New 'Absolutely Shocking' Evidence Presented in the George Floyd Case

There is no doubt that officer Chauvin was using an authorized hold -- but how well he was trained to use it is an issue.  Such "sleeper" holds should be removed as soon as the perp goes limp.  There are only one or two minutes between death and survival where such holds are used.  It would appear that the officer maintained the hold for far too long

On the other hand, Fentanyl is a very powerful surgical anaesthetic.  Using Fentanyl requires very careful dosage control for the patient to survive. Again there is only a very fine line between survival and death. And Floyd definitely had fatal dose in his system at autopsy. He appears to have taken it just as the police began to restrain him.

So there were two causes for the death of George Floyd.  He could have died of either of them.

So which cause of death cut in first is unknowable.  Therefore officer Chauvin cannnot be held to have killed Floyd beyond reasonable doubt  -- and that will presumably be the eventual verdict


Attorneys for former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin are requesting the dismissal of murder and manslaughter charges against him for the death of George Floyd. They're using the police training manual as justification.

According to the Minneapolis Police Department training manual, officers are shown how to subdue violent or resisting suspects by placing their knee on the neck.

Analysts and attorneys at Court TV explain. It's worth a full watch:

"From coast-to-coast everyone, absolutely outraged, especially by that fact, the knee on the neck. Well, guess what folks, take a look at what you're looking at right here. That is from the police training manual," attorney and host Vinnie Politan said. "Where this all comes from is from a motion to dismiss. A motion to dismiss that was filed by Derek Chauvin's attorneys saying that the knee on the neck is part of his training as a Minneapolis police officer. And there we see it in the manual on the left and on the right is what we all have seen in the video of Officer Chauvin. So, is this a game-changer?"

"This one is absolutely shocking. I mean, this is what the whole story is about. This is what outraged millions and millions of people, this is what caused the protests. It was the knee on the neck...and now the defense is saying dismiss the charges because the knee on the neck is right there in the police training manual," he continued.

So why did Chauvin continue holding his knee on Floyd's neck after he became unresponsive?

"There comes a point where everyone is telling him, 'Look, he's not responding anymore.' ... I want our viewers to get familiar with a very important word here, it's called "excited delirium." ... That's what he's going to use to explain why when [Floyd] was no longer responsive, he continued with the knee on the neck because that, when you talk about excited delirium, it's about people who use drugs, which they're going to claim they saw him using, that's why they're talking about the tablet on the tongue, bizarre behavior. We saw that, but eventually, it gets to something that's called superhuman strength. Oftentimes people in that position, they show superhuman strength and that picture shows how you are supposed to restrain people when you are afraid for excited delirium," Attorney Michael Ayala added. "This is a game-changer...it's going to be tough to overcome this training instruction picture that shows exactly how [Chauvin] was doing it by the book."

Newly released court documents show Floyd had a "fatal level" of fentanyl in his system when he died. He also resisted arrest before being placed on the ground by officers.

New documents filed in the George Floyd case give new information about the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's findings in Floyd's autopsy.

Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system.

"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.

In another new document, Baker said, "That is a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances."

But then Baker added, "I am not saying this killed him."

Defense attorneys for the officers have signaled they will argue Floyd died from the drugs and pre-existing health conditions.

The new documents say Floyd had a "heavy heart" and "at least one artery was approximately 75% blocked."

SOURCE






Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Nonsense

Walter E. Williams

Check out any professional and most college basketball teams. Their starting five, and most of their other 10 players, are black, as is 80% of the NBA. This does not come anywhere close to the diversity and inclusion sought by the nation's social justice warriors. Both professional and college coaches have ignored and threw any pretense of seeking diversity and inclusiveness.

My question to you is: Would a basketball team be improved if coaches were required to include ethnically diverse players for the sake of equity? I have no idea of what your answer might be but mine would be: "The hell with diversity, equity and inclusion. I am going to recruit the best players and do not care if most of them turn out to be black players."

Another question: Do you think that any diversity-crazed college president would chastise his basketball coach for lack of diversity and inclusiveness?

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (National Accelerator Laboratory) is home to the world's most powerful experiments, fastest supercomputers and top-notch physics researchers. Much of SLAC's research is on particle accelerators that are complicated machines that are designed, engineered and operated to produce high-quality particle beams and develop clues to the fundamental structure of matter and the forces between subatomic particles. You can bet that their personnel makeup exhibits very little concern about racial diversity, equity and inclusion. The bulk of their scientists is not only Americans of European and Asian ancestry but mostly men. My question to you is: What would you do to make SLAC more illustrative of the racial, ethnic and sexual diversity of America? As for me, my answer would be the same one that I gave in the basketball example: I am going to recruit the brightest scientists and I do not care if most of them turn out to be men of European and Asian ancestry.

