The Dicey Prospects of Putting Jurors on TV

Juror #8

CNN has found a juror (#8) in the Jordan Davis killing (“the loud music shooting”) willing to be interviewed on TV.

It’s always a dicey proposition for any juror to go before the cameras in such agenda-driven venues.

For one thing, jurors heard a LOT more evidence and were privy to a LOT more information than was covered in news accounts.

Moreover, jurors generally have a rough time relaying their understanding of the law, which is to say, how they “understood” the law and the judge’s instructions is NOT always what was intended. So jurors, on that level, seem to have the SAME problems understanding the law as do news-entertainment people in the national media.

In the case of “juror #8,” she frustrated CNN hosts by insisting that “race played no part in the verdict,” while also relaying that “there was a lot of yelling and shouting,” to indicate how tempestuous such proceedings often get.

MORE troubling however, was that she claims to see Michael Dunn (the shooter) as “a good guy.”

OK, I’ll admit that from all I saw of the guy, he seemed to be an arrogant, insufferable prick, however, I may just be more sensitive to such things, or my perception of people might be a bit off...that wouldn't be the first time I've heard that. In either case, Dunn’s “prickishness,” or lack of same, SHOULD NOT be taken as evidence of any proof of wrongdoing, absent direct proof of that guilt.

Even more disturbing, in explaining why they didn't convict Dunn of First Degree murder, juror #8 explained that they believed he was firing only because he truly believed he was in fear of his own life.

Yikes! IF that is indeed the consensus then he SHOULD HAVE been acquitted of everything EXCEPT criminal reckless endangerment (firing nine rounds from a gun in a densely packed public area). Self defense is an affirmative and legal defense against murder and manslaughter charges.

What’s VITAL here is that NO GUN, no lead pipe, NO weapon whatsoever was found by police and the Dunn defense’s charges that “police didn't search for weapons extensively enough,” DOES NOT change the fact that no weapons were found.

It should be a high bar for someone to shoot an unarmed person...far higher than “believing they are endangered,” when no one got out of the other car, no assault took place (Zimmerman was at least assaulted prior to firing at Trayvon Martin), NOTHING seems to reasonably suggest Mr. Dunn had any reality-based fear for his life. IF the jury heard otherwise, certainly juror #8 gave no indication of that.

As for CNN’s astonishment that the jury had a rough time convicting on 1^st degree murder, well that only shows that news-entertainers are, for the most part, even dumber than the folks they dupe onto their shows.

First degree murder requires “forethought and intent.” In this case, 1^st degree murder would constitute that there was some evidence that Mr. Dunn didn't like what he called “thug music” blaring from the next car and decided right there, “I’m gonna teach these goons a lesson they won’t forget.”

AGAIN, no such evidence seemed to be uncovered in trial. Juror #8 suggests there wasn't and CNN’s dopey hosts seem to believe that apparently Dunn’s “whiteness” was all the proof you’d need. Apparently, “WHY else would a middle aged white guy shoot someone black?”

CNN a station which highlighted the murder of white air force corpsman David James by black homeowner Trevor Dooley during the Trayvon Martin case and has continually brought on guests that highlight the stark racial disparities in violent crime rates is on shaky ground when it tries to appear neutral on such issues. In continually brining on “experts” who highlight the wide disparities in violent crime in America, they appear anything but!

Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz has said that he believes there was a strong possibility that the attempted murder charges against Dunn might not hold up when the case is eventually retried. He said attempted murder, in which a person was not killed, must involve premeditation, which, of course, must be proven.

"I think there is some chance that will be reversed, because [of] the jury instruction, and the charge of attempted murder may not fit," he said.

A problem with Corey's strategy, Dershowitz said, was that she "always overcharges."

Dershowitz believes that Corey should have charged Dunn with second-degree murder in Davis' death. THAT makes sense, given that according to FindLaw notes that 1^st degree murder falls into two categories:

* Premeditated, intentional killings

* Felony murder

While 2^nd degree murder is either:

* An unplanned, intentional killing; or

* A death caused by a reckless disregard for human life

(http://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2011/08/difference-between-first-second-degree-murder.html)

According to FindLaw, the real difference between first and second degree murder is the degree of intent under which the defendant acted when carrying out the killing.

