The coming blackouts

 Here is a link to an article by a planning engineer (electric). It illustrates how irrational is our current electric grid policy.

Once again, Government is proving to be the problem, not the solution. Climate alarmists also are advocating policies that will prove unwise.

Here are some excerpts.

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The “green” provisions of the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act are sweeping and it appears they may do more harm than good. The philosophy behind the inflation Reduction Act seems to reflect the belief that if you can get the ball rolling, adding additional wind and solar will get easier. However, as Part 1 discussed, the compounding problems associated with increasing the penetration level of wind and solar generation are extreme.

Replacing conventional synchronous generating resources, which have been the foundation of the power system, with asynchronous intermittent resources will degrade the reliability of the grid and contribute to blackout risk. The power system is the largest, most complicated wonderful machine ever made. At any given time, it must deal with multiple problems and remain stable. No resources are perfect; in a large system you will regularly find numerous problems occurring across the system. Generally, a power system can handle multiple problems and continue to provide reliable service. However, when a system lacks supportive generation sources, it becomes much more likely it will not be able function reliably when problems occur.

Just as a pile of dry wood and flammable material can be sparked from many potential sources, or a very unhealthy person could succumb to many different threats, a weakened power system is more vulnerable to many conditions than a robust one. In this post I discussed responsibility for the Texas winter blackout. Many things went wrong that day in Texas. But often many things do go wrong – the real problem was that the Texas market did not provide incentives for standby resources. In Texas there were not enough committed resources to provide for the system load levels and potential contingencies. Texas relied on an energy market designed to favor wind and solar resources and it failed them. However, many analyses of the Texas blackout focused on the proximate conditions (problems of the sort that are common) ignoring or denying the major underlying problem.

We are seeing blackouts and system problems all over the world now, unlike in the past. There is a common factor for most – high penetration of intermittent asynchronous wind and solar generation. This commonality is generally ignored when evaluating the individual outages as vested interests focus on the triggering conditions. There are always going to be potential triggering conditions. No one anywhere will eliminate triggering conditions so absolving green resources of blame because such things exist in the real world only makes sense as theater. When faced with “green” outages, focusing on the proximate triggers serves to protect “green” interests and helps mask the emerging greater problems to come.

The Inflation Reduction Act is promoting a system with less stability, robustness and reliability. Besides describing how these green programs contribute in general to major outages, I will conclude this article by identifying a specific type of outage likely to become more common due to provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Before describing how the Act impacts the system, I will take a detour and describe a specific past incident where a system element which was valuable at one penetration level became a system detriment at a higher penetration level.

Penetration Case Review: Heat Pumps

A heat pump is an efficient way to heat or cool. As a refrigerator transfers the heat out of the refrigerator to the coils in the back to cool or freeze your food while making your house warmer, a heat pump can transfer heat between a home or building and the outdoors. In the winter it transfers heat from the outdoors to the interior. In the summer it transfers heat from the house to the outdoors. With a heat pump you don’t “create” heat you merely use a small amount of electricity to efficiently transfer heat in the preferred direction.

Even when the temperature is cold outside a heat pump can extract heat from the outdoors and use it to warm a home or residence. As the temperature drops below 40 degrees. However. heat pumps become less efficient and as temperatures drop below freezing, the home must be heated with a backup method, usually resistance heating. Resistance heating makes the process more expensive and inefficient. It is possible to exchange heat with a source below the ground or a source of water to get around this problem, or alternatively to provide heat from natural gas backup, but these approaches have not worked out as practical means on any significant scale.

Because of their behavior at colder temperatures, heat pumps are not appropriate for all parts of the country. In the north the many hours they would have to run with resistance heat makes them both environmentally irresponsible and too expensive. Natural gas is a better option. They work where it is hot enough some of the year that air conditioners are installed anyway (thus they don’t increase the summer peak) and where it is cold but not too cold at most times. If they run in resistance mode only a few days a year that does not cancel the net benefits, but with longer time periods the benefits are lost.

Encouraging heat pumps was all the rage, when I first started working in the southeastern US. Most entities in the south did not see winter peak loads, so adding heat pump load in the winter was a great thing. It was a win, win, win situation for all involved. The economics work generally the same for all utilities, but I will describe how they worked for distribution cooperatives.

Distribution co-ops pay a demand charge based on their peak load and an energy charge based on their kwh usage. Residential sales are on a kwh usage, so the peak charge must be recovered through the kwh charge imposed on residential customers. The better a Co-ops’ load factor (total kwhs sold/(peak demand*total hours), the lower their rate can be set. Heat pumps did not raise the demand charge, but increased energy sales and allowed the demand charge to be spread out over more energy sales lowering energy costs for all.

Builders were rewarded with free underground distribution if they committed to building all electric homes which relied on heat pumps. Rebates were given for heat pump installations and often those installing heat pumps were rewarded with free water heaters. My company had a big marketing division supporting the work of the distribution cooperatives to support efforts at increasing heat pumps. It worked well, almost perfectly. The only drawback was that on very cold days the heat pumps would switch to resistance heating and this made the customers’ meters spin at high consumption levels, raising heating costs a lot that day. But with incentives and the saving at most times, those costs were not that significant. The overall winter load increased a lot on those days, but it was still below the summer peak at most times. Plus, when it’s cold you can put a little more load on the power lines and fossil fuel generators can provide more power without overheating. So, the heat pumps did not contribute to increasing fixed costs.

Everything was going well as the penetration level of heat pumps increased. But there was a cloud on the horizon. Looking ahead it seemed like that within the decade our winter peak would move to surpass the summer peak. This meant that the winter peak would soon drive the need for improvements and expansions. Unfortunately, what should be technical disagreements are often political problems as well. In a battle of experts, the consultants working for the marketers disputed the trend. The programs continued and everything was great in the short term.

Sooner than expected the winter peak did hit and it hit hard and it hit regularly. On the coldest days when the resistive heating kicked in, peak demand rose sharply and swiftly. The winter “needle shaped” peak drove investment and costs. The mostly residential cooperatives who had invested big in the heat pump programs had to pay rates based on their demand during the new winter peak, greatly raising their average energy costs.

While almost no one wanted to see it coming, once the effects hit, most everyone in the power supply chain wished they had. This was a terrible blow to rural electric cooperatives who had invested big to improve their load factor, only to find they had subsidized a worse winter load factor. Residential customers are not charged for contributing to peak demand (the meters don’t measure that) so for them their contribution to the demand charges has no significant penalty. For customers in this region, it still makes sense to put in heat pumps so the problems continue to grow for some to this day.

The Inflation Reduction Act Enabling Blackout Conditions

The Inflation Reduction Act seeks to decarbonize the grid. In looking at the grid, you should not make one goal a priority but should instead seek to balance competing objectives. See Balance and the Grid for a discussion of how efforts to maximize one objective without due attention to other major goals can result in a worsening condition for all goals. It seems apparent that all the “green” measures in the Inflation Reduction Act were included because independently they all seem capable of reducing carbon. I have not seen any evidence that any consideration was given to system reliability or how these measures might interact to create problems.

The green measures encouraged by the inflation Reduction Act will lead to generic blackouts in many situations as described earlier in this essay and in Part 1. Presented below is a chart from a previous posting, titled “Will California “learn” to avoid Peak Rolling Blackouts?” The projected peak that was causing blackout concerns was only around 10% above the average for the previous year’s included in the chart.

The specific prediction of an outage condition I will make here involves winter peak demand conditions. Winter peaks can be extreme, much more so than summer peaks. As temperatures climb in the summer, air conditioners reach a saturation point. The climb in summer peak demand with each additional increase in temperature typically flattens out. In the winter each additional degree drop can increase demand more than the one before. There are a lot of potential sources of resistive heat that increase demand. In severe cold more and more heating elements come into play and the increase in demand rather than flattening can go up exponentially. Peak winter loads tend to hit just before sunrise. The system sees a rapidly rising peak, often described as needle shaped, which drops as the sun comes up and temperatures warm. Such peaks can easily be 5 to 20% above normal winter peaks in many areas. Thus these conditions have the potential to cause more severe concerns than California sees during extreme summer conditions.

The Act encourages solar at the bulk, distribution and residential levels. Solar will be of no benefit during such a peak, but does serve to push out other resources which might support the system during such conditions. Plus, there is a double whammy. Solar power supply supplied to the grid will not be there and at that same time homes usually supplemented with solar will be putting maximal demands on the grid. (Note -The infrastructure needs to supply a home which only puts a demand on the system a few hours a year concurrent with other uses maximum demand is basically the same as the infrastructure need to support a full requirements home. It is challenging to collect that from such customers. When there are rate challenges and it’s difficult to collect system costs, needed infrastructure often is delayed.) In any case widespread adoption and reliance on solar creates concerns around winter morning peaks.

