The headline reads Kyle Rittenhouse verdict violates these 5 standards for claiming self-defense. But if you read the actual article you will not find any such claim.
You can find errors in the article, such as in the Zimmerman/Martin case it is claimed the Florida Stand Your Ground law was an issue. But the writer doesn’t make the false claim the headline writer does.
I have to believe someone was making a deliberate effort to deceive the public and liable Rittenhouse.
On balance, the press has been a destructive force on this story, from its beginnings in the coverage of the Jacob Blake shooting that set the whole thing off and which we know was justified, to the downplaying of the $50 million in destruction done by rioters in Kenosha, to the libelous portrayal of Rittenhouse and the particulars of what happened. There have been innumerable journalistic disasters in the Trump era, but this is the most blatantly reckless one of them all.
Ryan Chittum
Media critic with the Columbia Journalism Review,
November 21, 2021
Misinformation About Kyle Rittenhouse Case Floods Social Media, TV Networks
[I think Chittum is giving the media too much credit with the claim of “reckless”. With the videos so easily available, with the jury verdict known to everyone, with the claims they make so absurd, I don’t believe they are “reckless”. They are malicious liars.—Joe]
The USA Today editorial board is incoherent and/or has a reading comprehension problem and/or is lying. And they tell the lie that they believe an inanimate object can be guilty:
He said the weapon was a key reason he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum during the mayhem. “If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would have used it and killed me with it,” Rittenhouse testified during the trial.
Demonstrators saw the shooting and chased after Rittenhouse in an apparent effort to disarm him. One of them was Anthony Huber armed only with a skateboard. Huber grabbed the barrel of the AR-15, and Rittenhouse shot him to death.
“The irony of the case is that Mr. Rittenhouse has become a cause célèbre among gun-rights advocates, even though, according to his own defense, it was his carrying of the rifle that put him in danger in the first place,” the Economist noted.
Rittenhouse said no such thing. And they quoted the testimony which refutes their claim! The key reason for all legal use of lethal force is the reasonable fear of imminent severe injury or death. Rittenhouse articulated this well, repeatedly, and the video supports his claims. Without the rifle Rosenbaum would still have been outraged at his dumpster fire, being pushed into a gas station, being put out with the fire extinguisher. And that outrage led to Rittenhouse being chased by Rosenbaum and others. And when they cornered him without the rifle they almost certainly would have caused him severe injury or death. Hence, the rifle cannot be the “key reason” justifying the use of deadly force.
They are also liars:
Such weapons were expressly designed for the battlefield, and that may be a good part of their appeal.
Wrong. Such weapons are expressly designed to be easy to shoot, maintain, carry, economical, and accurate. They are the most common rifle sold in the United States and no AR-15 style rifle has ever been issued to a military for battlefield use (the AR-15 is semi-auto, militaries all use select fire rifles).
The primacy of assault-style rifles in American society is not a Second Amendment issue. When the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia authored a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 underscoring the Second Amendment’s right to possess firearms, he said the freedom is “not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever.”
This must be a deliberate lie. Here is the complete quote from the 2008 Heller decision (emphasis added):
Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon, in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott333. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26
We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”
I cannot imagine having read to middle of page 54 to pluck the “not unlimited” quote they did not read to the top of page 55 and see the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”
Being the most popular rifle style sold in the United States the AR-15 qualifies as “in common use”. Hence, the AR-15 is protected by the Second Amendment.
The mention of Rolling Stone and anything to do with guns and then bring up lies is probably being entirely redundant, but it doesn’t hurt to make it explicitly clear.
While patrolling the streets, there was gunfire that resulted in some of the Black Lives Matter protesters thinking Rittenhouse was attacking them. They charged Rittenhouse, and he opened fire, killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injuring Gaige Grosskreutz.
That’s not how it happened. You can watch the video of every shot fired and see for yourself. The gunfire was as the “protestors” had boxed Rittenhouse in between some cars and were closing in on him. One of those attackers fired the gun into the air a few dozen feet from Rittenhouse. The shooting of Huber and Grosskreutz were a minute or so later as Rittenhouse was attempting to reach the safety of the police and the attackers caught up to him after he fell. They struck him with a skateboard, kicked him in the head, and pointed a gun at him. Each person shot was an imminent threat of permanent injury or death to Rittenhouse.
