more well-informed and detailed in his discourse.

Please have a listen:

I’ve already written so much about the Rittenhouse trial that anything I say now might be redundant, but I’ll just add that this trial has been dreadful in so many ways: dreadful that it was ever brought with such weak (or nonexistent) evidence against the defendant, dreadful in the defamatory MSM and Democrat publicity about Rittenhouse, dreadful in the viciousness of the stirred-up left against Rittenhouse, dreadful in the failures of the defense, and dreadful in the vindictive sleazy mendacity of the prosecution.

I sincerely hope that the verdict is not dreadful as well. I cannot remember being this nervous about a trial, ever.

The return of the lost: searching for…

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently a friend of mine mentioned that her book group had been reading the 1975 Anne Tyler novel Searching For Caleb, and after she’d read the copy that she’d found in her bookshelf, she noticed that my name was written on the title page. Evidently I’d lent it to her around 40 years ago and both of us had utterly forgotten that fact.

This made me smile, because the theme of the novel is – among other things – an elderly man’s search for the brother who left the family in young adulthood, never to be heard from again. So it’s about an effort to find someone lost, and the symmetry of the lost-and-found book appealed to me.

I won’t spoil it by telling you anything else about the plot, in case you want to read it. But I will say that, at the time I read it so long ago, I remember thinking it was enjoyable, although I’m not keen on most contemporary novels.

What’s more, the book had come to my mind even before its reappearance in my life, because during the past couple of years I’ve had my own experience – not with a sibling who disappeared, but with a lost great-uncle whose existence I only knew about because of a story my mother told me around 50 years ago. At that time she merely said (to my great surprise because our family is so small) that her father (my maternal grandfather) had had a brother who “disappeared” (her word), and that no one knew a thing about what had happened to him.

I knew he must be dead by now, because if alive he’d clock in at around 140 years of age. When my mother told the story I also assumed that his disappearance had occurred in his early adulthood, which would have been some time during the early years of the 20th Century, the same general time frame as Caleb’s disappearance in the book (which I hadn’t yet read because it hadn’t been written yet when my mother told me the tale of the missing great-uncle).

And since my usually very talkative and non-secretive mother seemed to know nothing more about this person, I assumed she knew nothing more about the story and I didn’t ask her any more questions. I assumed that she’d never met him.

Big mistake, but I didn’t know that at the time.

About two years ago I decided to do some genealogy research, something that had never interested me before. One motive was definitely to attempt to crack the mystery of this disappearing great-uncle of mine. I didn’t really expect to get anywhere, but I was going to try anyway. The story had stuck in my mind all those years.

The research took me a long time, with a lot of work and many twistings and turnings along the way, one problem being that he had a very very common name. I’ll skip the details, but it took a lot of skill and some creativity but finally I found out more about his life, which had included a bunch of marriages and even some illegitimate children or at least suspected illegitimate children, plus one legitimate child (and one legitimate child that actually wasn’t his, but that’s a whole nother story). And that legitimate child who was his also had had a very very common name, and I didn’t even know his birthdate or his mother’s name.

I even hired a genealogist to help me, but she only got so far, too. My big breakthrough was finding the great-uncle’s step-granddaughter (again, I’ll skip the details of the story), and she gave me a bunch of anecdotes about my great uncle (she had known him well), plus a small piece of information about his son: the name of the large city she thought my great-uncle’s son (her mother’s stepbrother) had lived in for at least a little bit.

And that in turn helped me to find his most recent address.

I figured this great-uncle’s son (who was my first cousin once-removed) would have been 94 at the time I found that address for him. What were the chances that he was still alive? And if alive, what were the chances that he was cognitively capable of understanding what I was saying and who I was? I thought they were slim, but I wrote him a letter anyway in which I explained the situation very carefully. I didn’t want to jar him and cause undue alarm or upset, and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t try to phone. I thought a letter would be gentler, plus it might reach someone else who might know something about his story.

I never expected to hear another word.

But – as you may by now have suspected – about a month later I got a letter in the mail. I stared at it in joyful but gobsmacked disbelief. It had a return address sticker with his name on it and the address, and my address was written on the front in the neatest, clearest hand I’ve ever seen. His letter was handwritten, too, and that clarity continued throughout the missive, matched by a clarity of thought.