The Act encourages wind development. Like solar, wind will push other better suited resources out of the supply pool. Wind is generally slower just before sunrise and winter is not generally peak wind season. In any case wind is intermittent and some of the times during cold weather wind is not available. Some say that wind tends to rise up as temperatures get colder and there are ways to keep turbines from freezing,. Nonetheless, we do see freezing problems and a tendency for wind to be there is not a guarantee. Green resources perform much better in theory than practice. At least at sometimes wind power will not likely be a great asset during winter morning peaks demand conditions.

The Act encourages efficiency. This could help to reduce load and thereby make severe outages less likely. But the real problem with peak demand is the difference in demand during the extreme peak period and other more normal high load periods. If efficiency reduces load, you will likely see a reduction in generating resources to serve the load at all high load levels. The risk from peak conditions is more attributable to the delta between the winter peak demand and more common high load levels. This is because regular loads drive generation additions more than extreme conditions. I don’t know that efficiency measures work better during the most extreme winter temperatures than it does at normal winter cold temperatures (probably less so), therefore its mitigating impact may be small to none. Also, there are those who might argue that consistent with Jevon’s Paradox efficiency efforts lead to increased energy consumption. The basic mechanism, behind this counterintuitive theorem, is illustrated by mechanisms observed such as individual consumers with more efficient homes choosing to heat more rooms or increase comfort because you get more for your money in an efficient home.

Solar, wind and efficiency are intended to decrease fossil fuel-based resources. Combustion turbines and hydro are generally the most appropriate resource for limited duration demand surges. The expansion potential of hydro is very limited and this resource can not make up for lost combustion turbines in most areas. Combustion turbines perform relatively well in cold conditions and old mostly useless units traditionally have been called on to get the system through short term peak demand conditions.

To be fair, the Act does encourage energy storage and that should help somewhat with peak demand concerns. Care is needed as batteries do not give their best performance in cold temperatures. But in light of all the other changes that is a huge burden to place on technology at this stage of development.

The chart below shows the US typical resource generation by major energy source. Imagine how this chart will look as fossil fuel is phased out. Hydro only makes up about 6% of the mix and expansion there is limited. Nuclear could replace these resources but it is not great for ramping up and down to follow needle peaks. If wind and solar step up to replace fossil fuels this leave us vulnerable to energy shortages during winter peaks just before daybreak. Battery capability would need to be huge, expansive and probably would not be procured in advance of demonstrated needs.

It is frightening to imagine how to serve a vast winter system demand just before daybreak in the green future. But one more feature of the Clean Air Act helps raise concerns to an even higher level. The Inflation Reduction Act subsidizes heat pumps!

Heat pumps are attractive to the Inflation Reeducation Act for only one reason. They help reduce the demand for gas furnaces. Subsidies will be available in areas where today heat pumps are not considered practical. Today it doesn’t make sense to drive resistance heating with electricity generated from fossil fuels. It’s inefficient and environmentally unsound. However, you can theorize that if all electricity is green, inefficient electric heat is green too. Replacing natural gas heat with heat pumps is not a good idea when one considers their impact on the power system during winter peak conditions.

Under the Act’s subsidy provisions people who live in areas where heat pumps don’t make sense may decide to get them anyway with the subsidy. For example, if you live in a cooler area and you’ve gotten by without air conditioning, now your units can be subsidized and the resistance heat will be there for you in the winter too. Green advocates talk of shaping the load to better use resources, but that evidently can be quickly forgotten when other green objectives emerge. Putting in a bunch of heat pumps and building tremendous infrastructure to support their short-term demands is far from environmentally responsible.

Specific Blackout Prediction

With a lot of help from the Inflation Reduction Act, we will likely see these full set of conditions in many areas:Very cold pre-dawn extreme temperatures
Backup quick start fossil fuel combustion turbines have been largely driven out of the resource mix,
Nuclear, hydro and battery resources are tapped out
Solar is absent from the distribution side and not available on the generation side
Wind may or may not be blowing
Heat pumps are operating maxed out in resistance mode, along with other resistive heating to drive system load to extreme heights
As with every power system there will be a few problems on the system
System will be forced to deliberately shed a lot of load or may go unstable and suffer crippling blackouts

To the extent as claimed by some, climate change is driving more extreme winter peaks in the near term, we may see this situation sooner than later. In any case green measures are driving us there with current historical weather patterns. Being without heat and power in extremely cold conditions is highly problematic for most individuals, businesses and industries.

What can be done to prevent such blackouts? Unfortunately, not much attention seems to have been paid to concerns of this sort. It might be argued we need vast surpluses of wind and storage (those not paying attention may argue we need more solar) to support winter load. The cost and environmental impact of these extra mostly underused resources would be large and prohibitive. This would be true weather the resources were wind, solar, batteries or nuclear. Keeping older already manufactured combustion turbines around for emergency conditions would be a much more reasonable means of mitigating risks. The additional environmental impacts of using something already manufactured and placed in service are small compared to building extensive new resources, no matter how green these resources may be claimed to be.

How do we encourage smart ways to provide emergency capacity? Current energy policies are seeking to direct as much money toward “green” resources and costs away from them. As discussed earlier, in Texas they are moving away from recognizing capacity value consistent with a trend towards energy only markets. I’m a big fan of markets, but they don’t do a good job of protecting against extreme conditions especially when no one has ultimate responsibility (except governmental entities) for ensuring load is served. Some measures would need to be employed to compensate for providing and ensuring combustion turbines are available for emergency conditions. But no one seems to be talking about such measures. The Inflation Reduction Act appears to be a single focus approach to a nuanced problem. Cut CO2 emissions and hope for great innovations. Reliability threats apparently are not on their radar, nor are they an articulated or contemplated concerns. It’s a shame because reduced reliability can wreak havoc on the economy and the environment.

“Be Afraid, Be Actually Afraid”: Reporters Panic at the Thought of Twitter Restoring Free Speech Protections

 Jonathan Turley is on target, again.

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“Be afraid, be actually afraid.” Those words from former Politico Magazine editor Garrett M. Graff captures the hyperventilation in the media this week. No it is not Vladimir Putin’s threat of unleashing a nuclear war or the word that our national debt has reached a staggering $31 trillion. No, it is the news that Elon Musk may go forward with the purchase of Twitter and . . . [trigger warning] . . . free speech protections might be restored on the platform. The pearl-clutching of various media and academic figures shows how engrained the censorship culture has become in the United States.

After Musk indicated that he was going forward, the Twitter stock quickly soared. The news that Musk might bring an end to Twitter’s extensive censorship system had previously drawn people back to the platform. However, the media is in full panic mode that the control over speech could be loosened with Musk. Twitter employees also previously panicked at the thought that they might lose some of their control over the speech of others.

NBC News reporter Ben Collins quickly raised the most immediate concern that the sudden ability to speak freely on Twitter could impact the midterm elections.

For those of you asking: Yes, I do think this site can and will change pretty dramatically if Musk gets full control over it.

No, there is no immediate replacement.

If it gets done early enough, based on the people he's aligned with, yes, it could actually affect midterms.

Consider that for a second: the loss of control over political speech could mean a loss of control over the midterm elections. There is, of course, no concern by Collins that Twitter (and other social media companies) have long been “aligned” with Democrats and the Biden Administration.

NPR editor Neela Banerjee retweeted and echoed his concern about “the broader implications for the rest of us of a Musk takeover of Twitter.” Others joined in on the collective panic that there could be a loss of control over what people say on social media.

BBC journalist Dickens Olewe warned that “Guardrails will be dropped, misinfo & conspiracy theories will thrive. No functional alternatives available, this is it: a complete destruction of the global public square. Been nice y’all.” In other words, free speech protections will lead to the destruction of “the global public square” by losing control of who can speak or what people can say.

PoliticusUSA head Sarah Reese Jones seemed to move from the desperate to the outright delusional: “Before 2020, Facebook deplatformed progressives, then it came for mainstream media and elevated only radicalized conservatives. Cut to 2022, we know Elon Musk plans to do same with Twitter. We know how damaging it will be.Tech giants pose ongoing threat to western democracy.”

That’s right, social media companies have been favoring conservatives and targeting progressives. That is why a wide array of conservative groups and figures have been banned or suspended. That is why the Hunter Biden laptop story was buried before the election. That is why there are now numerous reports of backchannels with the government in censoring opposing views.

