Zimmerman and other mail

Mail 782 Sunday, July 14, 2013

I am way behind on mail so I will try to do this one as a catchup, then follow with a brief view.

So far we have had an unexpected outbreak of sanity following the Zimmerman verdicts. Of course Zimmerman was a “white Hispanic”, whatever that means; id he is wise he will become an Hispanic Hispanic as soon as he possibly can.

Riot video

Hello Dr. Pournelle,

There may have been no comments yet when you posted the link to the riot video, but per the comments there when I followed the link, that footage is of rioting in Vancouver in relation to the Stanley Cup. I have no first-hand knowledge of either Miami or Vancouver, so I can’t say whether those comments are correct or not. This being early days (or hours), I wouldn’t be surprised to find misreporting to be common.

Best wishes.

Jason Bontrager

There weren’t any yet when I went to bed. I wonder why people fake such things?

You probably know this already

Jerry, according to comments posted on it, the rashaentertainment.com piece about rioting in Miami from the Zimmerman verdict was actually shot in Vancouver BC (Roedy Green’s stomping grounds – I’m sure you remember Roedy from BIX), and the cause of the riot was people unhappy about the Stanley Cup (hockey) result.

“You supply the pictures, I’ll supply the riot.” Or some such.

–John

I didn’t know it but it doesn’t astonish me. As I said, it was late. The interesting thing is that there was so little of it. Just as the activity in LA has been fairly tame after threats of much worse.

Prosecutorial misconduct in the Zimmerman

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

The addresses below report on:

1. Professor Alan Dershowitz’ accusation that the prosecutor in the Zimmerman case violated Zimmerman’s civil rights by withholding exculpatory evidence from the trial judge.

2. A Florida state attorney who had noted this misconduct was fired over it with threats.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Dershowitz-Zimmerman-Prosecutorial-Misconduct/2013/07/14/id/514957

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-zimmerman-evidence-firing-20130713,0,4147108.story

It ain’t over till it’s over.

Best regards,

Alfred Bowman

Well, Zimmerman escapes double jeopardy this time — unless the Administration wants to delay some other laws, rights, etc. or, in some other way, manipulate due process.  The FBI was not able to prove anything to pull another Rodney King double trial:

<.>

After interviewing nearly three dozen people in the George Zimmerman murder case, the FBI found no evidence that racial bias was a motivating factor in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, records released Thursday show.

Even the lead detective in the case, Sanford Det. Chris Serino, told agents that he thought Zimmerman profiled Trayvon because of his attire and the circumstances — but not his race.

</>

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/12/155918/more-evidence-released-in-trayvon.html#.UeM9mT7DVoY

Zimmerman is continuing his suit against NBC; how rightly so:

<.>

Lsst night’s not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial will enable the neighborhood-watch volunteer to resume his case against NBC News for the mis-editing of his widely distributed call to police. Back in December, Zimmerman sued NBC Universal Media for defamation over the botched editing, which depicted him as a hardened racial profiler.

</>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/07/14/zimmerman-lawyer-to-move-asap-against-nbc-news/

And, this President is using the emotional frenzy of a thousand mice squealing in agony to promote more of his unpopular policies:

<.>

President Obama called on the nation to honor Trayvon Martin a day after George Zimmerman was acquitted of his murder by asking "ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence."

</>

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/14/19467556-obama-honor-trayvon-martin-by-battling-gun-violence?lite

And life goes on…

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

My own thoughts on the Zimmerman trial for whatever they are worth.

#1 The charging of Zimmerman was racially motivated.

#2 If I had been in the Martin boy’s situation where I had a phone as he did, I would have dialed 9-1-1.

#3 What really troubles me most about the trial is that the prosecution was allowed to add a new charge after the defense had rested. That in itself appears to me to be something other than a fair trial. It is very scary. You get the court, ready to defend yourself and the government can decide new charges at any time with no opportunity to prepare a defense. Wrong!