Astounding.

Since then I’ve not met him; he lives far away. And I’ll skip all the things he told me about what had happened with his father, and how certain tragedies occurred and then after his father’s remarriage he was ripped away from the only family he’d ever known till then – which had happened not at the beginning of the 20th Century (when he wasn’t even born yet), but around 1940.

1940! That meant my mother knew about his existence, and knew him well, and he knew her, which turned out to be true and I received proof of it from him. Why hadn’t she mentioned him to me? He was her first cousin (she only had two others, so it wasn’t as though there were so many).

That’s another mystery and it will almost certainly remain unsolved.

And let me add that no one else in the family – neither my brother nor my own two second cousins on that side – had ever even heard of the existence of this great-uncle and certainly not of his son. They were flabbergasted by the whole story. Of the entire family, only my mother had mentioned it, and only to me.

Maybe she thought I’d figure it out some day, if anyone would. She probably knew what a bulldog I could be. And I’m pretty sure that after the 1940s she really didn’t know much about him or his father – but she obviously knew quite a bit about him prior to that. And afterwards, once I had seen photos of this great-uncle and his new wife and I had learned what they really looked like, I was able to see that they in fact had attended my parents’ wedding in the early 1940s. There they were in the photos, big as life.

My newfound first cousin once-removed is still going strong in his late 90s now – knock wood – and who knows, maybe some day I’ll actually meet him. He lives far away in a part of the country I almost never visit, so it would take a special trip.

But it’s extraordinarily satisfying to me to have located him. I can’t even explain the joy I felt when I got that letter from him, and it still makes me smile when I think of it – a mystery solved, an open circle closed. Not that such things are ever solved – including the grief and isolation he experienced as a child – but I hope there’s some healing there, and for me it’s been very satisfying.

I like to think my mother would have been pleased.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

These are a number of big stories I’ve barely touched on, and here are a few:

(1) First we have the FBI versus Project Veritas, though the use of raids and then intelligence leaks. A very familiar story and the way the intelligence community fights against the right. See this: “A US Government law enforcement agency conducted an illegal and unconstitutional raid on a journalist and then handed documents recovered in that raid, over to a rival journalistic group.”

(2) Now let’s turn to the 5th Circuit declaration that Biden’s OSHA vaccine mandate be enjoined:

On the dubious assumption that the Mandate does pass constitutional muster—which we need not decide today — it is nonetheless fatally flawed on its own terms. Indeed, the Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat). The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years,10 and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to11—is unavailing as well. And its promulgation grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.

(3) Yeah, Joe Biden called Satchel Paige a Negro:

And I just want to tell you, I know you’re a little younger than I am, but, you know, I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro — at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues — went on to become a great pitcher in the pros — in the Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.

I bow to no one in my detestation of Joe Biden, but I can’t quite bring myself to get excited about this particular utterance of his. After all, although the term “Negro” became verboten some time during the 60s (to the best of my recollection), I’m old enough to remember when it was the polite term, used by everyone in a respectful way. That’s why Satchel Paige was indeed a renowned pitcher in what was then called the Negro League, and in the Negro World Series (see this). That would have been in the 1930s and early 1940s, which was before my time and even before Biden’s (born in 1942) time.

But hey, we all know that Biden was actually born about 1000 years ago. As he segues deeper into cognitive decline, he probably is channeling ancient memories. But it is kind of fun to watch the press spin, and imagine the way his handlers must have cringed when he said it.

(4) Hostages taken at the US embassy in Yemen:

Houthi rebels backed by Iran continue to hold Yemeni employees of the U.S. government hostage, the State Department confirmed Thursday.

Earlier this week reports surfaced that showed 25 Yemenis in Yemen’s largest city of Sana’a, who worked for the U.S. Embassy and USAID, had been arbitrarily detained by the rebel group.

A State Department spokesman told Fox News the “majority” of the hostages have been released, but that embassy staff “continue to be detained without explanation.”

“We have been unceasing in our behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts to secure their release,” press secretary Ned Price told reporters Thursday. “We’ve seen some progress, and we’re continuing to work this critical issue.”