Euronews correspondent Shona Murray tweeted, “The end of Twitter as we know it is nigh.” I certainly hope so. However, it may be a case of “your Twitter is dead, long live Twitter.” As discussed earlier, the Internet was once the greatest single advance in free speech since the printing press.

The one thing that we agree on is that this could be a historic moment and free speech could be returning to a major platform of social media. The company seemingly wrote off free speech years ago. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”

I have written about five steps that Musk can take to restore free speech. However, the key is to break a culture of censorship at the company. If Musk moves Twitter out of San Francisco, it may help in that restructuring in replacing staff with those committed to free speech values. However, the key to restoring these values is to adopt what I have called the “first amendment model” for the company.

The question is whether Musk will continue to hold the courage to follow his stated convictions on free speech. I hope so. If so, the many censorship advocates in the media certainly do have reason to fear that free speech could be return to a major social media company.

Massive errors in FBI’s Active Shooting Reports regarding cases where civilians stop attacks: Instead of 4.4%, the correct number is at least 34.4%. In 2021, it is at least 49.1%. Excluding gun-free zones, it averaged over 50%

 The Center for Crime Prevention Research corrects the FBI's statistics on the frequency of armed civilians stopping shooters.

Here is the link.

Here are some excerpts.

It appears that the FBI and the media are not credible sources for facts about the advantages of armed civilians.

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The FBI reports that armed citizens only stopped 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.

An analysis by my organization identified a total of 360 active shooter incidents during that period and found that an armed citizen stopped 124. A previous report looked at only instances when armed civilians stopped what likely would have been mass public shootings. There were another 24 cases that we didn’t include where armed civilians stopped armed attacks, but the suspect didn’t fire his gun. Those cases are excluded from our calculations, though it could be argued that a civilian also stopped what likely could have been an active shooting event.

The FBI reported that armed citizens thwarted 4.4% of active shooter incidents, while the CPRC found 34.4%.

Two factors explain this discrepancy – one, misclassified shootings; and two, overlooked incidents. Regarding the former, the CPRC determined that the FBI reports had misclassified five shootings: In two incidents, the Bureau notes in its detailed write-up that citizens possessing valid firearms permits confronted the shooters and caused them to flee the scene. However, the FBI did not list these cases as being stopped by armed citizens because police later apprehended the attackers. In two other incidents, the FBI misidentified armed civilians as armed security personnel. Finally, the FBI failed to mention citizen engagement in one incident.

For example, the Bureau’s report about the Dec. 29, 2019 attack on the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, that left two men dead does not list this as an incident of “civic engagement.” Instead, the FBI lists this attack as being stopped by a security guard. A parishioner, who had volunteered to provide security during worship, fatally shot the perpetrator. That man, Jack Wilson, told Dr. John Lott that he was not a security professional. He said that 19 to 20 members of the congregation were armed that day, and they didn’t even keep track of who was carrying a concealed weapon.

As for the second factor — overlooked cases — the FBI, more significantly, missed 25 incidents identified by CPRC where what would likely have been a mass public shooting was thwarted by armed civilians. There were another 83 active shooting incidents that they missed.

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News outlets often raise concerns that allowing concealed handgun carry will result in innocent bystanders being shot or in police accidentally shooting permit holders. White’s AP dispatch on the Greenwood shooting quoted Adam Lankford, identified as “a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama,” who stated: “While it’s certainly a good thing in this mall shooting that someone was able to stop it before it went any further, let’s not think we can substitute that outcome in all past and future incidents. If everyone’s carrying a firearm, the risk that something bad happens just gets much larger.”

Professor Moody, who studies mass public shootings, notes that such warnings are misleading:

“The media and gun control advocates always seem concerned with the worst possible outcomes when firearms are involved. We know that armed citizens do, in fact, stop active shooters. And while there’s a possibility of a bystander getting hurt, the data put together by the CPRC show that an armed citizen has yet to accidentally shoot an innocent bystander. We also know that the police have accidentally shot the hero citizen just once. That was in Colorado on June 21, 2021. That’s not something that would normally happen, because the police usually arrive long after the incident is resolved.“

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What is particularly troubling is the unwillingness of the FBI and the media to correct these omissions when informed about them. When Dr. John Lott worked at the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy and the Office of Justice Programs in 2020, the FBI was notified of their omissions involving potential mass public shootings, but they refused to correct those errors. Lott had previously alerted the FBI to similar problems back in 2015 and he published the list in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today in March 2015, but corrections were never made even after the FBI admitted they were missing cases.

When the CPRC emailed Ed White, the AP reporter who wrote that article, about the omissions in the Texas State numbers, he responded: “Our reporting, citing the specific research by Texas State U. over a 20-year period, was accurate. No correction was necessary.” The reporter did not need to take our word for these errors. A list of these cases and links to the news stories where mass public shootings were stopped was provided to him so that he could check out the omissions himself.

Sarah: An example of the damage done by today’s educational system

Don Boudreaux, one of the relatively few remaining educators talks with one of his students, Sarah.

Sarah's responses make clear how much damage to thinking our educational system has been doing. A large chunk of education today is indoctrination, not education, which has been so successful as to make many students opaque to facts and reason.

Your reaction to DB's report on his discussion with Sarah will tell a lot about your ability to place due emphasis on facts and reason.

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The opening lecture that I deliver every time I teach a Principles of Microeconomics course, which I do each semester, is on what the economic historian and liberal philosopher Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Great Enrichment.” I impress upon my students (most of whom are in their late teens) that they and everyone they know are off-the-charts materially wealthier than were the vast majority of all humans who ever lived. I explain that millennia after millennia, our human ancestors breathed, toiled, and perished in poverty so grinding that we today can barely imagine it.

This pattern of existence, when reckoned in historical time, was suddenly shattered just over two centuries ago. First in Holland, and then even more spectacularly in Britain, ordinary people gained steadily greater access to goods and services that in the past either were available only to royals, nobles, and members of high priestly classes, or – more commonly – weren’t available to anyone at all. Even Louis XIV, likely the most powerful man in the world, could not travel in motorized vehicles, escape from the heat of summer into air-conditioned rooms, converse in real time with people out of earshot, avoid having his face disfigured with smallpox, improve his vision with contact lenses or Lasik surgery, or treat his gonorrhea with antibiotics.

A key purpose of my intro econ course is to help my students understand that and how peaceful, commercial cooperation – today spanning the globe and involving billions of people nearly all of whom are strangers to each other – emerges to create and maintain our astonishing material prosperity.

Some students more than others resist my explanation of how. One such student – a freshman who I’ll call “Sarah” – came up to me after our most recent class and asked this question: “Isn’t our wealth the result of slavery?” She continued: “My high-school history teacher taught us that our wealth was extracted from slaves.” Sarah seemed to be convinced by her high-school teacher’s explanation.

Don to Sarah: “Yes, I’ve heard that claim, but I don’t buy it. How do you explain the fact slavery in America ended 157 years ago and ever since then the wealth of ordinary Americans has continued not only to grow, but to grow far more impressively than it did when slavery still existed. Think of what happened in the 20th century. Ordinary Americans got easy access to electrification, radio, television, automobiles, a continent-spanning network of paved roads, air travel, air conditioning, supermarkets, antibiotics, contact lenses, and laptops and smartphones. All of these pieces of prosperity were created long after slavery’s demise.”

Sarah to Don: “Yes, but these things were made possible by the wealth that whites extracted from slaves. Without the wealth produced by slaves and then stolen from them, we wouldn’t have had the foundation to produce what we did after slavery ended.”

Don: “American slaves worked overwhelmingly in agriculture. How did, say, cotton picked by slaves in Louisiana in 1860 turn 160 years later in Michigan into middle-class homes equipped with wi-fi, Google Home, and refrigerators stuffed with orange juice from Florida, pineapples from Hawaii, and sauvignon blanc from New Zealand?”

Sarah: “The wealth stolen from slave labor was eventually invested in factories that produced all these things.”

Don: “Not so. Consider, for example, Henry Ford. He was born into modest means on a Michigan farm in 1863 to a family with no history of slave-owning. What made him successful in business?”

Sarah: “You’re asking me?”

Don: “I am.”

Sarah: “I’m not sure. I don’t know the specifics.”

Don: “Henry Ford had entrepreneurial ideas. He also had the gumption and the freedom, as the economist Deirdre McCloskey says, ‘to have a go’ at putting his ideas into practice. Ford, like countless other lesser-known entrepreneurs, created wealth. Ford grew rich by dramatically increasing the efficiency of producing automobiles that the masses eagerly bought. His business success owed nothing to slavery.”