In the hard sciences, one will find black Americans underrepresented. For example, a 2018 survey of the American Astronomical Society, which includes undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and retired astronomers, found that 82% of members identified as white and only 2% as black or African American. Only 3% of bachelor's degrees in physics go to black students. In 2017, some fields, such as structural engineering and atmospheric physics, graduated not a single black Ph.D.

The conspicuous absence of black Americans in the sciences have little or nothing to do with racism. It has to do with academic preparation. If one graduates from high school and has not mastered a minimum proficiency in high school algebra, geometry and precalculus, it is likely that high-paying careers such as engineering, medicine, physics and computer technology are hermetically sealed off for life.

There are relatively few black fighter jet pilots. There are stringent physical, character and mental requirements, which many black applicants could meet. But fighter pilots must also have a strong knowledge of air navigation, aircraft operating procedures, flight theory, fluid mechanics, meteorology and engineering. The college majors that help prepare undergraduates for a career as a fighter pilot include mathematics, physical science and engineering. But if one graduates from high school without elementary training in math, it is not likely that he will enroll in the college courses that would qualify him for fighter pilot training.

At many predominantly black high schools, not a single black student tests proficient in math and a very low percentage test proficient in reading; however, these schools confer a diploma that attests that the students can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level and these schools often boast that they have a 70% and higher graduation rate. They mislead students, their families and others by conferring fraudulent diplomas.

What explains the fact that over 80% of professional basketball players are black, as are about 70% of professional football players? Only an idiot would chalk it up to diversity and inclusion. Instead, it is excellence that explains the disproportionate numbers. Jewish Americans, who are just 3% of our population, win over 35% of the Nobel prizes in science that are awarded to Americans. Again, it is excellence that explains the disproportionality, not diversity and inclusion. As my stepfather often told me, "To do well in this world, you have to come early and stay late."

SOURCE





Do All Lives Really Matter?

The media's refusal to report on black-on-white crime is both shameful and expected.



It’s been a busy few days, so you might’ve missed the disturbing story out of Georgia last week that a middle-aged black man was stabbed multiple times in the neck and torso by a young white man in an AutoZone store. The assailant reportedly smiled when he told police that he “felt the need to find a black male to kill.”

Early last month in Colorado, there was an even more awful incident of racial violence. A 21-year-old white man from Aurora was driving down a suburban street when he began following a trio of 11- and 12-year-old black boys walking home from school. The man then hit the gas, jumped the curb, and mowed down two of the three boys.

Given the racially charged tensions of the day, it’s hard to believe these stories haven’t received more attention. Or maybe it’s not hard to believe at all. Because the victims in these two cases were actually white, and the assailants were black.

But does anyone doubt that had the races been reversed, these terrible stories would’ve been more extensively covered by the mainstream media? If you doubt this, think back a month ago to the execution-style slaying of five-year-old Cannon Hinnant, who was out riding his bike in front of his house when he was shot point-blank in the head by a neighbor, a 25-year-old black man named Darius Sessoms.

Perhaps there’s a shrine somewhere commemorating the too-short life of young Cannon, but perhaps not. Either way, we certainly won’t see the protests, the looting, the arson, and the nationwide violence we’ve seen in response to the death of 46-year-old career criminal George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Why not?

The answer might be, at least in part, that black-on-white crime is so commonplace as to not be newsworthy. Of course, it might also be that reporting on black-on-white crime discomforts our mainstream media and distracts from its narrative of the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation shot through with white supremacy.

Our Mark Alexander picked up on this blame-shifting charade recently, and he cited some compelling statistics from researcher and author Heather Mac Donald regarding the interracial crime disparity. Such as: “There were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations … between blacks and whites [in 2018], including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.”

Mac Donald goes on to note that blacks represent just 13% of the U.S. population, and yet they commit 90% of our nation’s violent crime. She adds that this ratio is becoming even more skewed despite the Left’s continuous claims of Trump-inspired white violence. “Blacks,” she writes, “are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50 percent — according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017.”