According to Google; according to DuckDuckGo

The New Neo Posted on by

Grosskreutz was the man who survived being shot by Kyle Rittenhouse, and who testified for the prosecution in the trial. During that testimony it was brought out that Grosskreutz had been carrying a concealed weapon without a permit.

This is a violation for which he could and probably should have been charged. But we all know why he wasn’t charged. It would have taken away some of his credibility that the state so desperately needed to make its case, and perhaps would have even bolstered Rittenhouse’s self-defense claim.

Can’t have that, can we?

So, what happens when you do a Google search for “why wasn’t grosskreutz charged with weapons violation,” as I did? You get a load of articles, but none of the high-on-the-list ones appear to address that question. Here’s the very first one on the list if you want to take a look at what you typically get from that Google search.

It isn’t until the fourteenth article on the Google list that we come to something marginally relevant to my search: this Quora question-and-answer. But it doesn’t really deal with the question I really wanted answered, either. That Quora piece asks why Grosskreutz wasn’t charged with pointing the gun at Rittenhouse, not why he wasn’t charged for concealed carry without a permit. It’s only at article number sixteen that someone asks (tentatively, without much information on it) about that type of weapons charge for Grosskreutz. But even after that, although I looked for a short while longer, I found no more articles addressing the subject.

Go to DuckDuckGo, however, and the story is very different. The first five articles that come up are directly on point, as is number eight (at least, in my list). That’s pretty impressive. Apparently there aren’t so many places where it’s been discussed, but DuckDuckGo does a good job of locating and prioritizing them. Google does not, and of course that’s not by accident.

It’s one of the biggest ways in which Google shapes public opinion rather than merely providing information, and the only thing to do about it is to stop using Google and advise others not to use it either. But Google is an immensely popular search engine and I’m pretty sure that the vast vast majority of people who use it have no idea about its biases or how they operate to keep information from the searcher.

The Rittenhouse jury instructions: provocation included

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew Branca has posted his analysis of the day’s proceedings in the Rittenhouse trial. It contains the jury instructions and is quite detailed, and I suggest you read it or at least skim it.

I wish I could say it cheered me up, but it most assuredly did not.

The comments there are worth reading, too. I’ll highlight some of them, but there are plenty more:

“andrew [Branca writes] Judge explaining lesser included offenses, notes reduces risk of a second trial due to a hung jury.”
******
That is probably the most ominous thing that I have read…The judge is allowing more lesser includeds so as to increase the likelihood of a guilty verdict inorder to reduce the “risk” of a second trial. Making decisions not on “law” or the “risk” of Kyle going to prison but to increase the chance of a guilty verdict inorder to avoid the hassle of another trial!! WTF

I still have a problem with provocation with intent. KR’s statement was that he dropped the fire extinguisher because he saw Ziminski with a gun pointed at him. Ziminski proved he had a gun by firing a shot into the air several seconds later.
The state needs to disprove KR’s testimony with some evidence. Ziminski was never called to testify that KR pointed a gun at him. No witness testifiied to seeing KR point his rifle, and there were witnesses everywhere. We have a retouched photo, that now the prosecutor is going to tell the jury what it shows? That sure doesn’t sound like “evidence”, and the judge SHOULD NOT allow it.
Finally, the entire foundation for the prosecution’s close is based on a video for which we have no idea where it came from, that was only provided to the defense in the second week of the trial, immediately before the prosecution rested. So, the state charged and prosecuted KR for more than a year, and conducted the first week of the trial, without the only evidence that supposedly supports their charges? If that doesn’t prove political persecution, I don’t know what does.

I’m confused now.

As I understand things, as the trial started, the FBI unexpectedly showed up with low-res drone footage that everybody understands was from the FBI.

Then, halfway through the trial, some additional drone footage mysteriously appeared, and no one knows who took it, who stored it, who may have tampered with it, or really anything about its provenance or chain of custody.

And Kyle’s freedom is going to hinge on barely-discernable “information” recorded on that video?

How was this evidence ever accepted by the defense?