Sarah: “I get that he didn’t use slaves. But I feel that the capital to start his company probably came from wealth that had earlier been produced by slaves.”

Me: “First, the capital that first backed Ford came from a man named William H. Murphy. Born in 1855 in Maine, Murphy moved to Detroit where he and his father were successful in the lumber business. I’m pretty sure that post-Civil War Michigan lumbermen didn’t earn any income from slavery. Murphy, like Ford after him, created his wealth by running a successful business.

“Second, regardless of the source of the capital that Murphy invested in Ford’s new business, that investment would have been worth diddlysquat if Ford hadn’t had the vision, energy, and freedom to use those resources in ways that produced outputs that the masses wanted to buy and at costs low enough to make it worthwhile for Ford to continue to produce. This is what I mean when I say that Ford created wealth – wealth, obviously, for himself, but also for his customers in the form of automobiles that were worthwhile to purchase, and for his workers in the form of opportunities to earn incomes higher than they could have earned by working elsewhere.”

Sarah: “But I still feel that the seed money for all these later companies like Ford’s came from the slave economy that lasted in this country for centuries.”

Don: “Sarah, don’t feel. Think! Don’t you see that Ford created wealth? Don’t you see that he created value that didn’t exist until he put his entrepreneurial ideas into action? If Henry Ford could, without slavery – as you admit – turn some amount of wealth into a larger amount of wealth, why can’t other people have done the same, before and after Ford? Even if – contrary to fact – all of the seed money for the Ford Motor Co. happened to come from former slave owners, what created Henry Ford’s wealth and the valuable goods that he produced for millions of Americans was Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial vision and effort put into operation in an economy that permitted him to act entrepreneurially. No amount of resource-value grows into a larger amount of resource-value automatically.

“The ability of an entrepreneur to turn some amount of resource-value into greater resource-value doesn’t depend upon the source of the initial funding that the entrepreneur used to launch his or her venture. What matters is the entrepreneurship and the freedom of markets, which emphatically has nothing to do with slavery.”

Sarah: “I don’t know. Capitalism followed slavery. That must be significant.”

Me: “Do you remember my lecture from about three weeks ago in which I warned against the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy? You’re committing that fallacy now. You can’t legitimately conclude that if event A is followed by event B, that A caused B. Maybe it did, but maybe it didn’t. In fact, it’s possible that B happened despite, and not because of, A. Just because people leave their homes in the morning carrying umbrellas doesn’t mean that the rain that started later that day was caused by people carrying umbrellas.”

“Slavery was prevalent throughout human societies for millennia. If slavery was the cause of capitalism, don’t you think that capitalism would have started at least seven or eight thousand years ago? If slavery is the source of our prosperity today, why are not all countries in the world as rich as are the United States and Sweden? Do you realize that Brazil had slavery until 1888, nearly a quarter-century longer than the U.S. had slavery? Yet Brazilians have always been, and remain today, much poorer than Americans.”

Sarah: “I’m not convinced.”

Me: “Well, may I ask that you keep an open mind for the rest of this semester? Perhaps what’s still to come in our economics course will help you to better understand why I’m certain that modern prosperity has no connection whatsoever to slavery except that it is capitalism – and the ideas that support it – that brought about slavery’s demise.”

Sarah: “Yes, I’ll keep an open mind. Good night, professor.”

Me: “Thanks Sarah. That’s all I can ask. Good night. See you in our next class.”

Marxism at the Museum

 Andy Kessler gets it right at the Wall Street Journal.

The Woke culture misrepresents economics at the New York Public Library.

The educational system has done a great job at destroying rationality and tolerance. We are almost to 1984 and moving fast.

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Polls show more than half of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. have a negative view of capitalism. More than half have a positive view of socialism. I wonder where they got that.

I recently strolled through the New York Public Library’s “Treasures” exhibit, which would delight readers and writers alike: Charles Dickens’s writing desk, a manuscript delivered in a box from former newspaper columnist Mark Twain, draft cover art for Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” and an illustrated page from Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” manuscript. Pretty cool stuff.

Ah look, a first edition of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” from 1776—the free-market bible. I was in awe until I read the description: “Adam Smith believed, as did Karl Marx the following century, that national prosperity was best measured by a country’s labor power rather than by how much gold lay in its treasury.” I guess the description is technically correct, but Karl Marx? In the same breath as Adam Smith, who called free markets “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty”? Unlike Smith, Marx naively saw a static world without productivity, only labor exploitation. He completely missed that labor is more brain than brawn. Add exhibit curators to the list of socialist tub thumpers.

I wonder what Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the rather capitalistic private-equity firm Blackstone and giver of $100 million to the New York Public Library, whose name is etched in stone outside, thinks about the Marxist agenda of the library’s curators.

Wouldn’t you know it, next to “The Wealth of Nations” was none other than manuscript notes for “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx with this description: “The work has exerted an immense and lasting influence on world events: over the past century, its ideas have not only maintained a secure place in the realm of economic and political theory, but also inspired anticapitalist revolutions across the globe.” OK, but it was a lasting negative influence. And of course there was no mention of the hundreds of millions of people impoverished and slaughtered by Marxist regimes.

The description goes on: “Karl Marx’s foundational account of capitalist production and its manifold effects on human lives still inspires argument, insight, and resistance.” Inspires? Marxism is a desperate and dangerous call for redistribution from the productive class to, say, museum curators. No matter, a 2018 New York Times opinion piece blared, “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” The Marx rehabilitation tour continues.

A 2020 Edelman global survey found that 56% agreed that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world.” Really? I guess somehow the global increase in living standards and lowering of the extreme poverty rate from 36% to under 10% since 1990 happened by magic. It’s really a miracle since capitalism is so bad and Marxism is so good. Of the porous southern border President Biden recently noted, “What’s on my watch now is Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.” Why would anyone leave a Marxist paradise for the capitalist U.S.? Maybe the New York Public Library has an answer.

An almost fanatical devotion to Marxism is everywhere. The Journal’s Eric Gibson wrote a fantastic piece last month titled “Woke Ideologues Are Taking Over American Art Museums,” which got serious pushback from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’re exposed to anticapitalist agendas every day.

You wouldn’t expect this from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, but here are some words under Cornelius Vanderbilt’s portrait: “He began in the rough-and-tumble world of the New York port and by 1829 had parlayed several small shipping ventures into a stake in the lucrative Hudson River trade.” No mention that he did this by offering lower prices and better service than the Hudson River Steamboat Association, a government-sanctioned monopoly. Still, the museum labels the Commodore a “ruthless monopolist.” He was no saint, but he did provide affordable steamships to San Francisco and helped expand railroads. Like the term “robber baron,” this is anticapitalist propaganda disguised as education.

Here’s another from the Portrait Gallery: “John D. Rockefeller once remarked ‘The only question with wealth is, what do you do with it?’ By 1913, Rockefeller, a founder of the Standard Oil Company, had amassed an estimated $900 million, earned from an aggressive reorganization of the oil industry.” Get it? Wealth is evil and never deserved. Remarkably, no mention of his role in driving down the price to consumers of energy that boosted a rapidly expanding economy. Again, no saint, but the gallery notes, he “rehabilitated his reputation in later years by supporting charitable causes.”

This is a rather loud message to capitalists Bezos, Musk, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg: Give your money away if you want to be remembered kindly. Just don’t give your money to libraries or museums. Please.

The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization

Victor Davis Hanson at townhall.com on where are civilization is headed - and why.

As B. F. Skinner noted long ago - it's all about consequences - and unless those are changes our civilization will continue its decline.

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To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home - only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.
Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.

So, the great achievement of Western civilization - consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit - was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.

But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.

As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded - as civilization went headlong in reverse.

We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.

We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish New Green Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age - as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.

But meanwhile Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.

Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So, they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.

What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.

The Biden Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.

When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.

The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that they might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.

The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals.

It is not to hector soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force.

The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin's Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran.

At home, the Biden Administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.

Utter chaos followed. Three million migrants have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high-school diplomas, or capital.

The streets of our cities are anarchical - and by intent.

Defunding the police, emptying the jails, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent.

America is racing backwards into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern "critical legal theory" will ensure them exemption from punishment.

Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.

But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support - as green nihilists are attempting - and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.

Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.

So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions, and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed and sheltered America.

Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite - terrified of what they have wrought - selfishly retreat to their private keeps.

But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.

As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization.

When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.