First degree murder requires that a defendant plan and intentionally carry out the killing, whereas second degree murder requires that the killing either be intentional or reckless, and occur in the spur of the moment.

According to that definition this case clearly appears to fit a 2^nd degree murder charge much better.

Is Dershowitz right that perhaps DA Corey actively undermines some cases by deliberately overcharging, so that they’ll be overturned on appeal?

Might be...but that doesn’t explain away the abject ignorance of CNN’s newser entertainers.

Poor CNN....ALL They're Left With Are Curtis Reeves and Willie Noble!

Carol Costello  (above)          AND            Erin Burnett  (below)

What are the race mongers at CNN and MSNBC going to do now?!

In the wake of the “Loud Music Shooting” in which white, middle aged software developer Michael Dunn killed young, black Jordan Davis, they were able to attempt to turn an ugly incident between an adult jerk and a bunch of teen jerks into a racial incident...the upcoming major national crimes offer no such possibilities.

DRATS!

All they have left right now are Curtis Reeves and Willie Noble. What will Carol Costello, Erin Burnett and the other race mongers do for an encore?

I guess they’re going to have to wait...for the "right crime.”

And given the stats over race and crime (young black males committing a widely disproportionate amount of the violent crime in America), it could be a long and painful wait.

Seriously, do I HAVE TO go over these stats on race and crime again? Stats, by the way, which I gleaned by watching CNN!

OK, I will;

— "Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against other blacks." Forty-five percent of the victims of violent crime by blacks are white folks, 43 percent are black, 10 percent are Hispanic.

— “Blacks are seven times as likely as people of other races to commit murder, eight times more likely to commit robbery and three times more likely to use a gun in a crime.

— "Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit violent crime against a white person than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery."

— “Black-on-white rape is 115 times more common than the reverse.”

So once again, what do these crime statistics tell us? Merely that “the real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder is NOT to be found in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.”

In the case of Curtis Reeves, a white former cop who shot another man over texting in a movie theater (claiming the guy throwing popcorn at him constituted a “threat”), he unfortunately shot another white man.

In the case of Willie Noble of Arkansas, a black man who shot a teen after the group the teen was with egged his car, he sadly also shot...another African-American.

What were these guys thinking?!

Don’t they know that news-entertainers like Carol Costello, Melissa Harris-Perry and Erin Burnett live for inter-racial violence?

Do these guys even care ONE BIT how their callous disregard for ratings impacts these hosts?

OK, in the case of Mr. Noble, there’s little he could’ve done. If he’d shot a white teen, well that would've been no big deal to the likes of Ms. Costello or Ms. Burnett. In fact, they’d probably have framed their stories around the white teen “deserving it,” or “bringing it on herself,” all the while arranging for carefully chosen guests to undermine their own arguments on behalf of the traditional media meme – “black victim, white abuser.”

BUT Mr. Reeves really messed up! WHY couldn't he have targeted a black texter? Or, absent that, WHY couldn't he have missed the actual texter and shot a black theater-goer by mistake...even then, I’m sure Carol and Erin could’ve argued that somehow he meant to shoot the black victim, because after all, he’s both white and a former cop (a/k/a “racist”).

Seriously, I DO feel bad that things have broken so badly for Ms. Costello and Ms. Burnett. They’re going to have to largely ignore these two most recent national crimes, or resort to excoriating guns because there’s just no race angle to play here.

Wait a minute! I know! They could instead focus on Conrad Alvin Barrett (here’s CNNs own report: http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/26/justice/texas-knockout-charge/) the WHITE Texas teen who punched a 79 year-old BLACK man playing “the knockout game.” Barrett remains the ONE person the grossly incompetent Eric Holder DoJ has charged with a “hate crime” over this virulently racist “game.”