Provocation with intent occurs when the defendant deliberately provokes a violent response, with the intent of then having an excuse to use deadly force against the person provoked.
__________

I don’t see how this argument is going to make any sense. If Kyle really pointed his gun at Ziminski with the deliberate intent of provoking either him or Rosenbaum to attack him so that Kyle could then shoot one or both of them, then why did Kyle run away from them, instead of just shooting them as soon as they moved towards him? The fact that Kyle tried to get away from them seems to be pretty clear and convincing evidence that Kyle had NO intent to provoke them into attacking him so he could shoot them.

The reporter witness McGinnis, who witnessed the Rosenbaum shooting, testified that when Rosenbaum first came at Kyle, Kyle “pivoted” and ran away. Kyle could have shot Rosenbaum right then, but he didn’t. When Rosenbaum caught up to Kyle, Rosenbaum came at him again and Kyle moved the barrel of his gun away from him. IOW, Kyle had yet another opportunity to shoot Rosenbaum if that was what he wanted, but he didn’t do it. Kyle didn’t shoot until Rosenbaum lunged at him and actually grabbed the barrel of his gun. Kyle’s behavior doesn’t make sense if he was just looking for an excuse to shoot Rosenbaum. Kyle did everything possible to AVOID shooting Rosenbaum for as long as possible, and only shot him when he had no other choice. That behavior is completely inconsistent with the argument that Kyle was deliberately trying to provoke Rosenbaum in order to have an excuse to shoot him.

So the Rekieta Law panel today said that the only reason provocation was allowed today is because Rittenhouse himself brought up the pointing of a gun when he took the stand. If he hadn’t have testified, it would not have come up and the state would never have been able to resurrect its dead case.

I’ve watched most this case, but trying to think back to this – is this true? The prosecution could not have brought it up via video? I know there was no other testimony about it. Ziminski sure as heck wasn’t there to say so.

The gun charge may be a blessing in disguise. If the jury wants to acquit on the felonies, this gives them a misdemeanor charge to convict on so they at least convict on something. That’s a better compromise than the “lesser” included offenses which are all major end-of-your-life-as-you-know-it felonies.

And I think that Kyle has something important going for him that has nothing to do with the law. He seems like a nice kid with good-hearted intentions. I think it was good that he took the stand. He presented himself well. It helped to humanize him and maybe help make it more difficult to callously ignore the evidence and the law and simply throw him to the wolves out of political bias.

Nevertheless, if they convict Kyle on the basis of this bogus evidence and ass-hat prosecution, it means they had it in for him anyways, the whole trial was an exercise in futility, and Kyle was doomed from the start. No actually fair and un-biased jury could possibly convict on the basis of what I was in this trial.

It’s that very last paragraph of that last comment that reflects my views. Short of a dismissal with prejudice by the judge – which I think should have happened but I also think was never ever going to happen – such cases come down to the jury.

And not just the jury as they watch what is revealed in the trial, either. I’ve said that “a mind is a difficult thing to change,” and it really really is. That certainly applies to jury members all of whom supposedly come to trials with open minds. Open minds would be nice, but it’s not that way and is almost never that way. It’s especially rare in a case such as Rittenhouse’s, which has been very heavily publicized and propagandized for well over a year, with even national figures such as Joe Biden weighing in to condemn him.

Disgusting, but true. At least Obama only said Trayvon Martin might have been his son; he didn’t say the “white Hispanic” Zimmerman was a white supremacist.

It is almost a certainly that the jury pool in Kenosha was tremendously tainted by all that negative publicity, and in addition there was and is the added threat of jurors knowing that riots will probably ensue without a guilty verdict. That’s mob rule, and it’s the terrible sword that hangs over our heads now that the authorities charged with keeping civil order have abandoned that endeavor in many cities and states in recent years. The original riots in Kenosha that sparked the Rittenhouse’s actions were a form of the same thing – people enraged at what they thought had happened to Jacob Blake, and already making up their minds that the police who shot him had to pay.

In Rittenhouse’s trial, the jurors brought with them into that courtroom whatever preconceptions they had, and it’s probably the case that none of them or few of them changed their minds because of the trial proceedings. I have no idea how they were originally leaning, though, and that’s the all-important question.