Another attempt by Tech through censorship, etc., to influence the coming elections

 Here is Jonathan Turley pointing out the double standard on elections with yet another example.

Here is a link to the video he mentions - it's worth watching.

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YouTube Demonetizes Taibbi Video Showing Democrats Claiming Prior Elections Were Stolen

In the latest attack on free speech, YouTube had demonetized a video disseminated by former Rolling Stone and current Substack journalist Matt Taibbi. YouTube has previously shown open political bias in its censorship and demonetization policies. However, this is remarkably blatant in demonetizing a video that showed how Democrats previously claimed elections of Republicans were stolen — contradicting the narrative maintained in the media and on social media.

Taibbi sent out an email to his subscribers that revealed YouTube’s decision to demonetize:

Today we’re releasing a video Matt Orfalea has been working on, showing years of audio and video clips, tweets, and headlines in which Democratic Party politicians and media figures describe Donald Trump’s presidency as illegitimate. Before it was even published on this site, Matt received the above notice.

I’d like to thank YouTube for making our point. The material in this video does not promote the idea that any election was stolen or illegitimate. On the contrary, it shows a great mass of comments from Democratic partisans and pundits who themselves make that claim, about the 2016 election. Those comments were not censored or suppressed when made the first time around, by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre, Adam Schiff, Rob Reiner, Tom Arnold, and Chris Hayes, among many others.

Nor did any platform step in to issue warnings when my former boss, Keith Olbermann, promised with regard to Trump’s ascension to the White House, “It will not be a peaceful transfer of power.”

However, the decision to assemble these materials in one place, inviting audiences to consider their meaning, apparently crosses a line. Now we know: you can deny election results on a platform like YouTube as much as you want, you can even promise disruption, but drawing attention to such behavior angers the algorithm. It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the double-standard in content moderation.


Demonetizing a video of what Democrats have previously declared is reminiscent of Twitter the blocking of the site LiberalsofTicTok to stop the site from replaying the postings of liberals.

YouTube and other companies are now openly advancing a political agenda in blocking or demonetizing such postings. This is only likely to get worse as we approach the midterm and 2024 elections. The effort is to actively block resources or access to conservative, libertarian, or contrarians viewpoints.

The company is owned by Google, which has also faced such criticism of political bias. These are publicly traded companies like Twitter that have written off many potential users to advance a political agenda of company staff. They are selling a censored product to consumers who want free speech forums. While these companies continue to dominate the market, they are fueling calls for Substack and other alternative sites committed to free speech. Taibbi writes on Substack.

Here is the video:

Self defense is a risky act – even when lawful

 Massad Ayoob lays out the risks in a self defense action at The American Handgunner.

Using a gun in self defense is a last resort. Ayoob's articles at the American Handgunner can help provide the knowledge you need so that you do not do something inappropriate or unnecessary. One thing you need to know is that a jury may not understand enough about guns and appropriate defensive action to recognize when using a gun in self defense is necessary to avoid death or serious bodily injury.

Remember: the best self defense - if it is possible to do so safely - is to escape from the situation.

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AYOOB FILES: GOING FOR A GUN: THE JARRETT JONES CASE

Situation: Snarling homicidal threats … A big man lunges for your gun and then appears to go for his own. You perform the indicated response … and end up tried for murder.

Lesson: Too few people, even in the criminal justice system, understand the concepts of disparity of force, disarming attempts and furtive movement shootings.

It is March 8, 2022, at about 10 p.m., and I’m starting this article on my laptop in a hotel in Aberdeen, SD, where a jury just came in with a verdict in the murder trial of Jarrett Jones.

Not Guilty on all counts. Total acquittal.

Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but this isn’t about drama or suspense. It’s about lessons. In this case, there were several.

BACKGROUND

Jon Schumacher and Jarrett Jones had a history. Jarrett, 48, was a prosperous farmer and real estate developer. Jon, 28, owned an excavating business. Two years before, Jon had started dating Jarrett’s then 17-year-old daughter. She had fallen in love with the tall, handsome Jon, who could be charming when he wanted to be, and she enjoyed acting as stepmom to Jon’s three young sons. Jarrett was an indulgent dad despite instinctive disapproval of the relationship and wanted his daughter to be happy.

Jarrett referred work to Jon and often helped him with manpower and equipment. Even so, Jon wasn’t making a go of his excavation business. Word was Jon was a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt. There were stories of jobs unfinished and people Jon hired going unpaid. Much of that debt was owed to Jarrett, who couldn’t say no when his daughter asked him to stake the boyfriend she loved.

It wasn’t long before the daughter discovered another side of Jon. She told Jarrett Jon beat her and, on one occasion, raped her. Jarrett had a “come to Jesus” meeting with him. Jon was meek and contrite, wanting to keep the beautiful young girl and the money Jarrett sent his way. He promised to be better.

The promises didn’t last long.

(UN)HAPPY NEW YEAR

Jon drowned his troubles in alcohol. There were rumors of drugs as well. We all know how much booze gets consumed in America on New Year’s Eve; by New Year’s Day of 2020, an increasingly angry Jon Schumacher was still drinking. He had borrowed a truck from Jarrett and crashed it into a snowbank. He had a Bushmaster AR15, a Beretta 391 autoloading 12-gauge and a GLOCK 19 pistol in the vehicle with him.

He called Jarrett’s daughter to come and get him. She couldn’t; she was taking care of his three sons. Jon flew into a rage and threatened to kill her if she didn’t obey him.

He had finally gone too far. She told him their relationship was over.

He was arrested for drunk driving and driving on a suspended license. When the state trooper asked him about a blood test, Jon replied morosely he would take it if it would get him free sooner. His blood alcohol content was nearly twice the legal limit.

Jarrett and one of his employees drove to the scene to retrieve the truck. Jarrett found the guns, cleared them, and put them in his safe. With them was Jon Schumacher’s coat. The GLOCK 19 had been in the coat pocket.

Meanwhile, an angry Jon had called his long-suffering ex-wife, who agreed to pick him up at the police station. He asked to be driven to Jarrett’s place. On the way, he asked her if she would come back to him. She declined. In a very short time frame, he had now been rejected by both of the women he professed to love.

ESCALATION

By the time a steaming Jon Schumacher arrives at the Jones place, the clock has ticked past midnight and into the wee hours of January 2. A concerned Jarrett has armed himself: In his hip holster is a subcompact 9mm 1911, a Kimber Micro 9 in desert tan color, which came with a Crimson Trace laser sight.

In the 13 minutes that follow, Jon’s rage becomes increasingly homicidal: He demands to see his ex-girlfriend and is refused by her and her dad. Jon explodes with threats to kill her, Jarrett and others. When the ex-wife demands he leave with her and he refuses, she leaves alone.
Jarrett, at one point, is far enough away from Jon that he feels safe taking a moment to turn his back to him and yells to the others to stay back. The 300-lb. employee is between him and Jon, whose back is to the door he entered through. Then Jarrett turns back to face Jon.

The moment comes when Jon grabs Jarrett by the throat. Jarrett breaks free and draws the Kimber, hoping its deterrent effect will bring Jon to his senses.

Every mammalian instinct, every human instinct, tells him to intersperse himself between his threat and his children. The daughter Jon has traumatized, now 19, is some 20 feet behind him in the office. So is his younger daughter, 12.

FLASHPOINT

Jarrett brings his pistol up in a two-hand Isosceles stance and again orders Jon to leave. He has closed the distance in hopes of moving Jon back toward the door he has entered through.

But Jon doesn’t back up. Jarrett comes to a stop. A security camera shows the men are now about five feet apart, chest to chest.

Jarrett is acutely aware his dominant right hand, the one holding the gun, is presently crippled. He has recently undergone carpal tunnel surgery and his recovery was complicated by a severe infection that has left the hand hurting, significantly weakened and encased in a soft cast. He is 5’5″ tall; Jon, 6’4″, looms over him. Having trained under instructor Justin Hoffman two years before to earn his South Dakota Enhanced Concealed Carry Permit, Jarrett is acutely aware of how quickly Jon can close the gap and snatch the gun … and how poor his chances will be to keep possession of the Kimber if a gun grab occurs.

By now, Jon has threatened to murder both Jarrett and his daughter and stated he doesn’t care if he dies himself. He has at one point threatened to kill his own three little kids. Jarrett knows if Jon tries to disarm him and kill everyone, he won’t be able to stop him. He realizes if that happens, his only chance will be to shoot Jon in time. The safety is off, and Jarrett’s index finger is poised on the front of the Kimber’s trigger guard.

