More FAIL in the Rittenhouse Trial

 

It was pleasingly entertaining to watch judge Bruce Schroeder excoriate the prosecutor in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.  To witness a judge properly calling the prosecutor on the carpet for their misconduct before a jury seems the rarity these days.

That aside, one video clip shows prosecutor Binger asking Rittenhouse whether the defendant believed that terminal force in the defense of property was justified, asking the same question over and over several times with different examples of property in each separate case.  The tacit assumption underlying each of these questions, of course, was that it was not.  For example, and to wit:

"Is it justified to use deadly force to stop someone from lighting a dumpster fire?"

"No."

"Is it justified to use deadly force to stop someone from lighting an empty automobile on fire?"

"No."

And so it went for several more iterations.

There are at least three serious errors in all of this.  

Firstly, the prosecution should never have asked such questions, most especially given the tone that clearly  connoted with dishonest tacitness that it was never justified to use deadly force to defend "property".  I noted that Binger neglected to ask Rittenhouse whether it was ever OK to use deadly force to stop someone from setting fire to an empty house, or perhaps more illustratively, a large office building.

It is clear that there are cases where the use of deadly force is well justified in defense of inanimate property.  Would police just stand idly by as the city's fire-bug-du-jour lit ablaze an empty Empire State Building?  These days, who can say for certain, but there was at least a time not very long ago when police could be expected shoot a man stone dead in their tracks, were it clear to them that the suspect were about to set even a small house ablaze, were there no reasonable opportunity to stop them by non-terminal means.

It is also clear that killing someone in defense of a piece of chewing gun from being taken without permission may not be justifiable, making special note of "may".  I will avoid the overly strict philosophical discussion for the sake of mercy on readers.

These two extreme examples illustrate with good force and clarity that terminal defense of some property is in fact justifiable, while that of others might not be.  This perforce implies a border of some sort between the cases of acts justified and those that are not.  It is also intuitively clear that this border is no bright line in the sand, but rather a hazily-defined grey area where justifiability turns very much on context, this being a very critically important element of the issue.  Context is often king.  What is just in one context may not be in another.  This fact is also completely ignored by the prosecution, further bolstering my assertion of incompetence, vicious corruption, or possibly both.

It is also clear that defense of life and limb is also that of property, and is eminently justifiable at the lethal extreme.  As to the specificity of "limb", it cannot be credibly argued that one's arm, for example, is not their property.  The arm of a living being is integral to its living self.  It therefore follows perforce that such a limb is in fact the property of the being to which it is so intimately, naturally, and properly connected.

Would this prosecutor, or anyone else for that matter, assert that one may not use deadly force to prevent some third party from causing its destruction, removal, or other uninvited injury, regardless of how trivial it has been assumed to be?  Would they assert that one is obliged to allow another human being to so much as touch them, uninvited?  That is the direct and unavoidable implication of any claim that one is not justly entitled to employ deadly force in defense of limb, as well as of life itself, for defense of limb may very well prove itself to be defense of one's very life in certain cases.

If, for example, a stranger makes it clear that they intend on using the hatchet in their hand to remove your arm, but nothing more, the threat to limb nonetheless constitutes a reasonable threat to life.  Therefore, the use of lethal force in defense of limb is absolutely justifiable there.

It is further made clear in these simple examples that either prosecutor Binger is incompetent beyond all forgiveness, or he is dishonestly employing the tactical use of tacit partial-truths and outright lies to sway the jury's emotions pursuant to prosecutorial victory; truth, logic, facts, and justice be damned.

Secondly, the implicit assumption that "property" and "life" are separate issues was not, to my knowledge, established.  I've seen no hint of a reference to the prosecution's use of expert testimony to establish the veracity of the idea that one's life is not property, which I must assume should be a critical element of the fact patterns as part of the very basis of the prosecution's case.  And yet, Binger implicitly (and possibly explicitly in other instances of which I am not aware) asserts as fact that property and life are separate things, with the clear intention of disparaging any lethal act in defense of the former.  This strongly appears to be a desperation stab at trapping Rittenhouse into admitting that he believed that it is justifiable to take lethal action in defense of "mere" property, vis-à-vis infinitely precious life.  Binger's drama-queen act aside, his brand of lie is most dangerous not just to Kyle Rittenhouse, but to every soul living under the umbrella (some might say "pall") of American jurisprudence.  To allow this tacit assumption to stand on its own, and in this manner, is to place every decent man in America behind the cross-hairs of any and potentially every fool prosecutor seeking another notch in his quest for professional and perhaps even social advancement at the cost of the destruction of innocent lives, the preciousness and sanctity of which they otherwise sing praises like canaries on cocaine.