When Brother Doug and I get together we frequently have long talks about our country’s political state. The illegal gun laws, the U.S. debt, the out of control printing of money, etc..
One of the things Doug frequently points out is that the average person doesn’t get outraged because the legacy media gives the political left cover through, at best, selective reporting of the facts and implications of things that are not true. And frequently outright lies.
So how do we combat these lies? Doug and I get frustrated at this point. Politely pointing out their errors doesn’t work. After all, as Lyle frequently points out a good case can be made they actually pride themselves on there ability to lie and get away with it.
I finally came up with decent response. I have created a new blog post category, Legacy Media Liars. This category will be used to call out individuals (when available) as liars. I don’t know that my blog has enough Google Page Rank to bring searches for the liars names into the top ten on Google but it’s better than doing nothing.
I have gone back to a few previous posts and categorized them as well to kind of jump start the category. This is as if I actually will be short on material. The Rittenhouse verdict probably gave me 100 articles to blog about in the first 12 hours after the verdict was announced.
This is going to be a busy category.
From The Hill:
A jury on Friday acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who fatally shot two protesters and wounded a third, of murder and other felony charges.
Update: More information here: Jury finds Rittenhouse not guilty in Kenosha shootings
I sometimes joke about the Skynet of the Terminator movies. And occasionally I get serious about it. But this is the first time I ever had a strong Skynet inspired chill engulf me when read about a new technology:
The 2.6 trillion transistors in the WSE-2 are organized into 850,000 cores. According to Cerebras Systems, the chip’s cores are optimized for the specific types of mathematical operations that neural networks use to turn raw data into insights. The WSE-2 stores the data being processed by a neural network using 40 gigabytes of speedy onboard memory.
Cerebras Systems says that the WSE-2 has 123 times more cores and 1,000 times more on-chip memory than the closest GPU.
I’m not sure why that emotional response occurred. It was as if some threshold had not just been crossed, but leaped over by such a huge margin. The potential threat became, not just real, but something much greater than that. I can’t say that I know or even really suspect that is true. It was just an emotional reaction.
However, see also what Elon Musk has to say about AI:
Never forget that a computer’s attention span is no longer than its power cord.
Prepare appropriately.
I’ve written about this before but the Rittenhouse trial provides us another data point.
One could assume, and rightly so, that from all the arson, looting, and thuggery involved in the “mostly peaceful” protest Rittenhouse attended the participants were no strangers to criminal activity. Usually the participants are masked and the general public doesn’t get to know their identities or criminal histories.
Because Rittenhouse ended up shooting three out of the four participants he had the closest contact with we learned much more about them that we normally learn.
Four is a small sample but that 100% of them had a serious criminal history tells us the odds of the majority of the complete set being non-criminals is very low. In fact, if we assume the sample was random (agreed, it is not true and it is biased in favor of my hypothesis) we can actually compute those odds. Given the assumption, the odds of 50% or more of them not being convicted criminals are 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 05 => 0.0625. That is one chance out of 16.
The political currency of the left is violence. It is part of their nature. That is why there are twice as many people in prison who identify as Democrats as all other political affiliations combined. Rittenhouse inadvertently helped us verify that.
Mob based political violence has been a tool of dirtbags since mankind invented politics. Quit pretending that the left doesn’t do it now.
It’s the same reason when after a summer of their continual fiery rampages with billions of dollars in damage and many lives lost, when the right got a little uppity on January 6th, the left absolutely lost their shit. That’s their game. That’s their tool. The left don’t share. So their rioters are heroic champions.
That Rittenhouse didn’t take a beating and discouraged their continued criminal activities is intolerable to them and is why he must be punished.
The best legal minds seem to be in agreement. Rittenhouse is not guilty and should be acquitted. Alan Dershowitz even agrees he should sue media outlets for their claims he murdered people:
Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says Kyle Rittenhouse “should be acquitted” of killing two men and wounding a third during riots and protests last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and he should file defamation lawsuits against media outlets for claiming that he’s guilty of murder.