He is on high alert, watching for attack signals. And what he sees now horrifies him.

Jon’s face bears a look Jarrett has never seen before, an expression of absolute hate and explosive rage. The veins in his forehead are bulging, and his eyes seem to be bugging out of his head. He has been clenching and unclenching his hands; then Jon’s fingers tighten into fists.

And now, Jarrett sees Jon’s head and shoulders come forward, and there is only one last resort remaining.

FIRST SHOT

Jarrett Jones fires. The security camera catches the little tongue of flame that licks out from the muzzle, and in an instant, Jon Schumacher pitches to his left and into the camera’s view at last. He sprawls on the concrete floor of the workshop on his left side, perpendicular to Jarrett and facing him. For a moment, he lies still.

Jarrett lets go with his left hand, and his right hand brings the gun down. He watches Jon in unbelieving horror at what has just happened. It looks as if it’s over.

It isn’t.

SECOND, FINAL SHOT

Several seconds have passed. Jarrett’s hands are down at his side now, the right hand still holding the Kimber, pointed at the floor.

Suddenly, Jon’s right hand flashes toward the right front pocket of his jeans.

Jarrett has known Jon for a long time and knows the man always carries one or more guns in various places — vest, boot, pocket. He knows how fast a person can draw and fire.

He raises the pistol one-handed, thinking there’s no time to resume a two-hand hold, and the beam of the Crimson Trace Laser plays on Jon’s neck as Jarrett fires a second time.

Jon stops moving. Now it really is over.

They call 9-1-1. The first responding officer arrives in approximately 18 minutes. Jon Schumacher is dead on the scene. Jarrett waives his Miranda rights and submits to an extensive recorded interview.

Approximately 12 hours later, as he is leaving the office of attorney Marshall Lovrien, Jarrett Jones is arrested and charged with murder in the first degree. A conviction is likely to bring life without parole, and the death penalty is not entirely off the table, either.

THE JUSTICE MACHINE

Jones went to trial in the court of Judge Richard Sommers on February 28, 2022. Twenty-six months had elapsed since the shooting. The original local prosecutor, called a state’s attorney in South Dakota, had departed, replaced by Ernest Thompson. The latter may have simply felt a need to continue the work and wishes of his predecessor. I was informed the grand jury that indicted Jones was not given a self-defense instruction and indeed was told self-defense was not an issue, even after one grand juror repeatedly asked about it.

To an untutored eye that didn’t know what to look for, it was easy to miss Jon’s right hand going toward the pocket, even though Jarrett had told police he knew Jon always carried one or more guns. Later, ace defense investigator Mitch Vilhauer found multiple people who claimed Jon had pulled a gun on them, usually a snub-nosed hammerless revolver, when angry. The defense couldn’t get that in because, being unknown to Jarrett at the time of the shooting, these incidents were not formative to his decision and action and therefore were inadmissible.

Jarrett had described Jon’s movement precipitating the first shot as a “lunge.” As I had occasion to testify, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a “lunge” as “a sudden forward thrust of the body,” which is precisely what Jarrett described. However, most perceive a lunge to involve large movements with arms outstretched. Jon, Jarrett said, had his fists clenched close to his body as if coiled to punch at the final moment he started to come forward.

Until he fell from the first shot, all the camera could see of Jon was the front of his left boot in the lower left corner of the frame; Jarrett dominated the viewer’s eye in his resolute Isosceles stance, gun extended and the muzzle flash. After Jon fell, anyone not watching his hands could easily miss the reach for the pocket.

That reach created a “furtive movement shooting,” a movement consistent with reaching for a weapon and not reasonably consistent with anything else within the totality of the circumstances. Many lawyers I’ve discussed it with don’t recall being told about furtive movements in law school and, similarly, pass their bar exams without having heard of disparity of force. The latter means a situation where the opponent, while ostensibly unarmed, possesses such great physical advantage over the defender that a bare-handed attack will likely cause death or great bodily harm. Factors include such disparity as Jon being 6’4″ and 28, and Jarrett, 5’5″ and 48, and the able-bodied Schumacher versus Jones and his crippled gun hand.

Moreover, while the eye of the untrained sees an “armed man shooting helpless unarmed man,” use of force professionals look at such a situation and see the exact truth: a man coming as if to punch you in the head and take your gun is a man going for a gun!

SA Thompson reached out for reinforcements from the South Dakota State Attorney General’s Office: first Kelly Marnette, and subsequently the highly experienced Brent Kempema. Early on, during an informal deposition, Ms. Marnette suggested Jones had nothing to fear because his employee, whom she described as a “300-lb. linebacker,” would protect him. I replied it would be foolish to count on protection by a third party from an attacker so close and noted that, in any case, the man did nothing but move away during the actual shooting.

These are things it takes a skilled defense team to get across to the jury, and Jones had that. Lead counsel Marshall Lovrien crafted the defense expertly and brought in as co-counsel the very able Bill Gerdes, who was said to have more experience with homicide trials than any other lawyer in the region.

TRIAL

With the State’s own witness, the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy, they established that while Jones appeared to be firing straight ahead, his Kimber was angled slightly upward. The 115-grain Winchester 9mm full metal jacket bullet entered the chest, pierced the heart, exited the back and kept going, punching a neat round hole through the steel door behind Schumacher at a height indicating an upward trajectory. The projectile was never recovered. However, the wound path went down through the body, front to back. Lovrien established with the doctor there was only one explanation for this: Schumacher’s upper body had to be angled distinctly forward when hit, consistent with aggressive forward movement. The doctor put a wooden dowel through a skeleton Lovrien had brought to court, vividly demonstrating for the jury.

This correlation between autopsy and video — hard scientific evidence — was irrefutable. It was a cornerstone of the defense.

Cross-examining the lead investigator, the defense established this was his first homicide case. He had never been explicitly trained in homicide investigation and he had never explored the elements of self-defense by Jones.

Self-defense is an affirmative defense, meaning, “The defendant did the act, but he was justified in doing it.” The defendant should usually take the witness stand in an affirmative defense because it’s no longer a “whodunnit,” it’s a “Why did he do it?” and only the defendant can truly answer that.

In this case, Jarrett had done something virtually every defense lawyer and I would advise against: He waived his Miranda rights and answered every question that night without counsel present. While some things sounded out of sequence, he got the basics right — and still in the grip of the emotion of his near-death experience, came through with sincerity and honesty. There was little he could add that would be worth the risk of being tricked by a crafty cross-examiner. Thus, he did not take the stand.

The jury heard from his daughter. There were tears in the jury box when they heard her smartphone recording of one of Jon’s vicious attacks upon her. The hired man, who first told police Jon lunged at Jarrett, changed his story and said there was no lunge. The State hung a lot of its case on that. Later, when I was on the stand, I was able to show the jury on the surveillance video that this man was looking off to the side at the moment of the shot and couldn’t have seen whether Jon had lunged or not.

Jarrett had taken South Dakota’s Enhanced Concealed Carry permit course from Justin Hoffman, who now works for Blackhawk. Logistics kept Justin from getting there in time to testify himself, but he provided his PowerPoint program delineating state law and a thorough, detailed affidavit. I was allowed to work from that and show Jarrett’s training had “checked every box” for what the state itself considered to constitute justifiable use of deadly force. This, in turn, gave Attorney Lovrien the nuclear-grade statement he made in his closing argument: Jones had literally done everything the law demanded for this homicide to be justified.

Before trial, I had done video demonstrations of how quickly Jarrett could have been disarmed and killed by a man in Jon’s position and how swiftly a man down on his side could draw a gun from his trouser pocket and shoot another man five feet away. It has been my experience some judges prefer video only, and some demand such demonstrations be done live in the courtroom. This trial was my first in 43 years as an expert witness where the judge would allow the jury to see neither demonstration. Nonetheless, having done them did allow me to testify that the disarm could be accomplished in two or three seconds, and the downed man’s draw to the shot from the pocket in under two.

In the disarm video, it took only six-tenths of a second to deflect the muzzle of the gun, another six-tenths to rip the small auto pistol out of my opponent’s hand, and a little over than one second more to re-grasp the pistol, point it at the center of his head, and pull the trigger. From the first movement to the “fatal shot,” the disarm had taken 2.23 seconds. Jarrett had been on the razor’s edge of losing his life. The pocket draw to fatal shot had taken 1.63 seconds, starting with the hand outside the pocket as Jon’s was in the video.