Perhaps this point is too subtle for some, but I would nevertheless ask where was the judge in all of that?  I like this judge, and I understand that being human he cannot be expected to see in real time that which I have the luxury of careful contemplation at whatever pace I may require to get things right.  But it stands nonetheless that allowing such poisoned barbs to pass unchallenged poses potentially serious threats to all, downrange.  Seeing only snippets, I cannot say that the judge missed this point, but neither do I know that he didn't.

One's life is in fact his "First Property".  In my opinion, both the judge and the defense should have called out the prosecution on this absurd, irrelevant, and dangerous line of questioning, if indeed they failed to do so.  I cannot tell because all I saw was an edited clip that did not provide all the details.  I nonetheless make this an issue precisely because it is so centrally important to the fabric of proper human relations, and if I do so redundantly, I say better that than to allow it to slip by, unnoticed and unchallenged.

Thirdly, Rittenhouse's responses of "no" to each query may not have been the correct ones to give, though I cannot assert this for certain in terms of the practicalities of testimony before a clearly and extremely hostile prosecutor who makes no secret of his attitude toward the truth v. winning.   I am, after all, not a lawyer.

In the luxury of my unthreatened liberty, I feel that Rittenhouse's responses of "no" to each of the prosecutor's queries about whether lethal force is justified, loaned validity to the grossly incorrect assumption that property is not justifiably defended with such non equivocation.  We have made it clear that in some cases it most certainly justified in using lethal force to defend property.

It may be that the philosophically more pure responses to the prosecutor's inappropriate questions might open the door to opportunities that one does not want to give his accuser, who is clearly on a fishing expedition in the desperate hope of hooking something, anything, that might save his clearly failing case.  I can see how defense counsel may have instructed Rittenhouse to respond to any such question with "no", keeping things as simple as possible.  But I also see a potential hazard there in that a jury may ask that if it is admittedly not justifiable to use lethal for in defense of property, why then was Rittenhouse entered into the fray with a rifle?  Was it not to defend property of others in Kenosha?  Was it only to defend the lives of people?

Perhaps these points have all been made clear - I do not as yet know.  But these are some of the pitfalls of allowing such issues to remain either unestablished with no clear answers, or even just partially so.  As long as any elements of such issues remain unanswered, the danger always lurks that people will fill in the blanks on their own with potentially disastrous outcomes.  Not everyone is competent to settle such issues on their own and without help and some direction.  Great injustice can be served most unintentionally.

Regardless of how this trial ultimately resolves, the questions raised here remain of central importance to the proper liberties of Freemen.  These questions should be asked and answered properly by the courts such that precedent is clearly set, that no prosecutor in the land is thenceforth able to claim ignorance when they improperly bring severe charges against someone on this basis.  Judges should be dismissing such cases with prejudice and should be holding in a cell without bail any prosecutor who would dare engage in such professional misconduct, pending the appropriate charges and trial.

These seemingly subtle and at times even trivial points of philosophy should never be improperly weighed as for their significance, especially in a land where the institutions of jurisprudence are as terribly broken as they are here in America such that absurdity tends to rule, leaving little to no room for actual justice.

Be well, and as always please accept my best wishes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Illogic Of Grosskreutz's Self-Disproven Claim Of Surrendering

 

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people during rioting in Wisconsin in 2020, killing two, has been a disaster for the prosecution since day one.  What I am assuming had to be their star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, effectively sent the prosecution's case to the bottom for brunch with Davey Jones.

Though now a moot point, given he was forced by defense counsel to admit he gave false testimony, it nonetheless pays to consider Grosskreutz's self-discredited central claim that he was shot while surrendering.

Grosskreutz initially claimed to have been raising his hands in surrender, his pistol admittedly still in his grasp. Let us examine that for sense, looking to the hypothetical case where the claim was not a lie. Would Rittenhouse have been wrong to shoot?