Greg Brewer

It was clear that the federal government exerted enormous pressure on the state and local authorities, and when the local prosecutor declined to file charges or go to the grand jury due to concluding the case could not be won, a special prosecutor was brought in. Every pressure was exerted. And it may well be that we have not seen the last of this. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/news/zimmerman-civil-rights-charges-142917019.html

Have you read the Florida law? Here it is:

http://www.husseinandwebber.com/florida-stand-your-ground-statute.html

Under the law, there’s no way Zimmerman should have ever gone to trial, but it’s also in my view entirely indefensible. It goes against everything you ever taught us about gun safety and personal responsibility. Under the law, I can go punch Mike Tyson in the face in locked room. If he hits back and I fear "great bodily injury" I can shoot him because I have no place to run. The situation is entirely of my choosing yet, I am not responsible for the results of my actions. This goes way beyond any "stand your ground" and into a license for mayhem. Not sure how anyone can defend that portion of the law. It encourage reckless behavior which may have been the case in Florida, but we’ll never know. Even my wife said after reading the law she would vote to acquit.

I would not be in favor of amending California law to the “stand your ground” condition. I think the requirement to retreat before employing deadly force is reasonable so long as you are not in your own home. Or perhaps it is not. I am not a legislator. I also do not live in Florida.

Of course it is difficult to retreat if you are on your back on the ground being beaten. Had Zimmerman threatened Martin with a firearm it would have been a different case. And we still do not know who struck the first blow; clearly the prosecution did not try to show that Zimmerman was in the habit of initiating violent confrontations. I didn’t comment on the case while it was in trial ; I had in fact expected a hung jury. Acquittal on all counts including lesser included accounts indicates that the jury believed this was a true case of self defense. It should never have got to that point, but I am not sure the stand your ground law was responsible for that. Of course I grew up in the era in which a man’s home was his castle.

 

"Stand Your Ground" comment

Jerry, the guy who gave you the piece on the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law may be somewhat mistaken.

He said “Under the law, I can go punch Mike Tyson in the face in locked room. If he hits back and I fear "great bodily injury" I can shoot him because I have no place to run.”

Tucker Max gives an absolutely beautiful exposition of the legal concept of “proximate cause” (legal term), in “Hilarity Ensues” at pp. 188-190 (http://books.google.com/books?id=0PJ2PdpE2XkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false <http://books.google.com/books?id=0PJ2PdpE2XkC&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q&f=false> ). He starts by quoting the Wikipedia entry, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause> , on “proximate cause”: “In the law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law> , a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light> , the collision <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision> would not have occurred. For an act to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.”

That would seem to be directly applicable to your correspondent’s hypothetical, and suggests that your correspondent would not fare well at trial. While Iron Mike’s return punch might be the cause-in-fact for his fear of great bodily injury, his initial assault on Iron Mike would almost certainly be considered the proximate cause, making him, not Iron Mike, responsible for the final outcome.

–John

<http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3844/honor-compromise-middle-east>

I was sent this link by a liberal rabbi who loves Israel and has long since given up expecting solutions to its problems. I think it was prompted by his “radical right” younger son’s enthusiasm and also my having said that I can’t believe that the West really wants to preserve Syria’s existing boundaries or arm the anti-Assad forces unless the weapons are first used on the Al Qaeda wannabes (think Stalin and Trotsky but no arms to either lot I suppose is the lesson from that). Obviously Israel is suited just fine by events in Syria. Still, what is the long term hope? I saw a film called “Hasidic” recently which makes one realise that help is not always from the logically obvious area. If there are millions of bearers of Ashkenazi genes in 100 years time they will be descendants of the families of Hasidim and other Ultra-Orthodox with their 10 to 20 children not the smart secular breeders of 1.2 children.

The historical changes for shame/honour to guilt/individualist-rationalist cultures and any regressions would be something I would like to read about. Any suggestions? Are Big Man cultures typically shame/honour cultures?

It can’t be all about literacy above a primitive level for listing stock. While a military aristocracy remains important one get such anachronistic but traditional behaviour as Langsdorff, the captain of the Graf Spee, risking dishonour in order to save his crew from certain death and settle them into digs in Buenos Aires, and then promptly shooting himself after writing to his wife.

Can Indonesia have some influence on Arab Muslim culture in the long run? Where does Iran fit in culturally? (I suspect that the tribal illiterates in Iran are not much different from Arabs, Pushtuns and Pakistanis who are also tribal and more or less illiterate).