“If I were a juror, I would vote that there was reasonable doubt [and] that he did act in self-defense,” Dershowitz told Newsmax on Nov. 13.
Rittenhouse, if acquitted, should then “bring lawsuits” against corporate news outlets for articles claiming the teen engaged in “vigilante justice,” Dershowitz said.
“It’s CNN who is involved in vigilante justice. It’s The New Yorker that’s guilty of vigilante justice,” he said.
At a minimum I would add ABC and USA Today to the list of contributors to Rittenhouse’s yachts..
Back in September of 2020 I noted the following:
The only potential charge that kept nagging at me until late today was the one about possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18 (a misdemeanor).
WI law is somewhat confusing here…
941.28 is about the possession of a short-barreled shotgun or short-barreled rifle. Hence, it does not apply to Rittenhouse.
29.304 is about restrictions on hunting and use of firearms by persons under 16 years of age. While some people might claim he was hunting I can’t imagine his activities met the legal definition of hunting. Hence, this section does not apply to Rittenhouse.
29.593 is about requirements for certificate of accomplishment to obtain hunting approval. I’m certain hunting licenses are not being issued by WI fish and game for the state terrorists. Hence, there cannot be issue with any failure to acquire a certificate to get approval for a license.
Hence, the “possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18” charge is bogus.
I find it amazing the opinion writers, lawyers, and the judge are only recently deciphering the actual wording of the law.
Via “Donaldo Seamus Baldwinski” on Facebook:
There is more than a little truth to this. And this is part of the reason the courts are so important to regaining some sanity in our political environment.
My guess: if it happens again, the judge will grant the mistrial with prejudice and a lot of findings about the prosecution motives, and how they kept screwing up even after he warned them. If it doesn’t, the judge will wait for the verdict. If not guilty, no need to rule. If guilty, he grants a new trial.
David Hardy
November 11, 2021
Still more disasters in Rittenhouse case
[Interesting hypothesis.—Joe]
I’m hoping #KyleRittenhouse and #NickSandmann end up with their yachts parked side-by-side trading caviar and champagne on the proceeds from their lawsuits against the legacy media.
Chris Knox @ChrisKnox_AZ
Tweeted on November 11, 2021
[He left out the part about the reporters and editors responsible for the lies have low paying jobs on their hands and knees cleaning the bilges of the yachts with toothbrushes.—Joe]
This is the kill shot. The idea that it was not self-defense is absurd. Two guys giving chase, one fired a gun into the air as a “warning shot”—Ziminski & Rosenbaum were intent on murdering #Rittenhouse.
Firearms Lawyer @firearmslawyer
Tweeted on November 9, 2021
[He is referring to this tweet and video:
This is drone video the state go ahold of Friday. It shows #KyleRittenhouse shoot Joseph Rosenbaum. It’s the clearest, steadiest video of that shooting.
Jury watched multiple versions including one that was cropped, zoomed in & slowed down by the crime lab pic.twitter.com/lCjTawdcIi— Kristen Barbaresi (@KristenBarbar) November 9, 2021
I find it very “interesting” this FBI video was not made available until the middle of the trial. If it had been then there would have been a good chance Rittenhouse would have had the charges dropped. I would like an investigation to see why the FBI withheld this for so long and, if legally justified, see a prosecution for this withholding of evidence and deprivation of rights under color of law.
This is a side note but I find it an interesting hypothesis… Some commentators have been saying that the prosecutor is doing such a poor job that they suspect it is intentional to make sure Rittenhouse receives justice (acquittal).—Joe]
It’s been two weeks since a 21-year-old Seattle man was arrested for allegedly stealing an unoccupied bus in Sodo and intentionally ramming numerous vehicles at high speed before crashing into a bus stop in Judkins Park on Oct. 26.