If one is surrendering, they do not have a weapon in their hands. So long as they remain armed, they are not in fact surrendering, but must be taken to be lying. Criminals, for example, lie all the time - it is one of their stocks in trade. When in a circumstance of effective warfare, a defender cannot afford the luxury of assuming that an armed opponent poses anything but a clear and present danger to life and limb, no matter the opponent's protests of "I surrender". Grosskreutz was armed, was not to my knowledge issuing a verbal surrender message, and claimed to have been raising his arms. This does not in any reasonable way convey surrender to outside parties.

The most basic midbrain sense tells us that when surrendering, one relinquishes all visible control of weaponry; that you will not so much as appear as a threat. If you do not wish to be targeted as an imminent danger to others, you empty your hands prior to making any other bodily gestures and hope for as much distance between yourself and anything that might be viewed as a weapon, as possible. It requires no feat of intellect to figure this out, first time, in situo.

Some will argue that if someone is sufficiently frightened or nervous, they might not come to that sense immediately. Let us assume it is so, doubtful as it may seem to anyone with a lick of sense. In that case, you have no business being in the situation in which you have voluntarily inserted yourself. I am confident in my assumption that nobody forced Grosskreutz to enter a riot zone, armed with a handgun, and to join in the felonious acts of his compatriot rioters. It also appears that nobody forced Grosskreutz to discharge his weapon in the midst of an active and ongoing riot, with no clear (or even claimed) defensive purpose. Grosskreutz's discharging of his weapon could not have been reasonably taken by Rittenhouse as anything less or other than an immediate threat to his own life, given that Rittenhouse was being actively hunted by several armed assailants across lines of battle that at that time were very clearly defined.

We therefore see with good reason that Grosskreutz was there in concert with the rest of the rioters, was armed with a handgun, and was at least willing to cause unjust harm to innocents. This much cannot be denied with any credibility.

We also see that if you voluntarily place yourself in such a situation, minus the wherewithal to handle adverse contingencies which arise, that you make yourself the victim of your own incapacity when things go awry. If you are thereby killed or maimed, the results can, at most, be chalked up to a tragic confluence of unfortunate choices. In the kindest case, Darwin will have harvested your deficient self and there is nobody to blame but sad circumstance. More likely, however, full onus rests with you for having made so poor a series of choices in the context of your inadequate nerves, and that you thereby effectively ended up committing suicide by stupidity, or being maimed by equal virtue.

That Rittenhouse shot Grosskreutz was fully justified even if what the latter testified had been the truth. Raising your arms in surrender with a gun in your hand is tantamount to begging to be treated as a clear and present threat, the logical result belonging to the fool and nobody else.

There are those, apparently mostly of a "left" bent so to speak, who either cannot or will not see things from the standpoint of someone defending their life from imminent apparent destruction. I have observed that such people generally look at such situations only from the standpoint of the one they view as being the victim, in this case Grosskreutz. "He was surrendering!" will be their emotionally charged justification for improperly seeing Kyle Rittenhouse sent to prison. What they fail to acknowledge is a young man's position as being hunted down by a mob of wild rioters.  

Even if Grosskreutz was truthful in his initial claims, put yourself in the place of Rittenhouse, standing before someone who had been chasing him with a handgun, had discharged that handgun without just cause, and was now raising that weapon in concert with utterances of "I surrender" (the latter of which was not the case, but I am purposely trying to make the best case in Grosskreutz's favor). Which gesture is one to heed, the spoken word whose veracity cannot be verified in the tiny split of a second required to make a decision, or the act of raising a hand with a gun in it?  There is no question as to the correct answer here, which is the latter.  

It may be seen as an unfortunate feature of being human, that we are not capable of discerning intent in the ways that some people assume. In this case, those who think Rittenhouse should not have shot Grosskreutz are sadly mistaken and their goodly intentions toward him and their tilted ideas of justice hold no validity in the matter. Even if we assume surrender, Grosskreutz's actions would utterly belie that intention, indicating very much its opposite and thereby presenting Rittenhouse with the reasonably perceived and very immediate choice of shoot or stand idly to be shot, maimed, and likely killed.

That is the best case in favor of Grosskreutz and it fails with stern misery to bolster the prosecution's proceeding. It does, in fact, demolish it in utter totality.