J

Of course the modern view is that Langsdorff must have been mad. Falstaff’s discourse on honor – who hath it? He that died a Wednesday – seems to be the accepted view today.

"Because of your deliberate, willful and unscrupulous actions, you can never again be trusted to step foot in this office."

<http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/13/justice/zimmerman-it-firing/index.html>

And more will come out now that the trial is over.

I read this earlier this morning and besides inappropriate laughing, for which I plan to punish myself in appropriate fashion once I decide exactly what that means, I think there was a further error here.

The NTSB girl was not wrong, just misunderstood. These were not the names of the captain and crew, these were the comments on the cockpit voice recorder recovered in the black box.

From: Bob

On the midday news program yesterday on the Oakland TV channel, the announcer said she had just been given the names of the crew members on the Korean airliner that crashed at SFO the other day, and proceeded to read these names:

Sum Ting Wong

Wi Tu Low

Ho Lee Fuk

Bang Ding Ow

By the time she got to the fourth one, she apparently realized that sum ting was indeed wong, and called for a break, after which she said the names were erroneous but that they had been confirmed to the station by the NTSB. Apparently an intern at the NTSB, some witless girl, had indeed confirmed them. The intern has now been sentenced to crucifixion and the announcer will have a month of ethnic sensitivity training.

Bob

Now, personally, I sort of tend to feel that peoples who normally use names like Fuk and Lipschitz have little to complain about, but, hey, what do I know, I have a completely normal name.

No, not THAT one…sheesh!

G

I cannot think of an appropriate comment…

"I was wondering if there was a rogue cow, a particularly temperamental one.”

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/countryside/10064225/Cow-attacks-It-looked-like-they-wanted-to-kill-him.html>

Roland Dobbins

I lived from third to 8th grade on a farm, and while we were wary of bulls, we were not concerned about cows.  Of course our dogs didn’t bother cows. 

 

 

Feds Take Raisins from Raisin farmers

This rivals the bunny inspectors. The Feds take part of the raisin crop with no payment to the farmers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/one-growers-grapes-of-wrath/2013/07/07/ebebcfd8-e380-11e2-80eb-3145e2994a55_story.html

I keep wondering when we will get the laser-like inspection of the budget, line by line, that was promised in the 2008 election. The one that told us of the coming Hope and Change, Yes We Can.

Andrea Rossi’s megawatt plant

Thought you’d like to know that Rossi’s megawatt plant was only shown running in public once and that was October 28, 2011. Although scientists and the press were invited, and an AP reporter was present, none of the guests were allowed to see any measurements being made. And a very large diesel generator (450 kW or more) was connected to the device at all times while it was running.

Rossi later said he sold 12 more of these "plants" including some to the US military. But almost 2 years after the demo, no customer has been named and none has ever been identified.

As for the recent tests of a "hot ecat", the tests appear to have been done badly, using Rossi’s lab, his power source, and instruments and methods specified by him and used by him previously. It is not, as was claimed, an "independent" test. It involved some scientists from the University of Uppsala but other scientists from the same department, attacked and repudiated the work.

Rossi’s representatives include free energy crooks (Schneider in Germany) and a weird fellow (Roger Green in Australia) who sells distributorship shares for peanuts when if the device were real, they would be worth millions or billions.

Rossi writes on his blog that he has a million unit per year plant constructed in the US but when he was forced to talk to an inspector from Florida’s nuclear regulatory agency, he told the agent that he did no manufacturing in the USA.

Excellent summaries of the problems with Rossi’s work are detailed by Steve Krivit in his web site. See for example http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/RossiTimeline.shtml. There is also a somewhat disorganized but still useful web site by Gary Wright: http://shutdownrossi.com/ . It has details of Roger Green’s attempts to sell distributorships and includes relevant emails directly from Rossi to prospective customers. Here is one link about those emails. http://shutdownrossi.com/law-legal-issues/andrea-rossi-roger-green-fraud-scam-update/

I have trouble finding stuff on Wright’s site but there is much of interest there. It is also important that Wright calls Rossi a criminal and Rossi has not sued him.