When was the last time you read crime statistics like these in The New York Times or The Washington Post, or heard them discussed on NPR, or saw them displayed on CNN or CBS or NBC or ABC or PBS?

If racism in America is indeed worthy of our discussion, then by all means let’s have a discussion. But let’s be sure to have a thorough discussion, a legitimate discussion, an honest discussion — rather than a politically correct one that avoids these inconvenient and troubling truths.

SOURCE





The COVID-19 panic is unnecessary — it is much less threatening than we think

Deutsche Bank analyst Tim Baker was perplexed on Friday, highlighting in a research note to clients the “extent to which Australia and New Zealand stand out for a heavy response to a relatively mild problem”.

“Put simply the Antipodes have coronavirus caseloads at the bottom of the pack but lockdown stringency at the top; governments have chosen to respond with extreme caution,” he said.

In France, about 5000 cases a day are being diagnosed, yet the French government has vowed not to lock down the country again. Indeed, if my friends’ social media accounts are anything to go by, Europe rapidly is getting back to normal. While the flow of cases has rebounded a little, death rates have collapsed.

Meanwhile on Monday, after another 73 new cases were announced in Victoria, Australian Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth said it was unlikely the second six-week lockdown would end on September 13.

What can explain such extreme behaviour, and the extraordinary contrast in attitude, well into a pandemic that has been much less deadly than feared?

A Roy Morgan poll last week found 72 per cent supported Victoria’s 8pm to 5am curfew and 5km restriction. Three-quarters said restaurants, cafes and pubs shouldn’t be able to serve food even with social distancing. Almost 90 per cent wanted masks to be compulsory “when leaving home”. Almost 60 per cent wanted it to remain illegal to visit immediate family. Until this year, the World Health Organisation and senior disease experts advised against all of these actions to combat viral epidemics.

From the perspective of those halcyon days, our response to the coronavirus would be a story befitting Charles Mackay’s classics Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. Masked solo drivers are now a common sight in Sydney.

Perhaps Victorians’ authoritarian tendencies have arisen from extreme — and unjustified — fear of the coronavirus. Even in nations that didn’t mandate tough lockdowns, such as Sweden, economic activity and movement collapsed.

In Britain and Sweden the public thinks 6 per cent to 7 per cent of the population has died, which would be 3.6 million and 600,000 people, respectively. The figures are 41,500 and 5800. Interestingly, Sweden’s overall mortality for this year, adjusted for population size, is barely distinguishable from previous years.

Franklin Templeton, a US investment manager, recently conducted a survey of Americans that left its chief investment officer stunned. About 70 per cent of all age groups said they were worried about contracting “serious health effects” from the virus, a “staggering discrepancy with the actual mortality data”. “For people aged 18 to 24 the share of whose worried about health consequences is 400 times higher than their share of total COVID deaths, for 25 to 34 it’s 90 times,” Sonal Desai said.

“The misperception is greater for those who identify as Democrats and for those who rely more on social media for information.”

As growth of cases slows, as it has everywhere, many Victorians will attribute the decline wholly to the lockdown, to the wisdom of the state government, a classic logical fallacy but politically powerful.

Looking at data from 23 countries and 25 US states, economists from the US Federal Reserve and the University of California last month found growth rates of coronavirus deaths surged and dissipated rapidly everywhere, not­with­standing government policy.

“Given that transmission rates for COVID-19 fell virtually everywhere in the world during this early pandemic period, we are concerned that studies may substantially overstate the role of government-mandated shutdowns in reducing disease transmission,” they wrote.

Humans spontaneously took action to avoid viruses, whatever government said, they reasoned, and “unexplained natural forces” also accounted for the decline in transmission. Seven of the eight influenza pandemics since 1700 fizzled out without any government action. “Unfortunately, each of those seven had a second substantial peak approximately six months after the first,” they did add, somewhat ominously. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety,” American journalist HL Mencken wrote.

Fear might be helpful in eliciting compliance with public health measures — and for attracting clicks to online news articles — but it’s a disaster for economic activity and the livelihoods of swathes of the population who would like to get on with their life.

If most people significantly over-estimate the risk of coronavirus in a year’s time, they will not travel or consume in anything like the way they used to. Life will be a lot less pleasant. For now, JobKeeper and JobSeeker have papered over the economic damage wrought by lockdowns and fear.

George Orwell worried that man’s future was a boot stamping on his face. If the government doesn’t rectify such misplaced fear, it may end up being a mask.

SOURCE 


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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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