There is a lesson in all of this, and it is an old one: if you do not want to become a victim of warfare, the first thing you decide is not to go willingly into the fray. It is no great stretch to assume that Grosskreutz holds sufficient intellect (it doesn't require much) to come to the reasonable presumption that there would be lively action that night. Taking a sidearm would seem to suggest his recognition of that fact. He willfully placed himself in a position from which he could have removed himself at any moment by simply walking away. He chose to do otherwise and then engaged in positive acts against another human being for which he was rightly taken to task. There is no possible argument, short of proof of brain lesions to the point, that could in any way excuse his behavior, and even then his having been shot by Rittenhouse could at most be chalked up as a sad tragedy.

Let Rittenhouse be acquitted, come what may. Let the truth, particularly as here exposed for all to see, serve as an object lesson to those whose stunted views on such matters stand in dire need of correction. If one does not wish to be injured, then threaten no injury. Better yet, remove yourself from dangerous situations. Stay home; have a beer; read a book; chase your girlfriend around the kitchen table. Do anything, but do not join a rioting mob because that is asking for trouble that nobody needs and nobody in their right mind wants.

Be well, and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Endlessly Minute Divisions Of Matter

Way back in the Stone Age called "the '70s", one of my engineering professors took some time to cover a topic that would today fall under what we call "nanotech". This was a few years before William Gibson wrote Neuromancer. It was the offshoot of a safety discussion where we were warned of the potential dangers of tiny particles floating about in the local air and getting into lungs and other mucous membranes of the body. As engineers, we would likely have to deal with such matters with ever increasing likelihood as time wore on. The man was something of prophetic.

Interestingly, my professor seemed to have been considerably better educated on the dangers than are most doctors today. Note how the feckless stooges who peddle the mask narrative concern themselves with only pulmonary exposure. Nobody appears to be addressing concerns of contact with skin, eyes, inner ears, open wounds, and so forth. Lungs are not the only path to the soul, as it were.

My professor went to some length to discuss the truer nature of the hazard potential posed by what he referred to as "endlessly minute divisions of matter" floating freely about. This, before "nano-" became a commonly misused word of the unwashed mass of first-world humanity. He emphasized that the trends in manufacturing stood to place ever greater emphasis on smaller and smaller particle technologies. This was not immediately obvious to the common man in 1976. But he went to pains to describe the nature of such particles and how they move and why casual protective measures such as masks (vis-a-vis full-face respirators, the two being VERY different instruments) were insufficient to the task of protecting one from these dangers.

So here I am, nearly fifty years later, witnessing a raft of apparent fools peddling bald-faced lies to the world about the virtues of the N95 mask. 

Whether the lies we are told are intentional, or the product of the feckless bumbling of fools makes no difference; the result is the same.

Those who think that even an N95 mask makes a difference sufficient to protection are fooling themselves.  Even space suits are of no matter if the protocols for effective use are not followed.

Given the long and very clear nature of human beings in the context of their political behaviors, there can be no doubt about what is going on here, which is the latest example of a huge power grab by Themme, the costs of which are paid by the rest of us.  Anyone taking all this handwaving as anything but political theater is thinking and behaving in a dangerously foolish manner.  Do yourselves a huge favor and throw off your misplaced confidence in anything that "government" tells you, for in all likelihood they are lies or, far worse, the admixture of lies with truth such that the discerning what what is to be believed becomes vanishingly close to impossible.

Be well, and until next time please accept my best wishes.

The False Logic Behind Covid Mandates

 

Evil gallops roughshod over the land.  It always has, but in times past the horsemen endeavored to hide the fact with some respectable effort.  That is no longer the case.  Fine examples of this are the various and manifold mandates that have been vomited forth by the several American governing bodies into the laps of those to whom these bodies' respective members have sworn oaths of good faith and competent service.

Fundamental human rights possess two clear and distinct aspects: the claims embodied therein, and the resultant obligations of one man to his fellows in the context of each man's validly demonstrable equal claims.  For example, if I hold my claim to Life and you hold equal claim to it, then I am bound by logic to respect your claim as I expect you to honor mine.  This is the Golden Rule made manifest.

As can be readily seen, the nature of our mutual obligations to one another is negative, meaning "thou shalt not"; a requirement to not act.  This means that one is to refrain from taking any positive action in violation of another's rights, i.e., a valid claim to something, such as one's life.  One's life, being their First Property, I may not commit murder.

The commandment is properly summarized by "thou shalt not trespass against thy fellows".