Rossi behaves in every way as an investment scammer. So, by the way, does another claimant to high power LENR/cold fusion and that is Defkalion now in Canada.

Please let me know if I can provide any additional information. I am quite convinced that Rossi has absolutely nothing and never did. He has, however, been extremely clever in choosing scientists to fool and methods to fool them with.

Mary Yugo

 

Lust and Jealousy

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I don’t have any "studies" to back this up, but I find it pretty improbable that physical jealousy will ever be excluded from our psychology, any more than the Victorians ever managed to abolish Lust. It’s just not a matter of rational choice. Considering Chastity to be a virtue is a workable response to this aspect of the human condition.

Also, the reality of STD’s should give anyone pause before they conclude that Chastity will ever drop off the radar screen as a virtue. A world with STDs is a world that requires condoms, and honestly, if you’re rational enough to remember a condom every time, you’re not doing it right.

J

 

CDC says Americans still consume too much, but studies show no benefit in reducing salt

http://kfor.com/2013/07/09/cdc-admits-long-standing-error-there-is-no-benefit-in-reducing-salt/

"To translate this last study into teaspoons: the finding was that anything between 1-1/2 and 3 tsp of salt per day is just fine, and there were adverse effects from eating more than that or less than that. Most Americans who are not consciously restricting salt fall in this range (1-1/2 to 3 tsp). People who are on low-salt diets for medical reasons are getting as little as 1/2 tsp, and they’re well into the range where dearth of salt is harming them."

I’ve been saying for years that the initial studies they based this on were clearly flawed, and wondering why, if CDC and the rest of the government couldn’t see that, I should just accept that they knew better than me on anything.

Graves

And yet we borrow money to promulgate all this.

Subj: Fear and Loathing at Commerce

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353011/fear-and-loathing-commerce-kevin-d-williamson

>>Rather than simply identifying the [malware-]infected computers and fixing them, the agency set about physically destroying its IT hardware — not just computers, but keyboards, printers, digital cameras, and other equipment entirely unrelated to the problem. … The only thing that stopped EDA from destroying its entire IT infrastructure was that it ran out of money to fund the demolition.<<

Our Tax Dollars At Work! For Our Security!

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Subj: Video: 3D Printing of Liquid Metals at Room Temperature

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql3pXn8-sHA

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Atmospheric CO2 Level

It seems the current high CO2 level of 400 PPM is causing the deserts to start greening up. Maybe you’re a Climatologist, since I seem to recall you suggesting this might happen.

http://www.csiro.au/en/Portals/Media/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstract

David Smallwood

Not a climatologist, but an old operations research guy who pays attention to the data rather than the theory…

 

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmurph/articles/20130711.aspx

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

‘The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it.’

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-brand-new-us-military-headquarters-in-afghanistan-and-nobody-to-use-it/2013/07/09/2bb73728-e8cd-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_print.html>

Roland Dobbins

We had good strategic reason to go into Afghanistan and throw out those who had harbored our enemies; and to make it plain that if they went back to harboring our enemies we would be back.  Then we should have left.  Instead we stayed.  I do not know why.  No one has ever given me a satisfactory reason for believing that anyone was actually so ignorant of history as to believe Afghanistan could be made into a liberal democracy through any military influence we could exercise. Alexander the Great knew better.

Worse than Gandhi vs. better than Hitler

Dear Jerry Pournelle:

I notice that some people compare Edward Snowden unfavorably to Martin Luther King, Thoreau and Gandhi; and that the same people tend to compare the USA favorably to China, Russia and Venezuela. Technically these comparisons are correct, but still that’s holding Snowden to a much higher standard than the USA. If anyone ever compared me to Gandhi, even unfavorably, I’d be pleased; but if anyone ever compared me to Hitler, even favorably, I’d be furious. The latter is called ‘damning by faint praise’; so maybe we can call the former praising by faint damns. I’d say, in both cases, ‘so that’s who I remind you of?’

I have heard this nation called better than Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and Taliban Afghanistan; and this from people who thought they were saying something nice! (Assuming that they thought about it at all.) Am I the only one to see the grievous insult in this? The soft bigotry of abysmal expectations?

Sincerely,

Nathaniel Hellerstein

paradoctor