I can’t imagine any thinking person being persuaded of Rittenhouse’s guilt by the evidence in this trial. But what I can imagine isn’t the point. The point is: who are the jurors, what did they each think going into the trial, what will they each think at the end of it, and will at least one of them decide he is not guilty.

Now the governor of Wisconsin calls out the National Guard (plus, is this the end of self-defense in Wisconsin?)

The New Neo Posted on by

Governor Evers of Wisconsin has authorized 500 Wisconsin National Guard troops in anticipation of the Rittenhouse verdict.

You could say this was prudent, because if there is anything less than a conviction on the most serious charges, riots have been promised. You could also say – and you’d be correct – that this is just another element of the case that will tend to intimidate the jury from rendering a “not guilty” verdict. I would add that in my opinion this jury should have been sequestered, because all of this could have easily been foreseen. But I’m not even sure that the defense asked for that, and at any rate it was not done.

What’s more, irony abounds. Evers didn’t see fit to call the Guard when the Kenosha riots occurred, but he should have. And that’s not just 20/20 hindsight; it was quite obvious at the time. If he had done so, it is highly likely that Rosenbaum and Huber would still be alive, Grosskreutz would have retained his biceps, and Kyle Rittenhouse’s entire future wouldn’t be in jeopardy. There were so many points along the way when authorities made the wrong decisions, and I don’t think it was mere incompetence, I think it was a combination of cowardice and leftist ideology, with sometimes one predominating and sometimes the other.

I fight against my own pessimism, but in this case I’m losing that fight.

In other developments in the trial today, I’m still trying to get a bead on what was decided about the judge’s instructions to the jury. This Legal Insurrection thread is worth reading on that score, but I’m going to wait for Andrew Branca’s roundup tonight of the day’s events before I say much more, except to quote some commenters there.

First we have this:

The state’s entire basis is that there is no such thing as self defense, at least not in practice. In this trial so far the state has argued:

1. Kyle did not KNOW that Grosskreutz was going to pull the trigger, so it wasn’t a reasonable threat.
2. A defender is a threat to their attacker and may even be MORE of a threat provided the defender has a more capable gun. Apparently that invalidates uses of force.
3. Not risking death or bodily harm to give medical aid to the person you shot shows disregard for life
4. Having a gun at all is provocation
5. Being stripped of your gun by an attacker does not create a reasonable fear of death
6. As you pointed out, shooting anyone in any way in a mob is inherently reckless

This whole trial is just a look into what the left wants self defense to look like, as well as court process in general. There is no use of force of any kind that can pass the scrutiny Binger wants applied here.

That’s the way I see it, too: if the jury convicts on these charges, the right of self-defense is pretty much gone in the state of Wisconsin.

There’s also this:

The idea of “recklessness” here is tantamount to a principle that one can never shoot in self defense if attacked by a mob. When will there not be someone “possibly behind” the attacker in a mob? One could go further and point to the historic/common sense fact that a good portion of the most deadly attacks are those of multiple attackers. This is a case of “if not now, when?” That is, if one cannot shoot to defend against mob violence, there is no right to self defense.

A charge of “recklessness ” in this context is not a “lesser included” charge, but entirely negates the right of self defense. It should not be on the verdict sheet as a matter of law (unless)…Kyle was lobbing grenades.

Arizona school board president kept files on domestic terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

Otherwise known as parents who might have opposed him in some way:

The president, or possibly his father, appears to have kept a dossier on 47 parents who dared to speak out against his policies at school board meetings — a dossier complete with Social Security numbers, background checks, a divorce paper, mortgage documents, trade certifications, and screenshots of Facebook posts.

There’s a petition calling for his resignation, but he denies personal involvement with this. At any rate, someone seems to have been collecting such information:

The dossier also includes videos showing a man taking photographs of parents and children in the hours before a school board meeting. “Somewhere around here we have a private investigator who’s writing down all of their plates,” the man says in the video. “They don’t know it’s me … I covered up my license plate.”

Once again I am reminded of how the internet has facilitated this sort of practice, both in its compilation and in the organization, storage, and dissemination of the information. It’s not just the federal government, either, although it certainly helps that entity gather a huge amount of information on all of us and also to store it and to locate it when the time seems right. It’s also local government and private individuals, and activists have jumped at the chance.