I’m glad I thought of that. I hope it’s NOT too late and I sure hope that Ms. Burnett and Ms. Costello get the memo so they don’t have to suffer those nasty race-obsession withdrawal symptoms.
.
.
.
Post Script: The sad thing is that you cannot possibly shame these smug, sanctimonious, race-obsessed people because they are convinced they're motivated by righteousness. Unfortunately Hitler, Mao, Stalin and virtually every serial killer that ever lived have all felt they were motivated by some form of "righteousness" too. I KNOW all his, but I STILL can't help noticing it and finding the smell repugnant.

The TEA Party Goes Global?!

Kiev, Ukraine - February 2014

One of the more amusing, albeit pathetic observations of a lot of left-wingers is the inane idea that the call for smaller, less intrusive government (“anti-government”) is uniquely American.

Never was and never will be.

People the world over revile tyranny...especially that of “do-gooder” politicians and government workers looking to restrict their liberties “for their own good.”

The ONLY difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world is that the people of the USA are LESS capable of the kind of rigid conformity and allegiance to a central authority than those in places like Russia, Germany, Japan. It is impossible, for instance, to “copy the conformity and centralized authority that works well in such places,” here. Although there is no evidence that the conformity and allegiance to a central authority ever worked better in ANY of those places than even outright anarchy would have.

I once lauded the former USSR’s auto industry as an example of a “Command economy that works,” that is UNTIL I found that the entire Soviet auto industry was pretty much built by Ford Motor Company and that Western industrialists like Armand Hammer and others set up a Corporatist economy with veritable government sanctioned monopolies within that state.

In other words, Adolph Hitler, once regaled as “the greatest true socialist that ever lived” (probably thanks to ideals like, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." - Adolf Hitler...Speech of May 1, 1927. 

Of course, Hitler too abandoned the Command economy (because it COULD NOT work) and opted for the SAME sort of mercantile Corporatism that Stalin and the USSR did, along with the liberal use of slave labor...SAME as Stalin and Mao both did.

However, Hitler DID, however, gain the gratitude of the working classes in German by reducing the work week to 40 hours (the first 40-hour work week anywhere) and the work day itself to a tolerable norm of eight hours. The forty-hour week in Europe, was first initiated by Hitler and beyond that legal limit, each additional hour had to be paid at a considerably increased rate. As another innovation, work breaks were made longer - two hours every day in order to let the worker relax and to make use of the playing fields that the large industries were required to provide.

Prior to Hitler’s socialist government, workers' rights to job security were virtually non-existent. Hitler saw to it that those rights were strictly spelled out. The employer had to announce any dismissal four weeks in advance. The employee then had a period of up to two months in which to lodge a protest. The dismissal could also be annulled by the Honor of Work Tribunal.

What was the Honor of Work Tribunal? It was a council with one of the seats occupied by management, another by labor and the final seat by an appointed government official, it was also known as “the Tribunal of Social Honor,” and it was the third of the three great layers of protection that were to the benefit of every German worker. The first was the Council of Trust. The second was the Labor Commission and the third was the Honor of Work Tribunal.

Few today would argue that Hitler’s socialism was “to the good.”

People the world over deeply distrust the political class and for good reason. EVERY single large scale mass murder was conducted by governments and the political classes, every war was arranged and conducted by the SAME political classes.

Today we see large scale violent protests in both Kiev in the Ukraine and in Venezuela AGAINST government tyranny and abuse.

Slave owners once argued that “freedom didn't fit the nature of the slaves,” and that “freedom would mean literally throwing them to the wolves into a market they didn't have the skills to compete in.” The political class makes the very same arguments today, that “freedom pits the poorly educated and unskilled against those with far greater abilities and advantages, so freedom is just NOT in the best interests of most regular people.”

I did the math on the Russian auto industry in 1974 and it shook me to the core. I've done the math on the claims of the political class today and can find absolutely NO EVIDENCE that abject economic freedom that would toss both the highly skilled and the unskilled into the SAME marketplace would place any significant disadvantage upon the less educated and unskilled. It’s been proven time and time again that literally ANYONE can learn to speculate very successfully on commodities and currencies.

Victor Niederhoffer (the man who ran George Soros’ Quantum Fund) was self-taught, as are many of the most successful commodities and currency speculators. In fact George Soros himself, who initially made his own fortune speculating on various European currencies after the Second World War, was entirely self-taught.