There was no gun in that pocket, but Jones could not have known that. He did know the man was known to carry guns in his pockets. Remember, Jarrett had removed a GLOCK from Jon’s coat pocket that night — and he believed Schumacher was going for one. Instead, what had been in his pocket was a front-opening switchblade, the double-edged Benchmade Infidel. It was still wrapped in the plastic evidence bag the troopers had put it in before they gave it back to him upon his release that night. When he cross-examined me, prosecutor Kempema made a big deal about it being in a bag and not readily accessible. I replied it was irrelevant because Jones believed the man was reaching for a gun. “You don’t have to be right; you have to be reasonable.”

From Gerdes’ powerful opening statement to Lovrien’s crushing close, the defense had brought the truth to 12 people who ultimately knew it when they saw it … and delivered justice.

LESSONS

Juries have to be educated. If attorneys overlook concepts like disparity of force and other dynamics of violent encounters, what we now call “force science” thanks to the brilliant Dr. Bill Lewinsky, you can’t expect ordinary people in the jury pool to intuit them.

Document your training. It is a winning strategy to show the jury you did what you were trained to do, and what you did was, in fact, the right thing to do. South Dakota v. Jarrett Jones was a classic example.

Train with instructors who will stand up for you in court. Not all of them will, even in the police sector. Justin Hoffman did, and he had a big part in the defense’s victory.

Understand the cost of a trial. Jarrett Jones estimated he had spent at least $300,000 in legal fees and expenses when it was over. Consider joining a post-self-defense support group. For me, it’s the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network. Full disclosure: I’m on their advisory board. You have many such organizations from which to choose. Read the name of this case: State v. Jarrett Jones. When the power of an entire state is against you, you don’t want to be fighting alone. A lawsuit by the family of the deceased is pending.

The decline and the self-precipitated death of a 28-year-old man were tragic, and hearts, including mine, go out to his parents and loved ones. At the same time, the pattern of Jon Schumacher’s escalation in his final hours indicates Jarrett Jones very likely saved more innocent lives than his own.

A Washington Post journalist who is not

 Jonathan Turley is on target concerning the Washington Post's "journalists" and a few others.

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Washington Post Columnist Calls for the End of Impartiality and Balance in Journalism

In an age of rage, Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin has long been a standout in her attacks on Republicans and conservatives: “We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.” However, her recent column shows that she has made a clean break not only from Republicans but from reason. The writer (long cited by the Post as their “Republican columnist” for balance) has called for the media to abandon balance and impartiality. Rubin is demanding that the media just become overt advocates in refusing to report both sides in the myriad of political issues in this election.

In her column, Rubin rejects the “need for false balance” because the coverage can suggest that Republicans are “rational.”

“The Kabuki dance in which Trump, his defenders and his supporters are treated as rational (clever even!) is what comes from a media establishment that refuses to discard its need for false balance that it has developed over the course of decades.”

That balance was once called “journalism” but Rubin now calls it facilitating “disinformation.” Balanced reporting is now dangerous and makes the media “a megaphone for disinformation, upholding the pretense that there are two political parties with equally valid takes on reality.”

Rubin’s attack on disinformation is ironic given her own past controversies in misrepresenting news, cases, and events. For full disclosure, I clashed with Rubin over her personally attacking me for a theory that I did not agree with in a column that I did not write. I also challenged her on an equally bizarre column where she wrote about my impeachment testimony and later column misrepresenting the holding in an appellate case involving Trump. That false account was never corrected by the Washington Post. It appears that misrepresenting the holding of a major case is not being a “a megaphone for disinformation.”

Rubin, however, is not alone in this call to abandon the foundational principle of impartiality in journalism.

We have been discussing the rise of advocacy journalism and the rejection of objectivity in journalism schools. Writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. This movement includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy.

Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll decried how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that the journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Lauren Wolfe, the fired freelance editor for the New York Times, has not only gone public to defend her pro-Biden tweet but published a piece titled “I’m a Biased Journalist and I’m Okay With That.”

Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones is a leading voice for advocacy journalism.

Indeed, Hannah-Jones has declared “all journalism is activism.” Her 1619 Project has been challenged as deeply flawed and she has a long record as a journalist of intolerance, controversial positions on rioting, and fostering conspiracy theories. Hannah-Jones would later help lead the effort at the Times to get rid of an editor and apologize for publishing a column from Sen. Tom Cotten as inaccurate and inflammatory.

These figures are killing journalism. Polls show trust in the media at an all-time low with less than 20 percent of citizens trusting television or print media. Yet, reporters and academics continue to destroy the core principles that sustain journalism and ultimately the role of a free press in our society. The result is to turn newspapers like the Post into echo chambers for the values of its reporters and a core of liberal readers.

For the rest of the country (including roughly half that voted for Trump), figures like Rubin are saying that they should go elsewhere. They are. Media outlets like CNN have faced sharp declines in viewership and are trying to break away from this advocacy model to restore ratings. (The move has been denounced by some in the media as potentially helping Republicans by fairly reporting their side of these controversies). The movement toward advocacy journalism is likely to build in the coming years to remake the media in the image of figures like Hannah-Jones and Rubin.

Viewers clearly tune in to Fox News and MSNBC for their strong editorial opinion and commentators. However, there has long been a line between reporters and commentators in how stories are presented. If journalists want to be advocates, they can shift to the side of commentary. However, that is clearly not sufficient for some like Rubin who do not want readers to be able to receive both sides of these controversies. Readers are to be shaped in their opinions like impressionable children. That was the message from the conference on disinformation led by media and Democratic figures like the recently fired CNN media host Brian Stelter.

Even as a columnist, I prefer the approach of Theodore White that “when a reporter sits down at the typewriter, he’s nobody’s friend.”

Another study at odds with climate alarmism

Nicholas Lewis's recent paper "Objectively combining climate sensitivity evidence" calls into question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) likely range of climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide.

Here is a press release style summary of his paper.
One of the most important conclusions of the recent 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) was to reduce the uncertainty in estimates of climate sensitivity to doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Since 1979, the likely range (66% chance) of climate sensitivity has been between 1.5°C and 4.5°C. This range has remained stubbornly wide, until the IPCC AR6 narrowed the likely range to be between 2.5°C and 4.0°C.

A new paper by independent scientist Nic Lewis published in the journal Climate Dynamics challenges the conclusions of the IPCC AR6 about climate sensitivity. Lewis’ analysis reduces the magnitude of climate sensitivity by one third, relative to the range provided by the IPCC AR6. These results suggest that future global warming in response to fossil fuel emissions could be significantly less than has been assumed by policy makers.

In 2015, the World Climate Research Programme convened a Workshop aimed at reducing the uncertainty in estimates of climate sensitivity to increasing carbon dioxide. The Workshop ultimately resulted in publication of a report (a 92 page paper) by many of the participants that thoroughly assessed all lines of evidence (Sherwood et al, 2020). A key result of this paper was to reduce the likely range of climate sensitivity values to 2.6 oC to 3.9 oC. While Lewis was an invited participant to the 2015 Workshop, he was not a coauthor on this paper. The Sherwood et al. paper strongly influenced the IPCC AR6’s assessment of climate sensitivity.

Lewis’ paper critiqued the methods used in the Sherwood et al. paper, finding significant errors, inconsistencies and other shortcomings. Lewis remedied these shortcomings and also revised key input data, almost entirely to reflect more recent evidence. The results of Lewis’ analysis determined a likely range of 1.75 to 2.7oC for climate sensitivity. The central estimate from Lewis’ analysis is 2.16 oC, which is well below the IPCC AR6 likely range. This large reduction relative to Sherwood et al. shows how sensitive climate sensitivity estimates are to input assumptions. Lewis’ analysis implies that climate sensitivity is more likely to be below 2 oC than it is to be above 2.5 oC.

The lower estimates of climate sensitivity determined by Nic Lewis have profound implications for climate models and projections of warming for the 21st century. Climate models used in the IPCC AR6 had values of climate sensitivity ranging from 1.8oC to 5.6oC. The IPCC AR6 judged that some of the climate models had values of climate sensitivity that were too high. Hence the AR6 selected only the climate models with reasonable values of climate sensitivity to be used in projections of 21st century climate change. Lewis’ analysis indicates that a majority of climate models used in the IPCC AR6 have values higher than the likely range.

Here is a link to his paper.

Here are some excerpts.