Despite a judge’s finding that the man posed a danger to the community, he was released from jail on Oct. 29 and has yet to be criminally charged. The reason? Seattle police detectives have yet to submit paperwork to support the filing of criminal charges to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
The Seattle Police Department’s ongoing staffing crisis, coupled with a temporary personnel shuffle to cover for 93 officers seeking medical or religious exemptions to the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, are the apparent reasons behind the delay.
…
As of September, more than 300 officers had left SPD in what Diaz has called “an unprecedented exodus,” with many former officers citing lack of support from city leaders as a reason for their departure in the wake of last year’s civil rights protests and subsequent calls to defund the police. Only about 100 officers have been hired.
From Oct. 13 through Nov. 5, Diaz ordered a “stage 3 mobilization,” requiring detectives in many specialty and support units across the department to shift to patrol duties to ensure there were enough officers to respond to 911 calls, said spokesman Sgt. Randy Huserik.
It looks to me like Seattle law enforcement is in free fall. One has to wonder if it is through ignorance, stupidity and/or design. I’m inclined to believe it is by design. I find it difficult to believe people are that ignorant and/or stupid.
Prepare appropriately.
When the trial opens of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager accused of gunning down two men and wounding a third during nightly unrest last summer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, one word won’t be allowed to describe those who were shot: “victims.”
Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder, however, ordered that other words could be used — “rioters,” “looters” or “arsonists” — if Rittenhouse’s defense attorneys can provide the evidence that they had engaged in those acts.
Erik Ortiz
October 27, 2021
Rittenhouse judge in spotlight after disallowing word ‘victims’ in courtroom
[More could be said about the wording of the article, but the bottom line is that this is great news for Rittenhouse.—Joe]
Three states that have detailed race and gender data for at least a decade show remarkably larger increases in permits for minorities compared to whites. In Texas, black females saw a 6.3 times greater percentage increase in permits than white males from 2002 to 2020. Oklahoma data from 2002 to 2020 indicated that the increase of licenses approved for Asians and American Indians was more than twice the rate for whites. North Carolina had black permits increase twice as fast as whites from 1996 till 2016.
From 2015 to 2020/2021, in the four states that provide data by race over that time period, the number of Asian people with permits increased 93.2% faster than the number of whites with permits. Blacks appear to be the group that has experienced the largest increase in permitted concealed carry, growing 135.7% faster than whites.
John R. Lott & Rujun Wang
Crime Prevention Research Center
October 6, 2021
Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2021 (alternate link here)
[People demanding more restrictions on concealed carry permits, or the existence of such permits to begin with, are racist.—Joe]
What the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority says about itself:
Metrorail provides safe, clean, reliable transit service for more than 600,000 customers a day throughout the Washington, DC area.
“Safe” and “reliable” they say…
Compare the above with what the National Transportation Safety Board says:
Metro officials have been aware since 2017 of equipment problems that appear to have caused the train derailment last week in Northern Virginia, a preliminary investigation by federal safety investigators showed.
Metro train 407, which derailed on the Blue Line on Oct. 12, had two other minor derailments the same day and was able to get back onto the tracks, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said at a news conference Monday morning.
The train derailed and re-railed itself once near the Arlington Cemetery station at about 3:20 p.m. and again near the Largo Town Center station at about 4:15 p.m.
After the third and final derailment, the train with 187 people on board got stuck in a dark tunnel near the Arlington Cemetery station. Riders had to walk the equivalent of about six football fields to get to safety.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has known of problems with the wheel assemblies of 7000-series railcars for years, Homendy said.
“We were made aware that WMATA was aware of this situation with the wheel assemblies going back to 2017,” she said.
I wonder what the consequences will be to the government run Metro compared to a non government entity which did something similar.
A Boeing test pilot is being prosecuted over 737 Max crashes. I expect no prosecutions because of the Metro railcar issues and the probability of people being fired is low.
H/T to Paul K. for the email.
The Big Bang teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past.
However, extrapolating all the way back to a singularity leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe.
Instead, cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever.
Ethan Siegel
October 13, 2021
Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore
[Data exists back to about one second from the beginning.of the universe! Prior to that it’s speculation. The Big Bang from a singularity hypothesis doesn’t match some of the early data. Cosmic inflation is a better match.
Fascinating.—Joe]