The idea that economic freedom (the free market) puts the poor and less well educated at any distinct disadvantage is NOT borne out by the facts.

Moreover, people the world over yearn for MORE freedom, NOT more protections and security.

America must tread carefully in dealing with this global upheaval, for our own record is not at all stellar, of late, in this regard.

CNN’s Obnoxious Hypocrisy

CNN's Carol Costello

Lately I’ve found CNN to be the most consistently interesting and amusing cable news station on the air.

Unfortunately it’s NOT because of Fareed Zakaria’s always interesting take on Sunday mornings, or the now departed Howard Kurtz’ media analysis, no, sadly it’s because of a couple of deeply disingenuous hosts – daytime’s Carol Costello and prime time’s Erin Burnett.

BOTH these anchors, like many in the media are seemingly obsessed with race, but unlike most in the media, they approach the subject in the most mottled, even dishonest way.

In fact, their coverage of the race issue in America has left me puzzled. I have to confess that what I saw of Michael Dunn, I DID NOT like. He couldn't help himself, but he came off as an arrogant, imperious, pompous jerk...much like the majority of those in the media, Ms. Costello and Ms. Burnett being two prime examples.

Is it possible that both hosts see a bit of themselves in Michael Dunn? I’d object only in that Michael Dunn (a software developer) is probably quite a bit smarter than anyone at CNN or most other media outlets, but personality-wise, yes, there are definitely some similar personality traits Dunn shares with most “on-air news talent.”

If so, perhaps that’s why both Carol Costello and Erin Burnett, in particular seem to go out of their way to undermine the accepted media meme on race – “black victim, white abuser.”

As an example, in discussing the trial of Michael Dunn (the most recent media race sensation), in response to the observation, “Michael Dunn, like many white Americans might have had an unreasonable fear of young black males,” one of Ms. Costello’s expert legal guests left this out there completely unchallenged, “All groups, not just whites have a very reasonable fear of young black males, because young black males commit such a disproportionate share of the violent crime in America.”

He then went on to quote the FBI’s crime stats and Justice surveys, which, among other things allegedly showed that;

— "Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against other blacks." Forty-five percent of the victims of violent crime by blacks are white folks, 43 percent are black, 10 percent are Hispanic.

— “Blacks are seven times as likely as people of other races to commit murder, eight times more likely to commit robbery and three times more likely to use a gun in a crime.

— "Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit violent crime against a white person than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

— “Black-on-white rape is 115 times more common than the reverse.

- “Even the two most famous sexual assaults by white men on black women in the last two decades the Tawana Brawley and Duke rape cases — turned out to be hoaxes.”

He went on to say, “What do these statistics tell us? A message most will not report. The real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder is NOT to be found in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.”

Perhaps the reason that wasn't confronted by Ms. Costello or ANY other CNN host is because it’s absolutely and unequivocally true. I looked those stats up AFTER that CNN broadcast and YES...they are all very true. They can all very easily be found in a report titled “The Color of Crime.” (http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf). CNN isn't the ONLY media outlet NOT to have challenged that report, so far as I know, it has NEVER once been challenged by anyone from any media outlet.

STILL, that begs the question, “Do these particular hosts deliberately bring on guests to undermine the very views that have been the staple of the American media to date, that “African-Americans are disproportionately victims of white racism”?

After all, CNN is the SAME channel that brought up the killing of David James during the Trayvon Martin trial, AGAIN, with at least one legal guest describing the murder of white Air Force Corpsman David James by black homeowner Trevor Dooley as “an out-and-out race murder,” without that assertion being questioned.

In that case, I’d never even heard of the David James murder in Florida, not Trevor Dooley’s failed “Stand-Your-Ground” defense, but AGAIN, after looking it up, it seems EXACTLY what that CNN guest relayed. (http://www.truecrimereport.com/2010/09/david_james_air_force_veteran.php)

In this regard CNN has become the primary disseminator of a form of race realism.

Now I commend them on that, while I DO question the disingenuous way in which it is delivered, one that allows hosts like Ms. Costello and Ms. Burnett to remain above the fray, while giving no context to such assertions by their very carefully chosen “guests.”