Though with us now a long time, false-authority requirements of positive action have, until recently, been relatively limited in their reach, most often couched in tacitly veiled double talk by corrupted political hacks of various sorts and stations.  A very fine example of this can be seen in the manifestly absurd and deeply violative mandates with respect to the so-called "pandemic" of the so-called "covid-19" virus.  

I have recently read that the state of Maine is now requiring everyone there to be vaccinated against covid-19 and that some court has upheld the fiat.  The underlying logic is the diametric opposite of provably proper obligations between men, requiring people not to refrain from action (negative), but rather to require them to take specific action (positive).  Unlike in times past, this mandate is in no way being soft-peddled to the public through subterfuge, but rather it is being rammed down our throats with no apologies.  This represents a fundamental philosophical shift away from the proper respect of basic human rights, toward a blatantly tyrannical position that forces compliance where there exists no authority to do so.

The reasoning here is that the individual is obliged to take positive action to protect the rights and other interests of his fellows.  While taking such action may be validly viewed as morally praiseworthy, it is in no way validly demonstrated as being morally obligatory.

For example, if one is walking the lonely streets of Chicago at 2 AM and witnesses a rape in progress, it cannot be validly demonstrated that he is in any way obliged to render aid and service to the victim.  By the logic in question, walking away from a crime in progress would itself constitute a crime due to the individual obligation to render aid to the victims of actual crime.  This, of course, is a can of worms the implications of which are far reaching, none of them good.

If the obligation to positive action were ever to be upheld as valid in Law, a very explicit door to bald-faced tyranny will have been opened, thereby lending false license to "government" at all levels to force obligations upon people that would constitute nothing less that naked, objective chattel slavery of the servant individual to the master state.

The message in these mandates pose a clear and present threat to every living individual on the planet, the precedent they would set comprising a rather large nail in the coffin for all human rights, planet-wide.  These unsupported and morally invalid mandates must be resisted and rejected utterly if there is to be any future hope for humanity.  It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the dangers posed by these recent developments that require forced positive-action on behalf of one's fellows.  This is the very essence of authoritarian collectivism, its central pillar.

Refuse, resist, defy.  Endeavor for non-compliance with that which disparages and trespasses upon your freedom.  Make Themme work ever more exhaustingly for every scrap of tyranny-stolen booty that they attempt to take from us.  Leave them feeling hollow and meaningless and irrelevant in everything they do and experience.  Invokke Theire rage against us.  Force Theire hands to go that extra mile in their evil work, petty or grand, such that they are ever more required to expose to those whom Theye violate their true faces.  Leave Themme no avenue by which to escape their condign shame and guilt, that the quality of their very lives are drive to the status of mere existences so miserable, they will find themselves at the nexus that forces their hands to make the decision to step down or contrive to destroy it all.  Remove from Themme the profit motive for their crimes.  Make the cost far outstrip the payoff.

Tyrants can yet be stopped, but time runs thin on that, for as technology advances by the hour, the leverage wielded by those who presume, grow longer and longer, their moral inhibitions ever closer to vanishing.  When single fingers can cause the deaths of millions, you then know that humankind has passed into a sphere of immense danger.  We have been in that sphere for the better part of a century, wherein the moral constitution and practical survival instincts of the wielders were the only things that kept us from going over the precipice.  The moral objections to universal annihilation of humanity have certainly attenuated greatly in the intervening years and, in my estimation, have effectively disappeared from reality as meaningful deterrents against imprudent action.  Far more worrisome, those practical survival instincts appear to have take an immense hit, as demonstrated by the openly absurd behaviors that Theye and their useful idiots now commonly and daily manifest before television cameras.

Do not make the grave error of assuming that such people with such fingers would not dare exercise such power.  If and when the Tyrant perceives a clear and present danger to himself, he will hesitate for no measurable interval to set you and your entire family to the sword.  If the Tyrant perceives the threat as immediately existential in nature, I hold small doubt that he would put the entire human race to extinction.  If he's going straight to hell, the rest of the world will follow him close by. Theye are precisely sufficient to the evil and insanity required to destroy all humanity in preference to giving up their power.  This attitude is made manifest ever single day with little effort to hide their truer intentions, not to mention their utter contempt for us all.

All hope is yet to be lost, but I suspect that the ever onward march of technology, when placed in the hands of those in whom we have so foolishly vested our trust, stands to close off every path to self-salvation.  Pray if you are so moved, but always bear in mind the old adage, "God helps those who help themselves."

Until next time, please accept my best wishes...