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Introduction

The Earth's climate sensitivity is a key measure of the longer-term climate response to external forcing. It is perhaps the most important ill-quantified climate system parameter. In principle, climate sensitivity represents the equilibrium change in mean surface temperature to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration from preindustrial levels, once the deep ocean has reached a stable state. In practice it is normally estimated using some approximate measure, often derived from disequilibrium changes. Climate sensitivity has been estimated from various types of evidence, but none of these has narrowly constrained its value. The first five Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relied heavily on estimates of climate sensitivity from global climate model (GCM) simulations. The 1.5–4.5 K likely range for climate sensitivity in the 2013 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was identical to the range presented in the landmark Charney (1979) report, with the great increase in GCM sophistication since 1979 not having led to any narrowing of the climate sensitivity range.

GCMs use semi-empirical approximations (parameterizations) to represent subgrid-scale cloud and convection processes that are known to be critical to determining the model's climate sensitivity, which varies by up to a factor of three among GCMs. In one well regarded GCM, a simple change to how convective precipitation was parameterizedFootnote1 varied its climate sensitivity by a factor of two, with no obvious change in how well the model otherwise performed (Zhao et al. 2016). Changing the order in which the various parameterized atmospheric modules were updated in each time step was found to vary another GCM's climate sensitivity by a factor of up to two, with ambiguity existing regarding the optimum ordering (Donahue and Caldwell 2018). Moreover, the universal use in GCMs of deterministic parameterizations may bias their climate sensitivity upwards (Strommen et al. 2019). Such issues make the reliability of GCM-derived estimates of climate sensitivity questionable.

In the light of such issues, and the further widening of the range of GCM climate sensitivities in the latest (CMIP6) generation of GCMs (Zelinka et al. 2020), the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) abandoned the previous reliance on GCM climate sensitivities. Instead, evaluation of climate sensitivity was approached by combining estimates based on different lines of evidence, such as process understanding (feedback analysis), the historical instrumental record, and paleoclimate data.

Combining different lines of evidence should, to the extent that they are independent, enable climate sensitivity to be estimated more precisely than from any single line of evidence (Stevens et al. 2016). A comprehensive attempt to do so was made by Sherwood et al. (2020, henceforth S20), a 92-page study. S20 was conducted under the auspices of the World Climate Research Programme's Grand Science Challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity and provides a very detailed investigation of climate sensitivity. As the most influential recent assessment, S20 was cited over twenty times in the relevant AR6 chapter, which approached climate sensitivity estimation on very similar lines to S20, albeit not using its formal probabilistic methods. There are in principle considerable strengths in S20's scientific approach. Its main results were derived by combining understanding from feedback analysis (Process evidence) with evidence from changes since circa 1850 (Historical evidence), and from cold and warm past periods (Paleoclimate evidence)—three lines of evidence that S20 judged to be largely independent.

The contribution the present study makes to estimation of climate sensitivity is three-fold. First, it identifies statistical problems in S20. The main methodological argument is that, when Bayesian methods are used, an Objective rather than a Subjective Bayesian approach should be taken. This means that rather than the investigator choosing the prior distribution, the prior distribution should be mathematically computed, based on the assumed statistical model relating to all the evidence to be analyzed (Bernardo 2009). S20 used a Subjective Bayesian statistical method, with an investigator-selected prior distribution, that has been shown may produce unrealistic climate sensitivity estimation when used to combine differing types of evidence (Lewis 2018), and S20 provided no evidence that it did not do so in this case. Moreover, for all except Process evidence, S20 used a method of estimating likelihoods that turns out to be unsound. This study validates its likelihood estimates by using multiple methods and cross-checking their results. S20's method is shown to often result in serious likelihood underestimation at higher climate sensitivity levels.

The second contribution of this study is that it develops and applies an Objective Bayesian approach to combining differing climate sensitivity evidence, using a mathematically computed prior distribution. The results using the methodology developed and the same input assumptions as S20 are then used to assess what effect the statistical problems identified in S20 have on its results. It is found that they bias S20's estimation of climate sensitivity downwards, although only to a minor extent even at the upper uncertainty bound when all three lines of evidence are combined.

This study's third contribution is to review and where appropriate revise the input assumptions used by S20, paying particular regard to more recent evidence, and to investigate the effect of the revised input assumptions on estimates of climate sensitivity using the developed Objective Bayesian methodology. Some of the revisions to input assumptions relate to the treatment in certain cases of CO2 forcing and/or the warming it causes. This study differs from S20 regarding the appropriate scaling of CO2 forcing, and comparison of warming, where different changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations are involved, and regarding scaling CO2 forcing where its use requires a different estimation basis from that on which the forcing estimate was derived. The combined effects of the revisions to S20's CO2 related estimates and to other input assumptions result in a major reduction in estimated climate sensitivity.

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Discussion

This study first identifies statistical problems in S20. Using a Subjective Bayesian statistical method involving an investigator-selected prior distribution, as S20 does, may produce unrealistic climate sensitivity estimation when used to combine differing types of evidence (Lewis 2018), even assuming that the data likelihood functions are correct. In this case, I found that the method S20 used for estimating likelihoods for all but Process evidence was in fact unsound, and that it underestimated likelihood at high S levels, substantially so in some cases. I also found that S20 used an uncertainty estimate for PETM CO2 forcing that was a factor of ten too low, due to an apparent coding error, further biasing their likelihood estimate (although not affecting their main results).

This study then develops an Objective Bayesian approach to combining differing climate sensitivity evidence that, unlike the method used in Lewis and Grünwald (2018), is not restricted to dealing with a particular simple statistical model. The approach involves computationally deriving Jeffreys' prior distributions that are designed to maximize the influence of the data on the results and to produce probabilistic estimates that are as close as possible to being confidence intervals, and thus are well calibrated. Three different inferential methods employed for this purpose each provide nearly identical estimated likelihoods and Jeffreys' priors, and final results. This result is very supportive of the validity of the methods used and of the results they produce.

The robustness of S20's results to the use of properly calibrated statistical methods and validly calculated likelihood estimates is then examined, using the Objective Bayesian methods developed in this study. It is shown that while S20's choice of prior and its likelihood misestimation lead to over-constraining of high S levels, based on S20's data-variable assumptions the downwards bias in S20's Baseline combined evidence results is modest: the median S estimate is approximately 0.13 K low, and the 95% uncertainty bound 0.35 K low. However, the bias in S20's No Process results is over twice as large.

The other main contribution of this study is to assess the impact of revising various input data-variable distributions used by S20, by:(i)

adjusting the F2×CO2 value used for inferring S from Process and Historical evidence to reflect the effect of climate feedback changing over GCM abrupt4xCO2 simulations, as should undoubtedly be done;
(ii)

allowing for the CO2 concentration-ERF relationship being slightly non-logarithmic, and estimating the ECS to S ratio in a way that is unaffected by that relationship;
(iii)

changing some of S20's other data-variable estimates to reflect more recent information; and
(iv)

using arguably better justified (albeit not based purely on more recent information), alternative estimates for a few other data-variables.

I find that doing so results in substantially lower and better constrained estimates for S. The median S estimate when combining all lines of evidence, using the Objective Bayesian method and the LGM and mPWP for Paleoclimate evidence, reduces from 3.23 to 2.16 K.

All the revised data-variable estimates are not only defensible but, given the evidence now available, in my view are better justified than S20's original estimates. Moreover, omitting the only revisions dependent, to a greater or lesser extent, on reevaluation of existing evidence only very modestly changes the combined evidence results, with the omission just of the revision of the Historical aerosol forcing having almost no effect on the results.

It therefore currently remains quite plausible that S is below 2 K. The truncation in S20's results of the lower bound for S does not appear justified given the range of data-variable estimates supported by relevant, mainly more recent, studies. There is 36% probability of S being under 2 K, considerably greater than the 26% probability of S exceeding 2.5 K, according to the revised data-variable assumptions 'All combined: Paleo LGM + mPWP' results; they also imply that it is extremely unlikely that S is below 1.5 K, and extremely unlikely that S is above 3.2 K.

The revised data-variable median Historical evidence estimates of Shist and TCR are somewhat higher than the comparable estimates in Lewis and Curry (2018), of 1.66 K and 1.33 K respectively. The excess is mainly due to a stronger aerosol ERF change, even after revising S20's assumptions. Further revising S20's median aerosol ERF to match the change per the AR5 time-series, extended post-2011 using AR6's annual changes, would reduce the Table 8 median Shist and TCR to respectively 1.82 K and 1.40 K. Changing the base period to 1869–1882 to match Lewis and Curry (2018), avoiding the poorly observed 1861–1868 period, would further reduce those estimates, to 1.79 K and 1.37 K. The methane shortwave ERF adjustment, and greater estimated change in radiative imbalance, in AR6 can account for the small remaining differences.